James Gaffigan's American album release highlighted by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
James Gaffigan is featured in Experience CSO (Photo credit: Vera Hartmann)
With latest disc, James Gaffigan waves the flag for American composers
By Kyle MacMillan
CSO Experience
May 20, 2022
Even though his conducting career is largely based in Europe, James Gaffigan has not forgotten his American roots.
To drive home that point, last year he recorded an album titled “Americans” (Harmonia Mundi), featuring the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, for which Gaffigan served as chief conductor from 2011 to 2021.
“This was a kind of selfish thing for me, because I love the Lucerne Symphony,” said Gaffigan, who will guest conduct the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on June 10-11. “It was one of those relationships where we grew together and not apart. In end I didn’t want to leave, they didn’t want me to leave, but we knew it was the right time.
“That recording was the last recording I did with them. Being an American running a Swiss orchestra, I wanted to show them and the public that we have music that is extraordinary from our country.”
While Europeans know about popular musical figures such as Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland, they aren’t necessarily as familiar with some of this country’s other major composers, including Charles Ives (1874-1974) and Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953), who lived in Chicago in 1921-1929. This album offers tastes of both.
Easily the best-known work on the album is Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, the 1957 Broadway musical that Gaffigan called a “masterpiece.” The rest of the album consists of lesser-known compositions like Ives’ Symphony No. 3 (The Camp Meeting), dating to 1908-10. “A lot of Americans don’t even know about this piece, and I find it to be nostalgic even if you don’t understand what is nostalgic about it,” he said. “I love it, and I was really happy to have a European orchestra take it seriously.”
Also featured is Seeger’s Andante for Strings and Samuel Barber’s Overture to The School for Scandal, Op. 5 (1931) and Toccata Festiva, Op. 36 (1960), for organ and orchestra, with Paul Jacobs as soloist.
Gaffigan noted that a few of Barber’s pieces are regularly performed, such as the ever-popular Adagio for Strings and his Violin Concerto, but many others have been neglected.
“The music of Barber is extraordinary,” Gaffigan said. “I think it is quintessentially romantic American music. It sounds like one of these huge Steinbeck novels like The Grapes of Wrath or East of Eden. It’s the American journey.”
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