Morton Gould - Complete Chicago Recordings

Between 1965 and 1968, the musical polymath Morton Gould conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a handful of recordings for RCA Victor. In and out of the catalogue for decades – mostly out – they have become the stuff of legend. Now, at last, Sony Classical brings them all together in a new 6-CD box, following up the series’ acclaimed complete collections of CSO recordings conducted by Fritz Reiner and Jean Martinon. New York City native Morton Gould (1913–1996) was a phenomenon: a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, Grammy-winning conductor, prolific arranger and prodigious pianist who achieved equal renown in classical and popular music. He was barely out of his teens when his compositions were being conducted by the likes of Stokowski, Toscanini and Mitropoulos. He wrote for the concert hall, movies, radio, TV and the Broadway stage, as well as ballets for Balanchine, Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins. Gould, who in his long career conducted all the major US orchestras as well as those of Canada, Mexico, Europe, Australia and Japan, first stood before the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1955 – engaged as a guest at the CSO’s Ravinia Festival by the orchestra’s music director Fritz Reiner, another champion of his music. When Jean Martinon succeeded Reiner in 1963, RCA split up the orchestra’s recording duties between its distinguished new French chief, the young Seiji Ozawa – who had just been named Ravinia music director – and the recording veteran Morton Gould. Gould’s eclectic RCA/Chicago repertoire reflects his exceptionally wide musical affinities. Of course there is American music, including Gould’s own masterpiece Spirituals for Orchestra, which in 1941 became the first of his works to enter the standard repertoire. In February 1965, it occupied his first Chicago sessions along with Aaron Copland’s Dance Symphony, which surprisingly had never before been recorded by an American orchestra. High Fidelity wrote: “Gould’s performance is extremely fine, and the orchestral execution is equally superb.” That November in Chicago, Gould’s Orchestra Hall concert programs included Charles Ives’s First Symphony. A few months later, it was captured by RCA’s microphones – the symphony’s recording premiere! – and went on to win the 1966 Grammy as “Classical Album of the Year”. Another high point of Gould’s Chicago concerts and sessions came from his advocacy of Carl Nielsen. In June 1966, he conducted the orchestra in the Danish master’s Second Symphony and, joined by Benny Goodman, the Clarinet Concerto. ClassicsToday.com, musing over whether Gould’s experience and insight as a composer might explain his palpable understanding of what Nielsen wanted in the symphony, exclaimed that “no other performance whips up the first-movement coda to such a frenzy of excitement, or drives the finale so dazzlingly from first note to last.” BBC Music Magazine called this recording “the most alive of Nielsen’s Four Temperaments” and praised Goodman’s “inimitable” and “moving” performance of the concerto. This new Sony Classical collection of Morton Gould’s Chicago recordings – featuring facsimile LP sleeves and labels, plus full discographical notes – also contains “a thoroughly convincing account … with playing of great virtuosity” (Gramophone) of the Symphony No. 21 by Nikolai Myaskovsky – a CSO 50th-anniversary commission in 1938 – coupled with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Symphony No. 2 “Antar”, as well as an “excellent” (Gramophone) disc of Tchaikovsky waltzes. Every recording in this next set has been remastered from the original analogue tapes.

Price: $129.98

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