Walter Piston was one of the more influential American musicians of the twentieth century. For nearly four decades he was a mainstay of the Harvard Music Department, authoring a series of widely used textbooks and teaching generations of composers. Like many Americans who went to Paris in the 1920s he fell under the influence of Stravinsky and neoclassicism and it was that aesthetic that prevailed at Harvard and in Piston's own composition.
Piston worked in all the formal genres, leaving a substantial legacy of quartets, symphonies and concertos. His two violin concertos are among his most important works and Naxos has provided an invaluable service by placing both on one disc, along with the later Fantasia, as part of their American Classics series. The performances by erstwhile prodigy James Buswell are strong, he is able to get inside these cerebral scores and light the fires within. Theodore Kuchar and the Ukraine National Symphony lend solid support and the recording is first rate.