Violinist Augustin Hadelich embarks on an American Road Trip, travelling the musical highways and by ways of his adoptive homeland in the company of pianist Orion Weiss. The duo perform works by a melting pot of American composers, writing in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries and drawing on a diversity of idioms, influences and inspirations... from European Romanticism to revivalist hymns; from blues and jazz to bluegrass; from the banjo and ukulele to Jimi Hendrix's guitar, and from a little Mexican star to exquisite Japanese carvings. Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Charles Ives and John Adams take their place beside Amy Beach, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Eddie South, Howdy Forrester, Manuel M. Ponce and - flying the flag for today's composers along with Adams - Daniel Bernard Roumain and Stephen Hartke. Augustin Hadelich, born in Italy to German parents, moved to the USA at the age of 19 to study at New York's Juilliard School and became an American citizen in 2014. In the words of The Strad magazine, "Hadelich's playing brings together the best qualities of both American and European playing: passion, Polish and coherence, but also thoughtfulness, expressivity and nuance."

*** This title is a reissue of a Japanese release with liner notes in Japanese. ***

A Copland Celebration, Vol. 3: Vocal & Choral Works

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

This disc received the 1997 Grammy Award for "Best Classical Engineered Recording." It was also nominated for the Award for "Best Classical Album."
This disk presents a vivid picture of Aaron Copland's growth in the decade from his arrival to the creation of his early masterpieces. The 1924 'Organ Symphony' shows the enfant terrible throwing crashing dissonance and jazzy accents around with such high spirits that conductor Walter Damrosch told the premiere audience "if a young man can write like that at twenty-three within five years he will be ready to commit murder." The 1929 'Dance Symphony' recycles music from a never-staged ballet, which accounts for its somewhat episodic nature, while the 'Short Symphony' of 1933, modest in dimension and taut in structure, reveals a dramatic increase in the composer's powers, a development first signaled by the 1930 'Piano Variations,' arranged by Copland in 1957 as the 'Orchestral Variations.'
Leonard Slatkin and the Saint Louis Symphony are old and trusted hands with Copland's music, having recorded nearly all of the major orchestral works for RCA and EMI. These performances are right on, full of energy catching the young composer's heady mix of French color and American attitude. The recording is excellent, having both atmosphere and punch, with the featured organ captured impactfully in Christ Church Cathedral, Saint Louis.

Classical Music

This is a very important release for lovers of 20th century music, featuring the major solo piano works of one of America's most revered composers, and includes all of Copland's major piano works. Pianist Raymond Clarke is one of Britain's leading exponents of modern music. He has recorded 5 other CDs for our Divine Art, Diversions and Athene labels, featuring highly acclaimed performances of outstanding modern masterpieces.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Aaron is Moses. Leonard Bernstein's affectionate aphorism about his friend and mentor expresses exactly Aaron Copland's importance in the development of a truly American music. Copland, born 1900, influenced as did no other the emergence of America from a country whose aspiring musicians, with few exceptions, had to go abroad in order to receive adequate training, into a mecca for musical training and a center for new artistic impulses. His personal involvement together with his popularity smoothed the way for innumerable composers and was instrumental in awakening the interest of the American public for it's native musical language. The scope of Copland's language as a composer is defined by two extremes: his so-called "severe" style, determined by serial techniques and stringent formal structure, and his simple style, in which he tried to write music that would be more accessible to a broad public. American musician Nina Tichman has been acclaimed as one of the leading pianists of her generation (Neue Musik Zeitung). Winner of numerous international competitions and being at home in the major music centers of the world, Nina Tichman has been particularly interested in contemporary compositions and their roots in traditional music for the piano. The music of Sch�nberg and Debussy, whose complete piano works she has presented cyclically (also released on the WERGO label), as well as that of contemporary American composers such as Copland and Elliott Carter, plays a central role in her repertoire.

Playing the piano was for Aaron Copland one of the necessities of life, like eating or breathing. Wherever he was there was always a piano somewhere near. Even during conversations and interviews, so it is said, his fingers used to move involuntarily on the table-top like on an imaginary keyboard. And it is in piano works that Copland's compositional development found it's culmination again and again. The "Passacaglia" is his very first large-scale work, and the 5"Piano Fantasy" can be regarded as his most ambitious, most extensive composition in the field of absolute music, a work in which he sums up and concentrates many characteristics of his musical style in a late work. American musician Nina Tichman has been particularly interested in contemporary compositions and their roots in traditional music for the piano. The music of Sch�nberg and Debussy, whose complete piano works she has presented cyclically (also released on the WERGO label), as well as that of contemporary American composers such as Copland and Elliott Carter, plays a central role in her repertoire.

