This disc scores highly on the rarity-value scale, but I suspect that only one of the works was really worth disinterring. One reason why Alexander Tansman (1897–1986) isn't rated alongside those composers who are truly great is that his music is so hit-or-miss. It's as if he wrote so much simply because he couldn't tell (or didn't care) whether it was really any good or not.
The good piece here is the set of Four Movements, written in 1968. Perhaps because there are no symphonic pretensions, this work has much more sparkle and genuine sensuality than the laboured and undramatic Fifth Symphony of 1942. The music of Four Movements moves easily between a rich confection, with Ravel and Scriabin the principal ingredients, and an astringent Stravinskyism which, in the finale, suffers not at all from recalling the Symphony in Three Movements so explicitly. There is a warmth, a lack of inhibition, especially in the third Movement's expansive climax, which surpasses everything else on the disc.
The wartime Symphony, written in Hollywood and hinting at a kind of Honegger-meets-Copland style, comes to life only in the short scherzo, with its clear premonition of the trumpet theme from the finale of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra (1943). Yet even in this scherzo there's an absence of those well-motivated contrasts basic to symphonic argument, and in the other three movements a rather murky blandness soon sets in. This dispiriting quality is also to the fore in the Stravinsky memorial piece (1972), where the difference between the master's ability to stimulate and challenge and Tansman's altogether more mundane manner are all too evident. His orchestration can be imaginative, but his ideas rarely amount to much.
The performances seem well-studied, yet the sound, very bright but not especially well-focused, is far from the best that technicians can manage today.'