The record companies are not making it easy for collectors of the music of Samuel Barber.
Take the new Telarc CD listed above. Here are impressively recorded performances of a half-dozen of the late American composer's finest works, including maybe the most forceful statements yet of the first two Essays for Orchestra.In short, it almost duplicates Leonard Slatkin's equally fine EMI collection, which includes all three Essays, both now superseding Thomas Schippers' venerable Odyssey collection in terms of repertoire if not performance.
What neither Slatkin nor Schippers offers is "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," perhaps the most sublime masterpiece in the Barber canon. However, anyone susceptible to its wistful nostalgia (annotator Richard E. Rodda calls it a musical counterpart to the play "Our Town") is likely to already have either the pioneering Eleanor Steber recording - currently part of a Masterworks Portrait CD that includes the only available discings of "Andromache's Farewell" and the "Hermit Songs" - and/or my own favorite, Dawn Upshaw's on Elektra/Nonesuch, mesmerizing in its childlike innocence and imagination.
Compared with these, McNair and Levi's account seems more deliberately contemplative, with a distant, half-remembered quality of its own. I like it but would not want to be without the other two, which means three CDs of this one work alone.
Since Neemi Jaervi's new Chandos recording - his 100th for that label - also includes the three Essays, it would appear a reasonable alternative to Slatkin's. Except that the Estonian conductor's more lyrically ruminative approach misses the ruggedness Slatkin and especially Levi find in this music.
What's more, Chandos has once again given us Jaervi's Barber coupled with something else - not a bad idea on its own but hardly the way to go about building a Barber edition per se.
Last time it was Amy Beach's "Gaelic" Symphony, coupled with the Barber First and the "School for Scandal" Overture. This time it is the Ives First Symphony, already available in a splendid new Michael Tilson Thomas recording. There are differences, however. For where Thomas' is more pointed in its accents and stresses - more "American," if you will - Jaervi brings out more of the symphony's markedly European qualities, especially the Dvorakian elements of the opening movement, here vital and flowing, and the Scherzo. (Unlike Thomas, he also includes the first-movement exposition repeat.)
For a limited time, moreover, this disc is available in a gold commemorative edition at no extra charge.
Also something of a commemorative issue is the latest and, with his death earlier this year, the last installment in Andrew Schenck's developing Barber series. Which makes it something of a memorial, as well as the first recording ever of "The Lovers," for baritone, chorus and orchestra.
Based on Pablo Neruda's "Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair," this is relatively late Barber, commissioned by the Girard Bank of Philadelphia in 1971, when the composer was still licking his wounds following the disastrous Metropolitan Opera premiere of "Antony and Cleopatra."
With that in mind, one can almost hear him regaining his confidence as he goes along, as these exotically scored exercises in erotica grow in strength and intensity. The poetry itself strikes me as pretty steamy for a bank commission, in some cases embarrassingly so. But it is hard not to be seduced by the warm sun, gently rocking rhythms and spent passion of "The Fortunate Isles" or seared by "Cemetery of Kisses," its deep tolling mourning the loss of love.
In short, here for once is a Barber release that has no competition, although I can imagine a more forceful performance. Baritone Dale Duesing does not disappoint, however. Nor, for the most part, does the Chicago Symphony Chorus, either here or in the accompanying "Prayers of Kierkegaard," still perhaps the composer's most imposing choral work of any kind.
Here I occasionally miss the impetus of the pioneering Louisville recording, available on an Albany CD. But the clarity and conviction of the singing and the conducting give the work as a whole an impact it does not have there. Ditto the digital recording, which captures not only the sound of the audience at this 1991 performance but what sounds like maybe the Orchestra Hall ventilating system as well.