Classical Music

Having taken up the post of music director with the Colorado Symphony in 2013, Andrew Litton has chosen a highly fitting program for the orchestra's first recording on BIS: the Wild West, its folk music, traditions and legends loom large in Aaron Copland's ballet scores Billy the Kid and Rodeo. The two works were the result of the composer's search during the early 1930's for a new musical language. Copland himself described his reasons for this as follows: 'An entirely new public for music had grown up around the radio and the phonograph. It made no sense to ignore them and to continue writing as if they did not exist. I felt that it was worth the effort to see if I couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.’ In the two ballets, this new direction can be felt in the immediacy of the music, but also in Copland's use of cowboy tunes. A similar approach, but with Mexican themes, characterizes the slightly earlier El Salón México, inspired by a visit to a dance-hall in Mexico and the atmosphere he experienced there. Whereas these three works belong to the most popular in Copland's entire production, the opening piece, An Outdoor Overture, is something of a rarity – especially on disc. Composed in the same year as Billy the Kid, the overture was part of an educational campaign with the slogan 'American Music for American Youth' and its snappy rhythms and colorful orchestration will have made it as successful in its original purpose as it is here, as a curtain raiser. The Colorado Symphony is obviously enjoying itself in this all-American program, as is its conductor Andrew Litton, who joins the revelry as honky-tonk pianist in the Celebration section of Billy the Kid and the Ranch House Party in Rodeo, before bringing the disc to a rollicking end in that ballet’s closing section, Hoe-Down.

Sir John Dankworth was inspired by Benny Goodman' playing to study clarinet at the Royal Academy: his delightful Suite for Emma was composed for Emma Johnson, former BBC Young Musician of the Year, who performs it on this disc.

Made for the 1939 New York World's Fair, this seminal documentary film is distinguished for the organic integration of narration (scripted by city planner Lewis Mumford), cinematography (Ralph Steiner & Willard Van Dyke), and music (Aaron Copland).

AMERICAN PIANO MUSIC

COPLAND: Piano Music

Daniel Rieppel, a native of Minnesota of Austro-Hungarian descent, performs Mozart’s Fantasy and Sonata in C minor, the Piano Variations of Aaron Copland and Symphonic Etudes by Robert Schumann. Dr. Rieppel performs widely in North and South America and Europe (most recently in Iceland) and has been Professor of Music at Southwest Minnesota State University for over a quarter century. He has international recognition for his research into Schubert’s incomplete sonatas, finishing several that will be the subject of his next recording.

JoAnn Falletta conducts the National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic in works by four extraordinary mid-20th-century American composers who helped shape the country’s musical destiny: Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, Paul Creston and Ulysses Kay. Includes two world premiere recordings – Paul Creston's Saxophone Concerto and Ulysses Kay’s poignant and elegiac Pietà.

After World War I, composers would cast off the moorings of the traditional European styles to create something inexorably new. This was the beginning of the American Century. The four composers featured are the pinnacle of that achievement. Schuman, Persichetti, Ives, and Copland blazed a trail into a new era of distinctly American classical music on this incredible album from the United States Navy Band Washington D.C.

Kelly Sulick currently teaches at the University of Virginia and serves as Principal Flute in the Charlottesville Symphony. Prior to her appointment, she served as Principal Flute with the Evansville Philharmonic Orchestra and as Consortium Instructor of Flute at the University of Evansville for three years. She earned her Master of Music degree in Flute Performance from the University of Southern California; prior to her graduate studies, she earned a Bachelor of Music degree in Flute Performance and a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan, where she graduated with highest honors and was named a James B. Angell Scholar for her academic achievements. Pianist John Mayhood enjoys a busy performance schedule that in recent seasons has taken him across the North America and Europe in a wide variety of solo and collaborative settings and in repertoire that spans from the English virginalists to music of the present day. His concerts often explore the works of a single composer, combining solo piano and chamber music – he has dedicated complete evenings to the works of Poulenc, Hindemith, Feldman, and Schubert, and to new works by emerging composers.

The Legacy of Aaron Copland is an eclectic collection of works written by the great American composer Aaron Copland. Regarded as the "dean of American music", Copland's works are said to evoke the limitless American landscape as they achieve a difficult balance between modern music and American folk styles. (Altissimo)