Copland: Fanfare for the Common Man; Rodeo; Billy the Kid; El Salón México; Quiet City; Appalachian Spring; Nonet; Vitebsk; Sextet; Piano Quartet.
Aaron Copland, piano and conductor; London Symphony Orchestra; New Philharmonia Orchestra.
Sony Classical SM2K 89323, SM2K 89326, SM2K 89329. Recorded 1949–73, various venues. No texts for vocal works. 6 CDs.—There are moments in a critic’s life when a record company does something genuinely right—not just commercially shrewd, but culturally essential. Sony’s three-volume centenary tribute to Aaron Copland is one of those moments, and the fact that it appeared in 2000 with only modest fanfare is itself a small scandal.
Six discs. Most of it never before on CD. Some of it never before on any commercial medium. If you care about American music—and you should—these sets demand your attention.
Let’s be clear about what Sony has assembled here. The tapes span roughly 1949 to 1973, and the composer himself is present throughout: conducting, playing piano, rehearsing, occasionally stumbling over a tempo in ways that illuminate rather than embarrass. Howard Pollack, whose Copland biography remains the standard account, contributes the booklet notes. The photographs are candid, unstaged—Copland at a rehearsal podium, sleeves rolled, looking rather like a bemused schoolteacher who has just discovered his students can actually play. The design is consistent across all three volumes, the pricing sensible. No texts for the vocal works, which is maddening, but one takes what one can get.—Volume 1
The Fanfare for the Common Man opens proceedings with the LSO at Walthamstow, October 1968. There is bass here—real, chest-cavity bass—even if the hi-fi sheen of more recent recordings puts this one at a disadvantage. What it has instead is pith. Fibrous, undecorated, completely unimpressed with itself.
The Rodeo dances follow, and something interesting happens almost immediately. The second episode reveals a Copland I keep forgetting exists—boozy, slightly disreputable, closer in spirit to Malcolm Arnold on a particularly reckless afternoon than to the Copland of open prairies and Shaker hymns. The orchestration, burnished under Nadia Boulanger’s watchful Parisian eye, is transparent as glass—galant in its economy, American in everything else.
Billy the Kid is where Stravinsky’s ghost walks most openly. Try “The Open Prairie“—that vast, unhurried landscape music—and you will hear something that could not have been written without The Rite of Spring somewhere in the background, absorbed and transformed but not quite hidden. When the prairie music returns at the ballet’s end, it carries genuine weight, a scrolling cinematic tragedy in just a few bars.
El Salón México lacks the zip and shudder of Bernstein’s famous performance—the New Philharmonia trumpets never quite find the right swagger—but the accenting is sharper, more considered. This is a composer who knows exactly what he wanted and is mildly irritated that his brass players are being so resolutely British about it.
Quiet City stands apart. William Lang’s trumpet and Michael Winfield’s English horn moving through that nocturnal metropolitan solitude—this is music about loneliness without self-pity, and the composer’s own performance has never been surpassed, at least not in my experience. The sound is warm enough to serve it well.
The chamber version of Appalachian Spring is the disc’s crown. Thirteen instruments—six violins, two violas, two cellos, double bass, flute, clarinet, bassoon, and Paul Jacobs at the piano—and suddenly the orchestral suite we all know so well reveals itself as a kind of comfortable assumption, a garment that fits but was not the original. This is the score as Martha Graham’s company first encountered it, and it sounds cleaner, more exposed, every rhythmic zing and harmonic surprise unpadded by orchestral upholstery. Tracks 8, 11, and 12—stylistically they sit a little oddly against the rest, the pacing slightly cautious—but this is a minor caveat.
The seventeen-minute rehearsal sequence that follows is something else entirely. Copland is firm, precise, respectful of his players in the way that only conductors who are also composers tend to be. The sections fade in and out rather than running continuously, which is slightly awkward, but what survives is invaluable—a working document of musical intelligence in action.
The Nonet for strings is the wild card. Unfamiliar, oscillating between Bach, Tippett, and neoclassicism without quite settling anywhere, it is performed with gutsy conviction. The 1962 sound lends a somewhat unforgiving edge to the strings at full volume, but the playing has conviction to burn.—Volume 2
Copland at the piano is a different proposition from Copland on the podium. The chamber works on this disc come from sessions in October 1966 at Columbia’s 30th Street studio, and the playing throughout is delivered with the particular authority of a composer who knows exactly which notes matter and why.
Vitebsk is the revelation. Eleven and a half minutes, and not a bar of it sounds like the man who wrote Appalachian Spring. This is music of pogroms and cold winters, the klezmer idiom absorbed into something that occasionally sounds closer to Shostakovich than to anything we associate with Copland’s American pastoral manner. There is one moment—around seven minutes in—where the familiar Copland surfaces briefly, like a face glimpsed through a crowd, and then it’s gone. Delivered with malevolent precision.
The Sextet is an arrangement of the Short Symphony, and it draws its best energy from the ballet scores—Billy the Kid surfaces more than once. Harold Wright’s clarinet and Copland’s piano find a genuinely radiant interplay in the central Lento, bell tones implied rather than stated.
The Piano Quartet rears up from genuinely dark territory—dissonant, strained, the piano punching out isolated notes with something close to defiance—before the Non troppo lento finale, a valiant choice for an ending, claws its way toward a lyrical resolution. Not entirely convinced it gets there, but the journey is absorbing.
