Classical: Patrick Mason

American Orchestral Song ***

One need look no further for an explanation of why American composers after the 1920s wrote music that was thin, edgy and finely crafted than Horatio Parker's "Cahal Mor of the Wine-Red Hand." Written in 1893, this is a mix of Yeats' mysticism, Edward Elgar's bombast and Wagner's chromaticism, and it is sometimes laughably pompous. Parker was a Yale professor and tutor of younger composers, including Charles Ives. His music was (like many of his contemporaries') imitatively, even slavishly Germanic.

The French came to the rescue. After World War I, composers like Eric Satie and, later, Francis Poulenc, rejected Wagner and the tradition of gorgeously overdone concert music in favor of lean textures, block harmony and impudent gestures. American composers, many of whom studied in Paris, followed suit on their way to finding a voice of their own.

One of these was Virgil Thomson, whose wonderful 1964 "Feast of Love," here in only its second recording (Howard Hanson made one after its premiere), is enchanting with its light orchestration (no brass) and careful word-setting of anonymous Latin love poetry from the first two centuries A.D. This is one of the loveliest things Thomson ever wrote, and one of the least known.

The other songs on this Bridge CD -- by John Alden Carpenter, Charles Tomlinson Griffes and Roy Harris -- are less interesting but they describe a fine American tradition of works for baritone and orchestra. (This has continued in John Adams' 1989 "Wound-Dresser," which would have served the collection well in place of the bland Carpenter.) Patrick Mason is a fine, middle-age singer, not perhaps ideally suited to celebrate vernal love, but he has clear diction, a handsome tone and he manages Thomson's high melodic line without difficulty. The Danish orchestra sounds far off in relation to the singer.