It's 1993, and only now can I at last say that I have heard all seven Howard Hanson symphonies—thanks to Gerard Schwarz and Delos. This final disc in the series is, like all the others, well-filled with Hanson's entertaining, big-hearted music—none of it his very best, but every note bursting to communicate. The Fifth Symphony (1955) is a single movement forged from impressions (mystic and otherwise) of the Resurrection according to St John—an expression of faith which builds like a rising tide from the chant-like episode for strings at its heart. Its gestures, as one might expect, are biblical in the filmic sense more Old Testament than New: the big, rhetorical brass chorale at the close is predictable; the hushed codetta is not—its last word, a blessing.
At 81 years of age, Walt Whitman and the sea called, just as they had to the young Vaughan Williams. Hanson's Seventh is a good deal more modest and considerably less sophisticated than VW's First: with nothing more to prove, he bids farewell to the romantic symphony with immortal words from Whitman's Leaves of Grass: ''Now voyager—sail thou forth to seek and find''. An old-fashioned grandiosity (and many a well-worn chord) mark out the choral writing as it splashes and boils over familiar orchestral undulations and skirlings. No magnum opus, this, but something humbler and honestly unpretentious. At one point Hanson fleetingly quotes the key motif from his Second Symphony, the Romantic—music that effectively turned him into an unsung national hero. People knew the tune, but not the singer. It's a proud moment that will catch in the throat of anyone who knows his music.
Few will know Mosaics—a set of variations written in 1957 for George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, who must have done it proud. Schwarz and his orchestra do too. It's a typical Hanson 'quilt'; a colourful exercise in transformation and elaboration, something as natural for him as breathing. So many of his 'tunes' are simple scalic creations aspiring to something bigger and better. The Piano Concerto (1948) has its share. Action and introspection are the basic formula, the piano lending a personal touch to melodies which are typically giving, outreaching. Don't ask me why, but the Piano Concerto by Sir Hamilton Harty kept springing to mind. That isn't an important piece, either, but I return to it often—something about the melodic inflexion: it's inviting. So is Hanson's. The pianist, Carol Rosenberger, is plainly eager to share her invitation.'