5 out of 5 Stars for Performance and Sound!

Both Meyers and Schub enjoy distinguished international careers. Meyers made her debut as a soloist with orchestra when she was seven and has performed to high acclaim with major orchestras and ensembles in the US, Europe and elsewhere. Schub was once described by Harold Schonberg in the New York Times as ‘pianistically flawless’. But apart from their solo work they are supremely well-fitted to perform together. Their dynamic control is impeccable, and there is plenty of give and take between them. Meyers’s tone is rich and warm, her vibrato sensitively calculated. She achieves drive and precision in Piston’s outer movements and a singing line in his neo-Baroque Adagio. Copland’s undemonstrative middle movement is convincingly shaped, and she recreates to perfection the sharply pointed rhythms of his final Allegretto, with nimble, controlled pizzicato when required. Schub is a perceptive companion. Between them they hold Ives’s patchwork Sonata together, capturing its flavour from its springy start to its culminating revivalist hymn tune, and they are superb in both Baker’s genuine Blues and Copland’s Nocturne, which points in that direction. An excellent programme of American music for violin and piano, delivered with style and commitment.

-- Wadham Sutton, BBC Music Magazine

COPLAND GREAT HITS

Andrew Litton’s recent recording of Copland’s Billy the Kid and Rodeo with the Colorado Symphony (BIS, 1/16) was notable for offering the rarely performed complete versions of the ballets. John Wilson, in the first in a series of Copland’s orchestral music for Chandos, opts for the slightly shorter suites as well as that of Appalachian Spring. In doing so, Wilson comes into direct competition with Tilson Thomas and Bernstein, not to mention the composer himself. However, none of these recordings, not even BIS’s excellent multi-channel production for Litton, matches the spaciousness, transparency, and weight of the sound on the new Chandos disc. It’s the finest-sounding recording to have come my way for some time.

REVIEW:

Wilson’s performances are similarly impressive, and he secures superb playing from the BBC Philharmonic. The three ballets receive strongly characterized interpretations, as piquant and affecting in the slower passages as they are punchy and ebullient in the faster ones. The poignancy and rapture of the quieter episodes of Appalachian Spring are also strongly conveyed. I enjoyed listening to this disc enormously.

– Gramophone

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

What does America sound like? To many ears it sounds like Aaron Copland, and the three ballet scores featured on this CD are why. What now seems like a mainstream national style was quite original when 'Billy the Kid' arrived, a music educated in Paris but bursting with New York energy and chutzpah and hankering to go west. The integration of American folk tunes into a modernist palette, alive with polytonality and vigorous rhythmic displacement, had never been achieved so successfully before, nor has it since. Of course 'Appalachian Spring' followed the same formula down a somewhat more genial path and became the most beloved of all American ballet scores.
Since the 1960s the performances of Leonard Bernstein have had no rival in this repertoire, but now they do. Even among Michael Tilson Thomas' many fine discs of American music, COPLAND THE POPULIST stands out, as these well-known pieces are made to sound fresh and alive again. This 'Billy' is a great, energetic dancer, yet has wonderful delicacy, stopping to smell the cactus roses, as it were, on the way to a tragic fate. 'Appalachian Spring,' for all its beauties, is more attentive than usual to its darker side, especially as it includes the rarely heard "revival" scene, an edgy, propulsive, and forward sounding episode that immediately precedes the final Shaker apotheosis.

APPALACHIAN SPRING

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

Classical Music

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This set includes 10 spoken word tracks (45'02") featuring Michael Tilson Thomas's description of the repertoire in the two accompanying discs.
Born in 1900, Aaron Copland was perfectly positioned to represent his country in the 20th century, at least the first three quarters of it, and no other composer's career has so completely traversed the many byways of American classical music, folk, pop and jazz and European modernism. Copland's wilder side is most clearly heard in early works such as the Piano Concerto where jazz and Stravinsky converse in an urban setting, while the famous ballets of the 1930s and 40s transform folk tunes with inexhaustible wit and grace to create what is widely considered the ultimate expression of rural America.
With the discs COPLAND THE MODERNIST and COPLAND THE POPULIST Michael Tilson Thomas assumed the mantle of Leonard Bernstein as the leading interpreter of Copland's music, and in this special edition box set he emulates Lenny even further as an insightful lecturer-demonstrator on the bonus disc entitled THE MAN AND HIS MUSIC, which also features a performance of the familiar 'Fanfare for the Common Man.' There could hardly be a better or more thoughtful introduction to Copland than this.

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.

The exploration by John Wilson of Copland’s major orchestral output with the BBC Philharmonic has now reached Volume 3, with this invigorating programme recorded in surround-sound. It opens with An Outdoor Overture, a cheerful and breezy piece which Copland composed in 1938, intending to spearhead an initiative encouraging ‘American Music for American Youth’. Originally written for organ and orchestra, the First Symphony is presented here in its revised version (1926-28) for large orchestra. The six concise movements of Statements (1932-35) introduce a new style, their gritty soundscapes being stunning examples of what Copland later would refer to as ‘hard-bitten’ pieces. The concluding work is the expressive, fantastical Dance Symphony (1929) which explores different styles of symphonic movements, its dark aura a residue of its origin as a ballet on a grotesque vampire theme, composed 1922-25 and named Grohg. The symphony has remained a highly controversial piece ever since.

Classical Music

Classical Music