Sessions is slowly making headway—the first five symphonies are available in the British catalogue now and I welcomed, with some reservations, the complete piano works authoritatively played by Barry David Salwen (12/92), also on Koch. Another fine performance of the Piano Sonata No. 2 is included in Peter Lawson's second CD of American piano sonatas (2/94).
In the piano music collection I admired the earlier Sessions of the Piano Sonata No. 1 (1927-30), the period of his ballet The Black Maskers, and regretted his move away from his Prokofiev/Bloch heritage. It is possible to feel the same way about these admirably prepared performances recorded here. There have been at least three earlier American recordings of the String Quartet in E minor (1938), two in the 1940s. It is the essence of chamber music with its long lines in the extended Adagio (track 12), and impressive example of Sessions's visionary imagination. The final Vivace has some common ground with Tippett.
The language of the Quintet (1958) is developed from the Schoenberg of the Third and Fourth Quartets, with a similar cantilena to the Quartet in a more advanced harmonic idiom. The energy of Sessions's faster movements, such as the finales of both works, is comparable and—in performances like these from New York's admirable Group for Contemporary Music—frequently electrifying.
The short, elegiac Canon to the memory of Stravinsky shows that Sessions felt deeply about both the great innovators of early twentieth-century music. The solo cello pieces use all the scope available and make the most of Joshua Gordon's virtuosity, even if the rather close recording is inclined to catch breathing sounds. Good CD notes from Andrea Olmstead whose writings have done so much for the composer.'