Walter Piston composed his Fifth Symphony in 1954, at the age of 60, to a formula found in the two later symphonies as well: a relatively expansive first movement, a grave, meditative slow movement and a brief, lightweight finale, more an antidote to the solemnity of what has gone before than a barnstorming apotheosis.
The style is more conservative, more neo-romantic than neo-classical, surprisingly so for a Boulanger pupil. The music's main weakness is its generally rather plain personality: more obvious debts might actually have generated a more distinctive blend of the borrowed and the personal. The music's main strength—the result, perhaps, of those cogitations that made Piston such a successful textbook writer—is in the confidence and inevitability of its structures.
The Fifth Symphony is the best of the three, principally because its opening movement has reflective material that attains a powerful visionary quality. The slow movement displays Piston's ability to construct a substantial design embracing strong, well-prepared climaxes. The ideas may not amount to much, the orchestration may be predictable, but with architectural expertise goes a rewarding determination to avoid unnecessary elaboration. It is noticeable that when the music does become more florid, as for example in the slow movement of the Seventh Symphony, it grows less openly expressive.
The first movements of Nos. 7 and 8 are less successful than that of No. 5, with a good deal of earnest pattern-making. The slow movements, especially that of No. 8, threaten to stagnate around their rather stodgy textures, but Piston's sense of shape keeps the music in motion, and the breezy finales—they seem like disarming acts of self-criticism for the sobriety of the earlier movements—provide attractively unpretentious conclusions.
The fairly elderly recordings are undistinguished, but the performances have a convincing balance of weight and energy.'