Union

Robert DeGaetano, piano

Indulging in the cliché that everything old was once new, it’s a rather lovely thing in the context of all this new music to step back onto Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s 19th century company with this new disc of some of the composer’s most popular songs. Considerably heavier than the rest of the polite parlor fare included is Union, a piece Gottschalk composed in 1862 during the Civil War and performed for Lincoln at the White House two years later. Sewn into the seams of this work are references to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Hail Columbia,” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” all varnished over with enough show-piece ornamentation to keep the soloist on the edge of the piano bench.

—MS