The Copland Collection: Early Orchestral Works, 1922-1935
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Brand: SonyComposer: Aaron Copland
Conductor: Aaron Copland
Performer: Aaron Copland
Conductor: Helmuth Kolbe
Conductor: Leonard Bernstein
Orchestra: London Symphony Orchestra
Orchestra: New York Philharmonic
Performer: E. Power Biggs
Edition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 1991-07-26
Music Label: Sony
Soundtracks:
Music CD 1
- Dance Symphony, for orchestra: 1. Introduction: Lento; Molto allegro; Adagio molto
- Dance Symphony, for orchestra: 2. Andante moderato
- Dance Symphony, for orchestra: 3. Allegro vivo
- Pieces (2), for string orchestra (arr. from 2 Pieces for string quartet): Lento molto
- Pieces (2), for string orchestra (arr. from 2 Pieces for string quartet): Rondino
- Symphony for Organ & Orchestra: 1. Prelude: Andante 6/8
- Symphony for Organ & Orchestra: 2. Scherzo: Allegro molto 3/4; Moderato 4/4
- Symphony for Organ & Orchestra: 3. Finale: Lento; Allegro moderato 4/4
- Music for the Theatre, suite for small orchestra: 1. Prologue
- Music for the Theatre, suite for small orchestra: 2. Dance
- Music for the Theatre, suite for small orchestra: 3. Interlude
- Music for the Theatre, suite for small orchestra: 4. Burlesque
- Music for the Theatre, suite for small orchestra: 5. Epilogue
- Piano Concerto: 1. Andante sostenuto
- Piano Concerto: 2. Molto moderato (molto rubato)
- Symphonic Ode, for orchestra
- Symphony No. 2 ('Short Symphony')
- Statements, for orchestra: 1. Militant
- Statements, for orchestra: 2. Cryptic
- Statements, for orchestra: 3. Dogmatic
- Statements, for orchestra: 4. Subjective
- Statements, for orchestra: 5. Jingo
- Statements, for orchestra: 6. Prophetic
Music reviews of The Copland Collection: Early Orchestral Works, 1922-1935
Music Review: Copland before he embraced his "populist" style - which doesn't mean that it's always "severe"
Rating: 5 Stars
I have no great interest in Copland's more popular - or should I write "populist"? - compositions and his "cowboy" style, initiated in 1936 with "El Salon Mexico". And I am one to regret that the lack of public success and the financial pressures of the depression led him not to pursue his more serious and demanding style.
The picture isn't as clear-cut, in fact. It would be comfortable for the mind to be able to think of Copland as the modernist turned populist - he would be neither the first nor the last. But in fact he never abandonned his more serious - or "severe" as he called it himself - style, returning to it regularly. It is in 1941 that he composed the masterful Piano Sonata, three years after Billy the Kid and a year before Rodeo. He returned again to his serious style in the 1957 Orchestral Variations (an orchestration of the Piano Variations from 1930), 1962 Connotations and 1967 Inscape, even flirting with the twelve-tone method in the Piano Quartet (1950) and the Piano Fantasy (1957).
So this instalment of the Copland Collection devoted to the "Early Orchestral Works (1922-1935)" is a blessing for me. "Early" here means before the turn to popular/populist, but don't get it wrong: one, "serious" doesn't necessarily mean "difficult" or (as one Copland biographer once put it) "esoteric" - not by today's standards, and even by the standards set in the early decades of last century by Schoenberg, Var?se, Ives and the likes. Sure, there is some dissonance, some crashing and clashing chords, the music can be stark and imposing, or rambunctious and, in the Jazzy second movement of the Piano Concerto, close to Ivesian cacophony. But it is less cacophonous than Ives or Var?se, more immediately appealing melodically than Schoenberg, and even the starkness and severity are always at the service of great evocative and dramatic impact.
Two, in fact, Copland then isn't always even "serious". The 1925 Music for Theatre and 1926 Piano Concerto are Copland's short-lived essays at creating an American vernacular style using Jazz - an attempt he subsequently considered an impasse, settling on another kind of vernacular which became his trademark. But the Jazzy movements in these compositions - the second of the Concerto's two, first, second and fourth from Music for Theatre - are saucy and rambunctious, sounding, in Music for Theatre, like circus music at times - Roy Harris even called it (laudatively) "whorehouse music", and you get some of that too in the 4th Statement, "Jingo".
