Charles Cadman - Piano Trio; Violin Sonata; Piano Quintet

Charles Wakefield CADMAN (1881-1946)

Piano Trio (1914) 

Violin Sonata (1930)

 Piano Quintet (1937)

The Legend of the Canyon (1920)
From the Land of the Sky-Blue Water (1909-13) arr Gaylord Yost

Paul Posnak (piano)
Peter Zazofsky (violin)
Ross Harbrough (cello)
Bergonzi String Quartet

rec 3-6 Jan 2000, Gusman Hall, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida

    Where will this Naxos series go next? Cadman is certainly a recondite figure although, as hearing this disc will confirm, his music is lyrically rewarding.

    Cadman was of the Arthur Farwell Indianist camp. His opera Shanewis, in which he used native Indian music, achieved considerable success. He gave lecture recitals with the Indian mezzo Tsianina Redfeather. However I detect little of that world in this music.

    The contours of the Piano Trio suggest an allegiance to searching Gallic lyricism. Here he stands at the confluence of the Franckian stream on one side and the Brahms on the other. Saint-Saens and Tchaikovsky are also presences. The music is florid and ecstatic with the first movement gliding along like an athletic swan. Despite some awkwardness in ensemble the music achieves a sanguine confidence and loquacious flood. This is Elysian music - sentimental but for the most part not cloying.

    The Sonata is taken by Zazofksy a Bostonian who studied with Joseph Silverstein. He is no stranger to esoterica having performed the Busoni violin concerto with the BBCPO/Gunther Herbig on BBC radio 3 in 1982. He has a searching forward unacademic sound. The work inspired by the Pacific coast and its desert hinterland was written in Fresno in 1929 and premiered the next year. It reminded me of the Dunhill and Ireland first sonatas. The skittery playfulness of Brahms Second Piano Concerto in the first movement contrasts with the raindrop piano and beguiling subtlety of the middle movement. Cadman obeyed dramatic convention for the ending.

    The Quintet is a noticeably more modern piece. It remains strenuous but the textures are lighter - less Brahmsian in density and of a lighter dancing quality. There is a Franckian striving for new and passionate heights and a startlingly ominous dissonance at end of first movement.

    After such a start I have my fingers crossed that Cadman's First Symphony will be next in the queue. Its premiere was treated to an NBC broadcast on 15 March 1940. The composer was interviewed before the performance and expressed his profound gratitude to the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the conductor Albert Coates. He said that working with the LAPO had been a very happy experience. The Symphony is in three autobiographically programmatic movements portraying a fairground, factory life and the struggle between labour and the bosses - resolved in optimism rather than doom. The Symphony which I have heard in that Coates directed premiere and also in the hands of Dan Winston Vogel directing the BBC Concert Orchestra is vividly rustic - Cadman being excellent as the poet-painter of the outdoors. The music has a Dvorakian swing and a grandeur in the swirling high strings which appear in the first movement and also open the finale. The music is wheezy and brusque - a whirl of gaudy life fading into a tired sunset.

    Until the entertaining First Symphony arrives on the scene you can now through this inexpensive disc access the laid-back and romantic world of Charles Cadman.

    Rob Barnett