MacDowell’s star may have faded to near oblivion over the years. Yet even when his very personal and oddly touching voice seems stifled by deference to outmoded European ideals he provides enough poetic and psychological interest to make Barbagallo’s affectionate tribute more than worthwhile.
The rough-and-tumble of academic life, with its hard-nosed jockeying for position, was ill-suited to MacDowell’s gentle nature and his professorship at Columbia was short-lived. A romantic escapist, he retreated to his “House o’ Dreams” in idyllic New Hampshire, where he indulged his passion for “the Gaelic world... of bards and heroes of great adventure”, a “love of other times”.
Significantly, the gems of Vol. 3 in this ongoing and excellently recorded series are surely the Op. 31 Poems after Heine, their charm and piquancy evoking Scottish castles, nightingales and a shepherd boy “crowned with golden sunshine”. The Forgotten Fairy Tales, too, have their moments but the 12 Virtuoso Etudes are less interesting than their title implies: the “Polonaise” is truly awful and the “Valse triste” an unengaging mixture of whimsy and complacency. But “Wilde Jagd”, with its sinister chromatic undertow, is effective and there is much homely lyricism elsewhere. The larger forms, however, surely defeated a composer who was essentially a miniaturist. And although the Keltic Sonata urges us on with instructions such as “with tragic pathos”, the music is overwhelmed by Grieg’s influence and by too many tub-thumping, inflated gestures.
Overall, Barbagallo is more persuasive in intimacy than in brilliance. But if he is hard-pressed by some of MacDowell’s more hectoring demands he is unfailingly warm-hearted. Personally, I’m not sure that there were “enough diamonds and rubies and emeralds... to make a crown for MacDowell as king of contemporary American music” (an early estimate quoted in the gushing insert-note) but the many semi-precious stones are certainly attractive.'