Edward Joseph Collins

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

In August 1996, the Concert Piece in A minor for Piano and Orchestra was performed by William Wolfram with the Peninsula Music Festival Orchestra in Wisconsin. This ensemble had also recorded the Concert Piece with conductor Thor Johnson and pianist Mayne Miller on a 1977 LP released to celebrate the dedication of Collins Hall at Chicago’s American Conservatory.

His final Piano Concerto, not heard since the composer’s own performance with the Chicago Symphony in 1942, was given a Wisconsin performance by the Birch Creek Music Performance Center Symphony (most of whose members are students) in 1998. Brian Groner directed and the soloist in this four movement, 40-minute work (ending with a powerful tarantella) was Jodie DeSalvo. An archival recording attests to the fecundity of the composer’s imagination and the sureness of his orchestrating skills. Of virtuoso dimensions, the concerto is an arresting and powerful work making Olympian demands on the soloist.
Two recordings offer strong performances of Collins’s music: the first containing most of the piano pieces, along with the one surviving movement of what was intended to be a string quartet; the second an excellent collection of three major orchestral works together with his Concert Piece.

In the former (CRI 644), the pianist is Earl Wild, who presents 13 shorter works for piano (dating from 1922 to 1949) in performances which have a certain flair and recognize the music’s often eccentric rhythmic patterns while not quite going the full distance. The Allegro Piacevole in D minor is given a poised reading by the Manhattan String Quartet.
The second, more recent disc (Troy/ Albany 267) holds two large works from the 1920s and two from the early 1930s. Conductor Marin Alsop, Music Director of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra and Principal Guest conductor of both the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the London Sinfonietta, directs her Concordia Orchestra —a symphonic ensemble drawn from top New York personnel and devoted to modern American music—in perceptive, well-played performances that do great honor to the composer’s vision and technical skill. The recording was made following a performance at Lincoln Center of the Concert Piece in A minor for Piano and Orchestra. Mardi Gras is another orchestral work that evokes Delius in its evanescent glow, its flashes of merriment viewed in recollection. A Tragic Overture is given a powerful performance, sinewy, ominous in its conjuring of war’s horrors. Valse Elegante is a measured, glowing evocation of graceful dance and is, as are the other works here, skillfully orchestrated.

In the Concert Piece, Collins slips from the clutches of theme and development to create a work that moves easily from one cadence to another, without any sense of early abandonment. The soloist here, Leslie Stifelman, is a distinguished artist whose career has been devoted largely to performance of contemporary music. Both she and Alsop convey a strong sense of belief in this music and withhold nothing in their advocacy. The disc has received strongly positive reviews in a number of national publications.

The music of Edward Joseph Collins rewards close scrutiny and merits frequent performance. While one can point to the presence of devices employed by other composers, the fact is that Collins was highly original in his organization and employment of ideas, in the flow with which they were assembled, and in the unforced introduction of American idioms to works that were conceived with great seriousness of purpose. His works dwell outside the easy categorization many critics and listeners commonly apply.

Whatever disappointments he may have experienced in life, his works show a strength of character and a courage that must be admired—and an endearing capacity to convey genuine and enduring emotion.

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