Listening to these fastidious accounts of Walter Piston's chamber music emphasizes the parallels between him and Sir Lennox Berkeley. Both studied with Nadia Boulanger; both were neo-classicists with deeper roots in Bach than Stravinsky; both wrote some of their finest works in the 1940s and 1950s, music of dignity and restraint eschewing sensationalism and unwilling to reveal all its secrets at a first hearing. In the two composers these qualities have given rise to outstanding chamber music. But there are differences. Berkeley was more melodic in approach, his adagios have more soul, and from that angle the more valid parallel may be Rawsthorne, who, like Piston, was more attracted to instrumental music. (Both Berkeley and Rawsthorne are miserably represented on CD: Piston is well ahead.)
But from every point of view, Piston was an individual—the pipe-smoking Harvard professor who wrote standard textbooks on harmony, counterpoint and orchestration and numbered Carter and Bernstein amongst his pupils. The CD of chamber and instrumental works is perhaps the more revealing. The first surprise is the Piano Sonata, written in Paris, and cited in The New Grove Dictionary of American Music as unpublished and withdrawn. Why? This is a big piece with maybe an echo of Stravinsky's Piano Sonata at the outset, but a well-sustained Lento to follow and a fugal finale, anticipating the energy of Barber's later on.
Leonard Hokanson plays admirably in the piano solos and in the Quintet, where the interplay between piano and strings is deftly used, providing Piston with more colour than in the quartets. In fact it would not be going too far to regard Piston's as one of the finest Piano Quartets of the century. The G minor ambience of the opening Allegro comodo has the grey restraint of the opening movement of Debussy's Violin Sonata or of Faure. The thematic technique is satisfying in that Piston sees no need to disrupt sonata-form conventions of recapitulation. The Adagio sustains a single mood—to a climax and back—and the Allegro vivo shows that Piston, in spite of his Italian ancestry and French training, can still be American, swinging and syncopating with the best of them. The Quintet, like the First and Third Quartets, has been recorded before, but this is a finely judged interpretation. The recorded sound at times lacks a real pianissimo and the solo piano is a little hard, but not seriously unflattering.
The first three string quartets—two from the mid 1930s, one more than a decade later (and the fourth and fifth to follow?)—show the same rugged consistency that permeates Piston's output. Sometimes his counterpoint with its regular imitations can become a mannerism, but there are enchanting moments when the mask slips, such as the G major episode in the middle of the finale of No. 2. The bars of 5/8 lift it from convention but it's still catchy: so is the near waltz which emerges in the middle of the first movement of No. 1. By the time of No. 3 some lessons have been learnt from Bartok. All the writing is idiomatic, but Piston is more orderly with his clear tonal centres. Nothing goes on too long, which shows both taste and discrimination of a kind to be expected from Harvard and Paris. The Portland Quartet is well drilled and precise: fine in the more percussive textures, perhaps a little cool in the adagios. But altogether a feast of chamber music with much to enjoy.'