Macdowell's Op.35

[kolaboy]

Listening to Macdowell's wonderful Romance for cello and orchestra makes me wish he'd composed a concerto featuring the same instrument, just as an adroit rendering of the orchestral suites causes me to wonder what his symphony - had it been completed - would have been like. "Absolute" music, or a rendering of some theme ala Raff's seasonal symphonies? I've read all I can find on the subject and can find no indication of the direction in which he was leaning...
And there are a fair number of his piano pieces that await a first recording... 

[FBerwald]

Did MacDowell ever work on a symphony?

[kolaboy]

It's mentioned in the Gilman biography that he did at least begin one...

[adriano]

Similarly to Macdowell, George Templeton Strong also composed some shorter concertante pieces for various instruments. I was confirmed to make recordings of them on Naxos - long ago -, but they were cancelled, alongside with many other interesting projects (including G.T. Strong's 1st Symphony torso, and two symphonic poems, which I had already started editing for performances). Among these concertante pieces, a lovely "Roaming" for Cello and orchestra was figuring as a new score. Other pieces were already available on old printed scores. It would have made an exciting CD, including also a very interesting Suite for Cello and orchestra ("An Artist's life") and two little poems for violin and orchestra, entitled "Americana". The 1st Symphony CD would have had early symphonic poems like "Totentanz" and "Darkness" as couplings. In style, the early G.T. Strong's music is similar to Macdowell's.

[kolaboy]

A few years ago when the Frye pieces were recorded (and I had NEVER had hopes of hearing the Santa Claus Symphony in my lifetime), I dared to believe that it might just be a harbinger of things to come - as far as little known American music was concerned. A cd of G.T. Strong pieces like you mentioned would be a dream come true...

[Ilja]

Ah, Fry. The Niagara Symphony is among my favorite pieces to play to friends with the question "when do you think this was composed"? One of those cases in which a lack of training produces something truly original.

[giles.enders]

Macdowell had quite a protracted correspondence with the English composer and performer Kathleen Bruckshaw.  This has recently been given to The Library of Congress.  I presume the became acquainted when they were both in Germany.

[eschiss1]

BTW one very interesting book published/edited by Sonneck, the early-20th century LoC librarian, was a fairly comprehensive list/description of MacDowell first and early editions; this has been digitized. Well worth going over if such things interest you as they do me

[kolaboy]

Absolutely, and thank you 

[Alan Howe]

Listening to Macdowell's wonderful Romance for cello and orchestra makes me wish...

Well, it doesn't tell you very much. It's a very slight, if charming piece giving little indication of what MacDowell might have achieved on a larger scale.

[kolaboy]

It tells me a lot - in the context of his entire orchestral output. Unfortunate that both he and Bennett were terminally over-worked.

[Alan Howe]

It's 4 minutes long and rather lovely. But it's not a concerto slow movement. I'd like to think he could have written something equally fitting, but it's all speculation really.

[chill319]

MacDowell is said to have worked on a symphony in the 1880s but to have abandoned the project. Or rather, to have abandoned all but two excerpts from the sketches, published as his opus 30. As with the ABA for cello, they are attractive but slight.

MacDowell showed himself capable of writing a respectable sonata form development and recapitulation as early as the first movement of his opus 15 concerto. So it seems unlikely that he abandoned the project for the same reasons Glinka, say, left a symphony unfinished. More than likely he just wasn't ready for the symphony he wanted to write. In opus 50 he achieved the kind of writing he was aiming for earlier. If no symphony followed opus 50, we should not read too much into this, remembering that MacDowell's greater contemporary Debussy was himself not ready to write a symphony until 1904, by which year MacDowell had essentially "checked out."

[J Joe Townley]

I have listened to his Lancelot & Elaine and Hamlet and Ophelia and Tchaikovsky they are not. For example Krueger's recording of the former has garnered only 42 hits on YouTube since 2013. I don't mean to be hard on MacDowell but I don't think he could have advanced as a symphonist. The tone poems are attractive, competently orchestrated and totally forgettable.

I truly wonder if Romantic music has seen its day and could never make a comeback even if another MacDowell were to emerge on the scene. So where is classical music to go? The contemporary music being written today, with few exceptions, is unlistenable.

[Alan Howe]

I truly wonder if Romantic music has seen its day

Well, there's Schmidt-Kowalski who wrote in a truly romantic idiom. Otherwise, there are composers who write in what I'd call a neo-romantic style, i.e. one with plenty of melody interspersed with passages of a more modernistic cut. Lee Holdridge probably comes into to this category - although one notes that he is primarily a composer of film music. And most music that could be described as fully romantic in style is probably associated with the movies these days.