The Music of America
Aaron COPLAND (1900-1990) 88697 70047 2 [205:20]
Full tracklist at end of review
CD 1
Rawness and ringing resonance make Copland's famous Fanfare shine.
So it proves with the composer's 1968 LSO version from London's Walthamstow
Town Hall. Tilson Thomas and the SFSO find pastoral tension, hushed fragility
and a super-taut precise terpsichore in their complete Appalachian spring
from 1999. It's only a pity that the whole ballet is given as a single 35+
minute track. This reading rivals the composer's own version on the same label.
The step to analogue for the 1965 composer-led Quiet City is announced
by an increasingly inconspicuous bed of hiss. This essay in neon mall and
boulevard solitude registers most sharply. The concentrated little Clarinet
Concerto is shaped with a few rough edges yet with the authority of the commissioning
artist by Benny Goodman. It is paced to introspective perfection. The other
soloists are harpist Laura Newell (who recorded the Bax Quintet in the early
days of LP) and the pianist, Abba Bogin. It moves through a slow-dripping
pavane to Bergian-dense intensity to a central dance with honey-sharpened
edges.
CD 2
I have always loved An Outdoor Overture with its out-West brashness
and revels in evening-fall trumpetry - why didn't Copland write a Trumpet
Concerto? The work has a propulsion and turbo-zip suggestive of Walton's and
Moeran's concert overtures and rhapsodies. Time has taken its toll here and
the violins have a rasp that once I never noticed. I love the tension release
at 6:45 onward as the music accelerates through joy into grandeur into brash.
It's great fun and well worth tracking down. Next come the two cowboy ballet
suites recorded by Bernstein and the NYPO in 1959-60. Not my favourite Copland
but they have their moments such as the Stravinskian rough-blown moments in
The Open Prairie. I noticed touches of Vitebsk, Weill and klezmer
in Celebration. The final segment of Billy - The Open Prairie
again - sustains the transition into Lincoln Portrait. The Portrait
is another Copland work of considerable majesty. I have always had a weakness
for music with orator and music as in RVW's Oxford Elegy and Bliss's
Morning Heroes. I hope one day to hear a good recording of Roy Harris's
Tenth Symphony (also with orator and also with a Lincoln theme) but until
then Copland's Lincoln Portrait as recorded in London for the orchestra
with Henry Fonda's vocal tracks added in NYC three years later. It works with
grace and majesty. The work is laid out in three tracks. Fonda does not go
in for dramatisation - it’s all rather flat and unassuming; in fact
that very modesty paradoxically supercharges the music. The message - especially
the references to the tyrannical principle - must have got under the skin
of America’s anti-communist gaggle. The disc ends with another glowing
gem, this time from The Tender Land which I ‘learnt’ from
a tape of that CBS LP of highlights. Here John Williams directs Boston
Pops forces. The Promise of Living still has the power to send goose
pimples down my spine from the nape of the neck to the feet. It is delightful
… as in full of delight. There is something of Russian crowd scenes
in this and again the words “with sharing and joint effort” may
well have touched off the bigotry of 1950s America; any suggestion of collective
effort being anathema in many circles.
CD 3
Copland's many visits to London for concerts and recording sessions bore fruit
in 1972. He joined with the New Philharmonia for the Appalachia-mode
music for the film The Red Pony. Corral speaks of prairie loneliness
then rangy and brazen dazzle. Warfield's Old American Songs (set 1)
is a classic of poetry and is almost Delian in the first song and in Long
Time Ago. The songs also encompass raw vaudeville, gawky fairground, cheap
gaudy and novelty comic. The latter in I bought me a cat.
Copland was subjected to the McCarthy show-trial sessions in the 1950s. Their
conduct provided uneasy echoes of the harangues of the Roland Freisler trials
in Nazi Germany. While Copland emerged with some dignity Hollywood promptly
dropped Copland. Music for Movies is a suite of film music pre-dating
the severed parting of the ways. They sample both bustle and rustic idylls
from The City, Of Mice and Men and Our Town.
The two movement Piano Concerto has Copland as pianist and Bernstein conducting.
It has pride of last place here with its jazzy dissonance and angularity rendered
without a flinch. It recalls Stravinsky's Ragtime and that composer’s
more challenging works for piano and orchestra. It does however rise to some
glowing heights in the second movement which Bernstein and Copland beat and
roar out with great swaying and stomping power. There is a touch here of Arnold's
Concerto for Phyllis and Cyril.
Largely absent from this set is anything at all thorny or dissonant. The works
of the 1960s and 1970s such as Inscape, Connotations and the
Piano Quartet. Also missing is the very popular El Salon Mexico - perhaps
its being south of the Rio Grande dictated its omission.
For contrast and a far wider Copland range you could try to track down three
two CD sets issued in 2002: A
Copland Celebration.
Rob Barnett
TRACKLISTING
Fanfare for the Common Man, for brass & percussion (from Symphony No.
3) 3:19
London Symphony Orchestra/Aaron Copland
Appalachian Spring, ballet for 13 instruments 35:52
San Francisco Symphony/Michael Tilson Thomas
Quiet City, complete incidental music 9:53
London Symphony Orchestra/Aaron Copland
Clarinet Concerto 16:55
Abba Bogin (Piano), Benny Goodman (Clarinet), Columbia Symphony Orchestra
Laura Newell (Harp) Columbia Symphony Orchestra Aaron Copland
An Outdoor Overture 8:59
London Symphony Orchestra/Aaron Copland
Rodeo, selections from the ballet (including "Four Dance Episodes") 18:25
New York Philharmonic/Leonard Bernstein
Billy the Kid, orchestral suite from the ballet 20:16
New York Philharmonic/Leonard Bernstein
Lincoln Portrait, for speaker & orchestra 15:08
London Symphony Orchestra/Aaron Copland
The Tender Land, opera - (The Promise of Living) 5:38
John Williams Boston Pops Orchestra
The Red Pony, suite for orchestra 24:35
New Philharmonia Orchestra/Aaron Copland
Old American Songs, for voice & piano, Book 1 12:24
William Warfield (Baritone)
Columbia Symphony Orchestra/Aaron Copland
The City, documentary film score - (New England Countryside) 6:13
Of Mice and Men, film score - (Barley Wagons) 2:36
The City, documentary film score - (Sunday Traffic) 2:45
Our Town, film score - (Grover’s Corner) 3:14
Of Mice and Men, film score - (Threshing Machines) 3:07
New Philharmonia Orchestra/Aaron Copland
Piano Concerto 16:10
New York Philharmonic/Leonard Bernstein