Getting to grips with Griffes

While the bigger recording companies seem intent on reissuing, repackaging and playing it safe and sure, Naxos continues to delve into the fascinating nooks and crannies of the repertoire.

As well as taking Hummel Masses and Takemitsu chamber music to the multitudes, Naxos has been lavishing special care on its American Classics series. The latest composer to be celebrated here is Charles Griffes, with a new collection of his orchestral music.

Devotees may already be familiar with the complete piano music, authoritatively delivered by Michael Lewin which Naxos released some years ago. The pieces range from the familiar neo-Impressionist The White Peacock to a more modernist Sonata, as well as oddities like Griffes' four-handed arrangement of the overture to Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel.

Charles Griffes has never been short of influential admirers. Elliott Carter, Virgil Thomson and Copland held him in high regard and Ned Rorem once confessed that his whole world changed when his piano teacher played him The White Peacock.

How would the teenage Rorem have coped, one wonders, if his teacher had exposed him to this lush score in its full orchestral voluptuousness?

The Buffalo Philharmonic, under JoAnn Falletta, unfold this and other Griffes canvases with just the right sense of sybaritic pleasure, reaching saturation point in the 12 goosebumpy minutes that make up The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan.

The 1919 Poem for Flute and Orchestra is a substantial and darker score which I've always linked to the haunted image of Griffes on the cover of Edward Maisel's fascinating biography. Carol Wincenc finds just the right pitch of contained fervour for the piece, as does soprano Barbara Quintilliani in The Three Poems of Fiona McLeod. And, if we must pursue Debussian comparisons, there is cause for lament that Griffes didn't have a Baudelaire or Mallarme to inspire him in this fine cycle.

Griffes the man remains a mystery, although not quite as much of one as Edward Yadzinski's booklet note would have it. Dying in 1920 at the age of 36, he was a complex figure, an obdurate Europhile with a Whitmanesque penchant for blue-collar men, which could add a provocative subtext to some of this music.

Griffes: Orchestral Music (Naxos 8.559164)