Hanson conducts as he composes: with a will. He powers us through the Nordic stress and strife, the craggy wind-swept tuttis of the First Symphony: the pace is urgent and developmental, the playing highly charged with lashings of swooning portamento from Hollywood-conditioned strings. Those of us brought up on it have come to love the ripe, dry, immediate, cut-to-the-bone quality of Mercury Living Presence sound. Which doesn't make it good, of course—far from it: the strings are thin and wiry, the upper brass and woodwind strident and overly bright. Bass drums fare best, booming out with a resonance seemingly denied the rest of the orchestra. And this music cries out for resonance: for space and tonal bloom and panoramic imaging.
The Romantic, unwittingly beloved of millions through American TV and radio exposure of its second movement 'anthem', makes much more of an impression in decent digital sound: the Schwarz (Delos/Pinnacle) and Slatkin (EMI) recordings both prove as much, though the composer, to his credit, suspends some disbelief with the wholehearted sweep and outdoor vigour of his reading, leading us tantalizingly on from one apparent resolution to the next. As I observed in my review of the Schwarz reading, the construction of this splendid symphony is a little ''like one door opening on to another until we finally step out into the blue beyond''.
This is a collector's item then; one to buy in addition to, but not instead of, the Schwarz disc. The Song of Democracy, incidentally, is exactly as you might imagine—a tub-thumper. Walt Whitman's words get the valedictory school-song treatment with Hanson drawing inspiration from the key harmonic progression of his Second Symphony: a curiosity, stronger on sentiment and bluster than substance.'