Copland and Barber – April Fredrick, Orchestra of the Swan

Copland and Barber never much liked being paired, at least not in the way posterity insists on pairing them. Copland was the raw-boned modernist with populist instincts, the man who found America in open fifths and long silences. Barber was the aristocrat of Mount Kisco, steeped in Strauss and Puccini, allergic to the idea that dissonance was a moral obligation. Put their music side by side, though, as this live disc from the Orchestra of the Swan does, and the kinship is impossible to ignore: both of them wrote about longing, about looking back at a lost American afternoon that may never have existed at all.

Quiet City opens the program, and director David Curtis refuses to let it drift into mere atmosphere. Too many performances treat this score, salvaged from an all-but-forgotten Irwin Shaw play, as a kind of sonic incense, all haze and no structure. Not here. The trumpet, placed in acoustic relief from the strings, has a burnished, almost vocal quality. It does not so much play its long lines as speak them, urban and lonesome at once, a Hopper painting rendered in sound. The English horn answers with pastoral warmth, but there is an ache underneath it. Curtis keeps the tempo alive, the phrasing forward-moving. This is a quiet city, yes, but a city, with edges, not a meadow.

Then Barber. Knoxville: Summer of 1915 is the rare American work that earns comparison with Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde for sheer tenderness toward the passing of time, though Agee’s prose-poem, remembered from a Tennessee childhood, is homelier stuff than Li Bai filtered through Hans Bethge. April Fredrick sings it with a voice of unusual richness low in the staff, opening into something bright and unforced above the stave. She has the technical means, certainly, but more importantly she has the temperament. There’s a soft-grained, almost contraltoish weight to her middle register that put me in mind, more than once, of Janet Baker’s 1970s recordings. That is not a small compliment. Where Leontyne Price (Schippers, 1968, still a benchmark after all these decades) brought operatic grandeur to the piece, and Dawn Upshaw brought a kind of wide-eyed innocence, Fredrick finds a middle path: conversational, intimate, never precious. The rocking string ostinato that opens and closes the piece is beautifully weighted by the Swan players, not too fast, not sentimentalized, just gently insistent, like a chair creaking on a porch that no longer exists.

The Capricorn Concerto is the real discovery of this disc, or ought to be. It’s absurdly underprogrammed given its wit and craft. Barber wrote it in 1944, named for the Mount Kisco house he shared with Gian Carlo Menotti, and scored it for flute, oboe, trumpet, and strings in obvious homage to the Brandenburg concertos, Bach filtered through a sensibility that had clearly also absorbed Dumbarton Oaks. The first movement’s athletic running passages have a nervous, almost neurotic energy. Curtis and his soloists catch the satirical edge in it, the sense that this athleticism is slightly forced, slightly grim beneath the high spirits. The central slow episode, with its dark, muttering wind writing, “meowing” is not a bad word for it, comes off with real menace. It’s a piece that could use more advocates. This reading argues its case persuasively, even if the trumpet intonation grows a touch effortful in the upper register during the finale. A small blemish, easily forgiven in a live taping.

Gershwin’s “Summertime” closes things out, an encore rather than a statement, and Fredrick sings it without artificial jazz inflection, letting the melody’s own bluesy contours do the work. It’s a lagniappe, nothing more, though a well-chosen one. It completes the arc from Catfish Row’s summer heat back to Knoxville’s, closing a circuit the whole program has been quietly wiring together.

Sound is good, if not distinguished. You can hear the room, hear a cough or two, hear the specific grain of a live event rather than a studio’s manufactured perfection. I don’t count that against it. This is committed, intelligent music-making, unfussy in the best sense, and Fredrick in particular deserves to be heard more widely on this side of the Atlantic. Not a first choice over Price/Schippers for the Barber, perhaps. But a genuine and rewarding alternative, and required listening for the Capricorn Concerto alone.