Sowerby / Craighead / Mulbury / Welsh - Works for Organ & Orchestra - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Festival Musick and Classic Concerto were both written for E. Power Biggs, who had given the premiere of Sowerby's Organ Concerto in C major with the Boston Symphony in 1938. Festival Musick, written in a single week during the summer of 1953, was first heard on Riggs' weekly CBS radio broadcast from Harvard's Germanic Museum on 3 January 1954. The Classic Concerto had it's premiere on the same program on 9 April 1944, having been written in the first three months of the year. In both instances the instrumentalists were from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Richard Burgin conducted. Festival Musick is in three movements InchFanfareInch begins with a pungently dissonant but effective brass flourish. The organ enters with a toccata-like figuration in the right hand over a strongly angular theme in the left hand and pedals. After a reception of both motifs in another key, the movement elaborates on this material, progressing in excitement and intensity to a bold conclusion. After the unrestrained exuberance (and volume) of the first movement, the quiet InchChoraleInch is an effective foil. It is in variation form and relies largely upon the organ and one of two of the brasses used intermittently for solo lines of great beauty. The idea for the final movement came from Biggs. The A.G.O. (American Guild of Organists) awards two degrees on the basis of examinations Associate and Fellow (A.A.G.O.; F.A.G.O.). The three acronyms provide the major thematic content of a movement marked InchWith verveInch. While the A, G, and F are, of course, part of the musical scale, Sowerby's dual solution to the InchO' is ingenious. To reveal it here, however, would spoil the composer's little joke, so it will be left to the listener. If Festival Musick represents the composer at his brashest, Classic Concerto emphasizes his lifelong comfort in expressing his distinctive harmonic muse and fr