Edward Joseph Collins: An American Composer (continued)
BY ERIK ERIKSSON

In the concert program notes, Ferris commented, “This grand personal statement is both romantic and visionary. His own evocative English text helps create a splendid universe of sound, filled with the warmth of choral and solo voices and a sparkling array of orchestral timbres.”

“Bringing this great hymn to life presented many special challenges. The original manuscript of the work had been lost. All that remained was the copyist’s version of the orchestral score. After study of the manuscript in the Collins archives, it seemed very likely that the composer did not work in short score for his orchestral or chamber music. That is to say that he did not sketch a version for piano first, but went directly into the [palette] of full orchestral score.

Ferris continued with these remarks: “Both the text and the warm post-Mahler scoring reflect Collins’s training in Berlin with Bruch and Humperdinck, as well as the vogue of the times. While some of the gestures may strike contemporary audiences as more 19th than 20th century, there is a remarkable technical skill in the writing and a richness of invention that fill the work with genuine and truly memorable moments.”

Ferris did not mention the striking parallel with Delius, an Englishman never mentioned by Collins, but who was another iconoclastic composer who found his own solutions and created his own sound world—in his own time, but not quite of it. An additional similarity is in the celebration of nature, an element constantly present in Delius.

Collins himself had expressed some mild disappointment in Hymn to the Earth, feeling “there are many fetching things in the work but it is old-fashioned and naive in spots.” Most likely, however, he simply had been too close to it: not having had the opportunity to hear it performed, he was denied the grand impression that the work makes in live performance.

Another notable performance of Collins’s music in recent decades was a concert given at the Henry Flagler Museum in Palm Beach, Florida 4 January 1991. Included were excerpts from an orchestral suite, a ballet, and Hymn to the Earth as well as four songs and his Concert Piece. The conductor for the program was Anton Guadagno and the orchestra the Palm Beach Chamber Orchestra.

From the 1927 lyric suite, Set of Four, Guadagno chose two movements: ‘Passacaglia’ and ‘To Her.’ The former employs the Mixolydian mode for eight short variations set to a stately triple meter stealing subtly over a ground bass.

Two movements from the ballet Masque of the Red Death, ‘Chez la Sultan’ and ‘Orgie,’ were next on the program, followed by ‘A Piper,’ ‘Prayer,’ ‘Daffodils,’ and ‘Song and Suds,’ four songs orchestrated by Verne Reynolds. This quartet of songs illustrates Collins’s diverse and far-reaching interest in poetry: an Irish folk verse, an elegy written by a close friend, a poem by Wordsworth, and a rambunctious spiritual—interesting bedfellows each. A soprano solo from Hymn to the Earth concluded the first half, leading to the Concert Piece after intermission. The concert offered one of the most variegated arrays of orchestral works by Collins yet heard.

Two years later, Palm Beach was host to another concert, this one a violin-piano recital, which included the music of Edward Collins. Violinist Velia Yedra and pianist Bogdan Chruszcz performed the Arabesque as a part of a program also holding Corelli, Massenet, and Sarasate. Arabesque was also heard in the early 1990s on the Dancing Bear Music Series in Traverse City, Michigan. Russian-trained violinist Julia Bushkova and pianist Victoria Mushkatkol also recorded at a later date a performer’s version of the work for inclusion in a 1998 series compilation CD.

In 1994, Collins’s Tragic Overture was given a performance in Carnegie Hall by the American Composers Orchestra directed by Dennis Russell Davies. In a laudatory review by Bernard Holland in the May 19 New York Times, the work brought these comments: “This tidy piece fights off every modernistic impulse while clutching Liszt and Wagner firmly to its breast. Yet the ‘Tragic Overture’ celebrates more modern calamity than Romantic tragedy . . . Its methods are efficient, its tone theatrical and its language easily grasped.”

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