Mercury Living Presence SR 90103: More American Music from Howard Hanson and the Eastman-Rochester

Mercury Living Presence SR 90103
Roger Sessions: The Black Maskers
Colin McPhee: Tabuh-Tabuhan
Eastman-Rochester Orchestra 
Howard Hanson, conductor

Pressing: US, dark maroon, colorback

Matrix numbers: FR3/FR5

Performance: 9/10

Sound: 7/10

Price range: $25-120 (mean $65) on popsike.com

Comments: One of the many great qualities of Mercury Records was their dedication to recording the music of 20th century American composers.  I don't know of another record label at the time that put these composers and their compositions on the map in the same way as did this one.  Many of these albums featured Howard Hanson and the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra (including recordings of Hanson's own symphonies and other works) or Frederick Fennell and the Eastman Wind Ensemble in what are mostly great performances.  The Suite from "The Black Maskers" sounds like it's taken off the soundtrack to a silver screen adventure/thriller/horror movie.  I found this quote about The Black Maskers play in the biography of Roger Sessions, by Andrea Olmstead:

"The play was expressionistic and 'ultra-modern' at the time.' Sessions described the story: 'It's a play about an Italian Renaissance [actually twelfth-century] nobleman, the son of a Crusader, supposedly. And he comes upon a document {in scene 2} which convinces him that he is really the offspring of an affair that his mother had with a groom, probably. And that unhinges him, you see, as far as his sense of identity.' Smith students feared for the sanity of the audience and some had 'visions of a line of ambulances conveying audiences and players to Hospital Hill.' The Smith College Weekly published an outline of the play and two pages of explanation of its 'inner meaning.' Eliot wrote, 'I knew it was obvious that the play came out of that, as Andreiev experienced it -- and how wonderfully he did dramatize it.' The play dealt with insanity, split personality, identity crisis, symbology, a fire as redemption, and, of course, scary black maskers, reminiscent of those Thanksgiving costumes that so frightened Sessions at 417 Washington Avenue. Sessions outlined the play and described it in detail in Conversations."

I guess that describes the mood pretty accurately.

McPhee's Tabuh-Tabuhan is full of exotic sounds.  On his own work, McPhee writes in his "Note" to the full score:

"Tabuh-Tabuhan was composed in Mexico in 1936 and first performed by Carlos Chavez and the National Orchestra of Mexico City. It was written after I had spent four years in Bali engaged in musical reserach, and is largely inspired, especially in its orchestration, by the various methods I had learned of Balinese gamelan technique. The title of the work derives from the Balinese word tabuh, originally meaning the mallet used for striking a percussion instrument, but extended to mean strike or beat... Tabuh-Tabuhan is thus a Balinese collective noun, meaning different drum rhythms, metric forms, gong punctuations, gamelans, and music essentially percussive. In a subtitle I call the work Toccata for Orchestra and two pianos."

The sound quality of this recording is a mixed bag on my system. The soundstage is quite widely spread across my speakers, but the presentation is very close, a little too close for my tastes.  Particularly in the McPhee composition, the balance is offset by percussion, which are certainly predominant, and this makes sense given that the work is intended to be a highlight of the percussion instruments.  In terms of spatial positioning, the percussion are either hard left or hard right (pianos on the right), with the orchestra in the middle.  The sound overall is very dynamic but a bit veiled, and textures consistently become muddy in louder passages of the music.  Maybe this is different on a FR1/FR1 pressing?  This album had the potential to be a Mercury sonic powerhouse but unfortunately falls short for me.

In case you can't make out the text on the back cover photo, this is the liner notes state about the recording setup:

"Because of its unusual instrumentation -- a kind of concerto grosso for percussion and orchestra -- Colin McPhee's Tabuh-Tabuhan offered a fascinating vehicle for Living Presence recording techniques. The "Balinese" percussion elements were ranged on the front of the stage as a "concertino" and the normal orchestral elements were set up in normal concert placement. All the melodic and rhythmic polyphony which is an intrinsic part of the work stand out and lend brilliance to the impact of the unusual percussion sonorities in both their ensemble and their soloistic aspects.

In Roger Sessions's music for The Black Maskers, the center of orchestral gravity favors the woodwinds much of the time, but there are also many complex and subtle touches for percussion (particularly in the first movement), and the stunningly dramatic episode for organ and brass at the end of the Dirge.

To capture all of these orchestral effects, three omni-directional microphones of extreme sensitivity were hung in the Eastman Theatre in positions that careful tests had shown would pick up all the music as well as the wonderful resonance of the theatre itself.  Later the three channels of sound were incorporated by an exclusive Mercury process onto this stereo disc."