The Second Symphony stirs special memories. At Harvard I was an about-to-become-lapsed premed, my love of the place sustained only by music classes with the exhilarating G. Wallace Woodworth. Woody got the nod to guest-conduct the Boston Symphony in the 1943 premiere of the Piston Second, and we in the class got to go to his dress rehearsal. It was the first piece of music by a living, visible composer I ever knew. It was then what it is now, a clear, neatly cohesive work that you could take into a classical-sonata-form class and locate all the points — tidy and expressive, with a drop-dead-beautiful slow movement. Naxos, that splendidly adventurous company, has just reissued the Gerard Schwarz recording (formerly, costlier, on Delos). It neatly fills out the aura around these fine new books.
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