Pieces like the Dance Symphony (1922-25), the middle scherzo of the Organ Concerto (1924, later rewritten as the First Symphony), the fast sections of the "Short Symphony" (Symphony No. 2, 1933) and "Symphonic Ode" (1929) and many passages in Music for Theatre (1925) bridge the gap between the jazzy sauciness and the "severe": they teem with a spirit of Dance, they are sprightly, energetic and rhythmically angular and complex - so much so that the Short Symphony was deemed by Stokowski and Koussevitzky to be unplayable by their respective orchestra - Philadelphia and Boston, no less! - in the allotted rehearsal time, and got its US premiere only ten years after it was composed. In fact it is incredible how much the Symphony sounds like Stravinsky - but the Stravinsky of The Rakes Progress (1951) and Agon (1957). Dance Symphony, the reworking in symphonic form of music first conceived as a ballet inspired by Murnau's film "Nosferatu", is dynamic and springly and colorful in its outer movements, an essay in rhythm and color, again something like Stravinsky (in the almost abstract bouciness) yet (despite a few echoes from Firebird and Petrushka, strikingly so at the beginning of the 2nd movement) entirely personal.
There are moments that are epically grandiose (the fanfares of the Piano Concerto's first movement, or the slow section of Symphonic Ode and the Organ Concerto's last movement, both rising to tremendous dramatic intensity), some nostalgic, pastoral and/or sentimental, announcing the Copland to be: in the first piece for String Orchestra, in the first movement of both the Organ and the Piano Concerto, in the first, middle and last movements of Music Theatre. Even when it is "severe" or `abstract" in its dance-like staccato jauntiness, the music is colorful, highly energetic and powerfully dramatic.
These composer-played (Piano Concerto) and conducted recordings (only the Organ Concerto, with Bernstein at the helm, is "non-Copland") remain, still today, inescapable yardsticks and indispensable building blocks of any Copland collection. My comparison is mainly with Michael Tilson Thomas' recent recording of the Piano Concerto, Short Symphony and Symphonic Ode, Copland the Modernist. In the two latter, MTT has the interpretive edge, being slightly more driven, muscular and snappy in the Symphony's finale, swifter and more urgent in Ode against Copland's more solemn approach. One hears that the members of the LSO in 1965 and 1967 sometimes struggle with the notes; the Sanfranciscans have them in their stride. MTT is also more dreamingly brooding and spacious in the slow section. Bernstein conducting the Piano Concerto in 1964 with Copland at the piano has a few strangely pedestrian tempos (the returning fanfare at 4:18 in the first movement, the swinging section starting at 1:49 in the second) - and he certainly doesn't take his cue from the composer conducting that same work with Earl Wild at the piano three years earlier, Copland, Menotti: Piano Concertos, my favorite version among the three. But other than these limited spots, Bernstein's reading has all the required rambunctiousness, and Copland (the pianist)'s more biting accents and cruder sonics are more appropriate in the Jazzy second movement than Garrick Ohlsson/MTT's more generalized sonics.
Indeed, sonics are where these recordings from the 1960s still strike: they are exceptionally vivid, giving much more presence and instrumental pungency than MTT's comparatively homogenized and somewhat muffled sound. So, small matters of interpretation notwithstanding, because these recordings have the authority of the composer and such stupendous sonics, they remain, still today, first choice.
General CDs
- Styles > Classical
- Featured Composers, A-Z > ( C ) > Copland, Aaron
- Featured Performers, A-Z > ( L ) > London Philharmonic Orchestra
- ( N ) > New York Philharmonic Orchestra
- Forms & Genres > Concertos > General
- Historical Periods > Modern, 20th, & 21st Century > Forms & Genres > Symphonies
- General Contemporary
- Instruments > Keyboard > Piano
- Symphonies > Modern & 20th Century
- General
- Opera & Vocal > Vocal Non-Opera > Odes
- Copland, Aaron - Works by Copland
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