800 children sing Young America
[In 1925 en 1927 maakte en dirigeerde Frank Van der Stucken een eigen Amerikaanse adaptatie van Jong Vlaanderen, de cantate voor kinderkoor en orkest van Lodewijk Mortelmans. Deze cantate werd onder de titel Young America uitgegeven door Van der Stuckens jongste zoon, Dirk, die in Reading een muziekuitgeverij had. In het ongemeen rijke archief van de New York Times vonden we in de krant van 10 mei 1925 volgende recensie van een uitvoering in het Mei-festival in Cincinnatti, onder leiding van assistent-dirigent Alfred Hartzel:]
800 Children sing Young America. Mortelmans's Cantata Beautifully Rendered at Cincinnati May Festival.
Cincinnati, Ohio. May 9. - The stage of Music Hall was small and shadowy, empty of everything save a few players tuning their instruments, as the audience gathered this afternoon for the fifth concert of the twenty-sixth May music festival. A deep green curtain took the place of the festival chorus which at previous concerts had formed the background of the orchestra. Suddenly, when audience and orchestra had assembled, this curtain rose, to reveal rank upon rank of an immense chorus of children. The effect was in itself dramatic and presaged the effect of the performance to come. For the singing of these children, 800 in number, trained in the public schools of the city, was in some respects the most thrilling moment of the entire festival.
They were joined later by their leader, Alfred Hartzel, chorus master and assistant director for the May festival, who directed the first performance in America of Young America, a children's cantata for chorus and orchestra by Lodewyk Mortelmans, the text from the Flemish of Niko Gunzburg. This work was originally called Young Flanders. Its musical quality and the general appropriateness of its sentiments caused Mr. van der Stucken to translate and "Americanize" it for local consumption. The music is clear and melodious and admirably adapted for children's voices. The text is rather conventional, of a patriotic flavor, and verging now and again on jingle, but the sentiments are unmistakable and the lines led themselves to the choral setting by a composer who is simple and unaffected in his writing and well aware of the limitations and capacities of children's voices. The work, which is of some fifteen or twenty minutes' length, was sung by the children from memory.
Sung with Surpassing Beauty.
It was sung with surpassing beauty and transparency of tone, with a rhythm that did not seem to be commanded by the conductor's baton, but to spring from the music itself, with a certainty and spontaneity of feeling unique in the writer's experience. In no particular was this a parroted performance. The feeling with which the meanings of the text were conveyed was felt in the colour of the tone; it is more natural for a child than it is for some grown-ups to darken the tone and give it a brooding melancholy in such a line as "all that slept in Winter's spell" and to take up the rhythm and press it forward with the thought of the stirring of new life at the coming of Spring.
There was also the admirable observance of dynamics from a finely balanced softness to the ringing resonance of certain climaxes. It is hard to praise too highly a performance of this kind, the results of educational plans evidently pursued with care and insistency in public schools, resulting in incalculable benefit to a rising generation, and indeed to the entire community. No other city than Cincinnati, to the writer's knowledge, parallels such performances. Children's choruses from public schools assist in a number of music festivals, but nowhere else in such numbers, and with such highly developed capacities as in this city. Here they are trained for two years for the festival performances, first in groups at the various schools, later as a body, and finally under the baton of a festival conductor; Mr. Hartzel may well have been gratified by the results of his labours with the children, his fine musicianship and knowledge which made possible such an impressive demonstration. The Cincinnati May Festival would have a place of its own in the musical annals of the land if it were only for its children's chorus.
N.N.: 800 Children sing Young America, in: New York Times, 10 mei 1925.