This year's second MacDowell LP predictably duplicates the Woodland Sketches, and Rosemarie Wright's account of them matches that by Charles Fierro (Nonesuch/Conifer H71411, 1/84). She plays all this music, indeed, with an apt simplicity, directness and an excellent sense of its scale. In the Sketches, for example, ''Will-o'-the-Wisp'' spins elusively, the elegiac mood of ''A Deserted Farm'' is exactly caught. In place of Fierro's coupling, the Sea Pieces, Op. 55, Arembe offer the first three of the dozen Etudes, Op. 39 of 1889-90, the Forgotten Fairytales, Op. 4 (1897) and Six poems after Heine, Op. 31 (1887, rev. 1901). The Etudes are good pieces and worth playing, but are less interesting than MacDowell's Op. 46 set, which he specifically called Virtuosen-Etuden.
Often he employed literary quotations as mottoes for instrumental pieces, and Op. 31 is among several sets of compositions in which he goes one step further and attempts pianistic interpretations of specific poems. Other examples include a Goethe set, Op. 28 and Les orientales, Op. 37 (after Hugo). As the Etudes follow the Sketches on the above LP, though, one realizes that they are basically the same type of piece, and the unfailing effectiveness of MacDowell's piano writing serves to underline the point. He was no innovator, was content to work within the German tradition in which he was trained and while listening to, or playing, such items one is frequently reminded of precedents in German Romantic keyboard music. However, this well-recorded issue usefully draws attention to MacDowell's fluency, sureness of aim, clarity, elegance; each work has a small yet distinct identity.'