Copland reviews
1942
Accents (Ensemble K)
Variations (Clare Hammond)
Copland • R Strauss: Duet Concertino, etc
From the New World
A Certain Slant of Light: Songs on Poems by Emily Dickinson
Whither Must I Wander
Standards
Copland: Orchestral Works Vol 4
A Simple Song: works by Bernstein, Copland, Mahler et al
Bernstein at 100 – The Centennial Celebration at Tanglewood
American Landscapes (Licad)
Twilight People
American Rage
Wilson and BBC Philharmonic perform Copland
Concentrated power and richness in Melody Moore’s American songs
20th Century: American Scene with Tai Murray and Ashley Wass
The opening movement of Copland’s Violin Sonata is dominated by a clipped, recitativo style of writing that eschews big, cumulative gestures and can seem inconsequential. With the American violinist Tai Murray, it is anything but that. Her rosined, folksy tone has you listening as though to a genial conversationalist, the soft-spoken piano of Ashley Wass providing apt, satisfying punctuation.
Leonard Slatkin conducts Copland's Symphony No. 3 and Three Latin American Sketches
Leonard Slatkin is a highly experienced conductor of Copland, so it’s no surprise that his new reading of the Third Symphony (he previously recorded it with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra) should pack its punch so impressively.
Leonard Slatkin conducts Copland's Symphony No. 3 and Three Latin American Sketches
‘Sweetie,’ Leonard Bernstein wrote to Copland in 1947 after performing his Third Symphony in Prague, ‘the end is a sin. You’ve got to change.’ In the event, Bernstein changed it for him by lopping off eight bars from the coda to what turned out to be Copland’s largest symphonic work. Initially Copland bridled, but the Bernstein cut became authorised when the Symphony was published later that year.
Leonard Slatkin conducts Copland's Appalachian Spring
Aaron Copland wrote Hear Ye! Hear Ye! in 1934 for the Chicago-based Ruth Page Ballets company, but then suppressed it for many years. It’s a send-up of the American justice system, a courtroom re-enactment of three contradictory eye-witness accounts of a night-club murder. Copland gave his score some of the anarchic spirit of Les Six, dropping in distorted quotations of the American national anthem and the Mendelssohn ‘Wedding March’ alongside scenes of hectic action and jazzy dance numbers.
Organist Jonathan Scott performs works by Copland with the BBC Philharmonic
John Wilson’s first Copland disc with the BBC Philharmonic (reviewed in March) was of popular ballet scores, but this one explores the more serious side of the composer’s output. The 1924 Organ Symphony was an early work, and indeed the first orchestral score of his own that Copland heard; its central Scherzo is in the lithe rhythmic manner that he’d already identified as characteristically American. The Symphonic Ode of the late 1920s begins and ends in the grand rhetorical vein that he wryly described as his ‘laying-down-the-law’ style.
Leonard Slatkin conducts the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in powerful Copland
'Slatkin rightly tilts the music towards nobility'
Copland Symphony No. 3; Three Latin American Sketches
Detroit Symphony Orchestra/Leonard Slatkin
Naxos 8.559844
John Wilson conducts Copland's orchestral works (Vol. 2)
'The performances are outstanding. Jonathan Scott (organ) matches the orchestra's incisive attacks and subtle woodwind colours' - Read more...
Copland
Symphony for Organ and Orchestra; Symphonic Ode; Symphony No. 2 (Short Symphony); Orchestral Variations
Jonathan Scott (organ); BBC Philharmonic/John Wilson