Edward MacDowell - Piano Sonata nº2 "Eroica" (score)

Flos regum Arcturus. Arthur, flower of kings.

Do you like epic-sounding sonatas? If so, you're absolutely gonna love this one.

American composer Edward MacDowell's four piano sonatas represent, to most of those relative few who are at all familiar with his now largely abandoned music, the most involved, weighty, and high-aspiring musical thoughts the man had to offer; and he does not fall so short of those aspirations as his total historical neglect might imply. MacDowell himself seems to have felt the Sonata No. 4 in E minor, Op. 59 (the "Keltic" Sonata), to be his greatest achievement, but the second sonata, the Sonata eroica in G minor, Op. 50 (counterpart to the Sonata tragica five opus numbers below it), of 1894-1895, offers a good challenge for the distinction.

The Sonata eroica was composed about a year before MacDowell, who was becoming increasingly famous in his homeland and throughout Europe, joined the faculty of Columbia University in New York City. At Columbia he was charged with the unfriendly task of creating an entire department of music where none existed. The sonata, however, is not the kind of music that today we associate with American academicians -- it has far more in common with the piano music written by the wandering virtuosi of a generation or two earlier and with that of Edvard Grieg, who collectively were the composers who generally appealed most to MacDowell. It is free-spirited in a high-flying Romantic way, poetic without necessarily being particularly salon-ish, passionate without necessarily plunging too deeply into the depths of the human soul. It is surprisingly skillful and refined.

MacDowell has written a traditional four-movement sonata, and he places the scherzo in the second-movement slot as had been fashionable ever since Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The first movement is marked "Slow, with nobility" at the opening, but, as happens so frequently in music of the day, fast music is just around the corner. The elf-like scherzo is in B flat minor and follows a course determined by successive sixteenth note bursts. The bass register of the piano periodically makes a syncopated throbbing sound throughout the E flat major slow movement ("Tenderly, longingly, yet with passion"). The finale is speedy and sets rigidly-articulated gestures against broad, flowing lyric ideas; a G major coda brings the Sonata eroica to a dolcissimo close.
Source: Blair Johnston, at https://www.allmusic.com/composition/...

MOVEMENTS:
00:00 - I. Slow, with nobility
07:48 - II. Elf-like, as light and swift as possible
11:39 - III. Tenderly, longingly, yet with passion
17:23 - IV. Fiercely, very fast
25:07 - Credits

I disagree with many of the dynamic choices in this recording, but I still like some of the choices of color and sound.
Original Audio:    • MacDowell: Piano Sonatas Nos. 2-4, Se...  
Score: https://s9.imslp.org/files/imglnks/us...