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
See also reviews of the Barber,
Bernstein, Ives
and Williams sets.
Track listing
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
SONY 88697 70047 2 [205:20] 
