PISTON. Symphony No. 3. Eastman- Rochester Symphony Orchestra conducted by Howard Hanson. Mercury MRL2549 (12 in., 28s. 9d. plus us. 2id. P.T.).

Walter Piston was born in Rockland, in the State of Maine, in 1894, and since 1926 (when he returned from a brief period of study with Nadia Boulanger) he has taught at Harvard. The background to his career, then, has been New England ; when one compares him with such figures as Stravinsky. BartOlt, even Hindemith (whom he resembles much more closely), who have been driven over the face of the earth both by circumstances and by their own inner needs, he seems positively stick-in-the-mud. But his relatively uneventful career has not meant that he has been kept out of touch with the deeper currents of twentiethcentury music. From his New England vantage-point he has been able to survey the scene, to select what he wanted in the way of new techniques and to absorb them into his own personal style. If there are local characteristics in his music, as opposed to personal ones, they are only to be found in a certain native seriousness, a mistrust of anything that could possibly be regarded as " meretricious "—a concept not in much favour today. This is reflected in the predominantly instrumental character of his output—it includes only one stage-work and scarcely any songs.

Everybody who knows Piston's music respects it ; it is so eminently the work of a thoroughly professional craftsman. Nevertheless I find that even into the most laudatory studies of Piston there creeps a slightly defensive note. For example, Elliott Carter, in an article on Piston that appeared in the Musical Quarterly for July 1946 (well worth reading, incidentally), found it necessary to rebut the criticism that Piston's music lacked emotion by writing : "Moods are contrasted so skilfully that they seem like a comment one upon the other, like the thoughts of a serious man with a sense of humour who can take up a subject and see it in different perspectives." This is true, but I doubt whether it is a description that could be applied to much great music. There is something altogether too rational about Piston's music, and, in the last resort, too little inspired.

The present symphony dates from 1947, and was commissioned by the Koussevitsky Foundation. It is in four movements, basically slow-quick-slow-quick, and of them I find the slow ones, with their dignified expression of a sort of consciously inhibited romantic feeling, the most convincing. The scherzo and the finale, on the other hand, though as well made as anything from Piston's workshop, seem to me only synthetically exuberant ; certainly they lack that specifically American energy that abounds in the music of Copland, Bernstein, William Schuman and many younger men.

As far as his musical personality goes, in fact, Piston might be said to be more English than American, though I'm sure this would be hotly denied by most American musicians. At any rate I see no reason why his music should not achieve in this country at least that high degree of respect which it commands in the United States, and this record should help it to do so.

Both performance and recording are very good, though owners of small and inflexible reproducers should be warned that like other Mercury recordings this one can sound harsh. Anyone interested in the vast amount of new music being preduced on the other side of the Atlantic should take this opportunity of making the acquaintance of one of the key figures of his generation. J.N.