Each of these purely instrumental symphonies takes its inspiration from the five sections of the Roman Catholic Mass Ordinary (that is, the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei). Nicolas Flagello’s work was composed in 1957, Arnold Rosner’s in 1973 as a sort of Vietnam War protest (he dedicated it to George McGovern, believe it or not). Both also include bits of plainchant here and there, and plenty of “celestial” orchestration, meaning seraphic violins, lots of harp and celesta, and splashy moments for cymbals and tam-tam at the climaxes. In short, they sound like Respighi in his modal style, or occasionally the Vaughan Williams of the Tallis Fantasia or Fifth Symphony (the Rosner especially).
Nevertheless, this is not sacred music. The two scherzo sections of Flagello’s symphony (the Gloria and Sanctus) sound as typically American as anything by Piston or Copland from the same period. Rosner’s scoring comes close to the Hollywood Bible epics of the 1960s (Ben Hur, The Robe, etc.), meaning Rózsa or Alfred Newman. Both works are obviously sincere and very pretty, but they’re also curiously devoid of even the sort of tension we often find in vocal settings of the Mass in such sections as the Kyrie, the Crucifixus in the Credo, and the Agnus Dei. In Rosner’s case, this arises from his interest in Renaissance vocal polyphony, where the timeless flow of the music is never disturbed by an attempt to dramatize the emotional sense of the words. However, in a basically Romantic orchestral idiom the lack of expressive variety prevents the writing from achieving the sort of depth of feeling that we have come to expect from most vocal settings of the same text from the Baroque period onward.
The performances, however, are very proficient given the unfamiliarity of the music, and they make a good case for both pieces. John McLaughlin Williams, always comfortable championing unknown works, gets the Ukrainian players to respond with both vigor and sensitivity, and for all their basic niceness neither symphony ever turns dull. The sonics are also bright and vivid, though there’s some rawness at the climaxes and the harp is balanced very far forward. Still, this coupling, the brainchild of musicologist Walter Simmons, is both singularly apt and easily recommendable to anyone interested in highly approachable modern American orchestral music.
