Edward MacDowell was the most highly regarded American composer of his generation, and the first to acquire a truly international reputation. Born in New York, he briefly studied piano as a teenager at the Paris Conservatoire, but quickly left to explore what he regarded as the more congenial musical environment in Germany. He studied piano and composition in Stuttgart, Wiesbaden, and then Frankfurt. After graduating in 1880, he remained in Germany for four years, before returning home, first to Boston, for eight years, and then finally to New York where he became Columbia University’s first Professor of Music. The various romantic influences that shaped the style of the First Piano Concerto include the music of Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Schumann, and Grieg, whilst the technical demands on the soloist reveal MacDowell’s prowess as a pianist.

MacDowell’s enthusiasm for the symphonic poem is reflected here by the inclusion of Lancelot und Elaine and Lamia. The former was inspired by the Arthurian legend as told by Tennyson in his Idylls of the King. The work is extremely narrative, and employs Wagnerian Leitmotifs to depict each of the characters. Lamia, written some two years later and based on the poem by John Keats, was neither published nor performed in the composer’s lifetime. MacDowell had planned another symphonic poem, based on the French medieval tale La Chanson de Roland, but the work was never completed, and the two fragments included here are all that remain. Woodland Sketches, a set of ten piano miniatures, were inspired by the idyllic environment of the MacDowells’ farm, in New Hampshire. The first of these – ‘To a Wild Rose’ – is by far the composer’s most famous piece, and made MacDowell a household name in both America and Europe.