Copland: Celluloid Copland — From Sorcery to Science (1939); The City, suite (1939); The Cummington Story, suite (arr. Sheffer, 1941); The North Star, suite (1943)
Eos Orchestra; Jonathan Sheffer, conductor.
Telarc CD-80583.—There’s a particular kind of musicological treasure hunt that produces genuinely revelatory recordings—and then there’s the kind that yields pleasant, historically illuminating footnotes. This disc from Jonathan Sheffer and the Eos Orchestra occupies, with considerable grace, somewhere between the two.
These four scores, newly exhumed from the Library of Congress after years of inaccessibility, were written when Copland still needed the money. That’s not a dismissal. It’s context. The period 1939–1945 produced some of his most enduring work—Appalachian Spring, the Piano Sonata, Lincoln Portrait—and the film commissions running alongside those masterworks reveal a composer keeping his hand nimble, his ear wide open, his bank account solvent.
From Sorcery to Science is the most immediately winning piece here. Seven miniatures, each barely breathing before the next arrives. Copland moves from airy chinoiserie—one thinks fleetingly of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde before the reference dissolves—through a jazzy witches’ sabbath, through something genuinely eerie in “The Alchemist,” those nocturnal chimes suspended in the air like smoke. “African Voodoo” gets filtered through something almost Chabrier-esque, which is a stranger combination than it sounds and rather more successful. The whole thing is frankly postcard music. Brilliant postcard music, but postcards nonetheless.
The suite from The City gives Copland—and Sheffer—more room to breathe. Most movements run past two minutes; two exceed four. That’s enough. Lino Gomez’s bass saxophone deserves particular mention: it weaves through “New England Countryside” and “The Steel Mill” with a smoky, unhurried authority that catches you off guard. I expected “The Steel Mill” to clang and grind the way Mossolov’s Iron Foundry does. It doesn’t. Copland is after something more ambivalent—industrial life observed with a certain Socialist unease, as if the World’s Fair rhetoric of technological progress left him not entirely persuaded.
“Fire Engines at Lunch Hour” buzzes with string writing that has a Nyman-like insistence—anachronistic comparison, obviously, but the ear goes where it goes. “Taxi Jam” follows with whistles and boogie. And then “The New City” arrives, pastoral and almost heartbreakingly gentle. If this is urban planning, it’s the garden-city dream, not the tenement.
The Cummington Story—a documentary about European refugees settling in rural Massachusetts—produces Copland’s most intimate writing on the disc. The same meadows as Appalachian Spring, the same dells as The Tender Land. The Eos strings sound slightly hard-edged in the opening pages, a touch more brightness than warmth, though they settle as the suite unfolds.
The North Star is the only feature film represented, and it’s the most complicated historically. The 1943 film—Walter Huston, Farley Granger, Anne Baxter, Erich von Stroheim as a Nazi villain he could play in his sleep—celebrated Soviet-American wartime solidarity at its brief, combustible peak. Khachaturian was being played everywhere; conductors were elbowing each other aside for the American premiere of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony. Copland’s score is busy, Russian-inflected, poster-bright. The remorseless march of the Shostakovich echoes—you can hear it, faintly acidic, underneath the battle sequences. After the war the film was recut, rereleased as Armored Attack, the Soviet heroism quietly revised out. History is awkward that way.
“Song of the Guerillas,” to Ira Gershwin’s words, is sung here with unpretentious conviction by the Collegiate Chorale under Roger Bass. Simple. Effective. The right approach.
Sheffer, who also wrote the liner notes, conducts with evident affection and real stylistic intelligence. He never overplays the nostalgia, never lets the smaller pieces sprawl beyond their natural weight. The Telarc disc is clean and spacious—perhaps a touch clinical in the louder passages of The North Star, where a bit more grit might have served the music’s deliberately martial character.
Is this essential Copland? No. Is it essential for anyone who takes Copland seriously? Rather emphatically yes. The gaps this disc fills were real gaps, and filling them with this much care and musical understanding is not nothing. It’s quite a lot, actually.
