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.

COPLAND Rodeo: 4 Dance Episodes. Piano Concerto 1. Billy the Kid: Suite • Gerard Schwarz, cond; 1 Lorin Hollander (pn); Seattle SO • NAXOS 8571202 (58:09)


This is yet another disc in Naxos’s Seattle Symphony collection, and again it consists of previously issued material. Recorded between 1990 and 1993, these pieces were originally issued by Delos, Schwarz’s former label. As is often the case with Schwarz, they are brisk, lively, well-phrased performances, in places quite elegant. I am particularly taken by his interpretation of “Corral Nocturne” from Rodeo, sensitively played and sensuously phrased. This in itself is conducting of the first rank, as it elevates a rather ordinary piece and makes it sound special. “Saturday Night Waltz” is also played with special elegance, and “Hoedown,” based on a country fiddler’s private recording of a tune called “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” has great swagger, although at a tempo a bit too fast to be danced to.


The piano concerto is described on the CD’s back cover as “saturated in jazz and blues effects.” Apparently, that is how it sounds to some listeners, probably those who don’t know real jazz or blues. The use of a flatted third is certainly a keynote of the blues, but does not in itself constitute a true blues feeling. It is, however, an interesting and at times atmospheric work, and played with surprising sensitivity by Lorin Hollander, a pianist generally known for his explosive keyboard effects. I would think that Schwarz possibly reined him in for this recording; if he did, that is all the more to his credit. I am particularly struck by the elegant phrasing of the winds in the first movement, where Schwarz evokes an almost Ivesian sound. As the first movement progresses, in fact, some surprisingly Ivesian tone clusters emerge in the background—surprising because almost no one was familiar with Ives in 1926. The second movement, which follows without a break, has a certain ragtime swagger and raw energy, something like a cross between Bartók and Antheil. A muted trumpet plays out-of-tonality figures at one point, then two muted trumpets at another, undoubtedly a touch of “jazz” for those who thought that Henry Busse was a jazz musician. Hollander is, again, surprisingly light of touch and elegant in his phrasing. A few Paul Whiteman-like spasmodic rhythmic jerks enter near the end, but are made palatable by the piano writing, which is in a different rhythm altogether. The piano settles into the regular rhythm while the orchestra plays against it, but then the tempo slows down as they eventually get back together. After a dead stop in the music, it becomes more lively again in the final pages.


Schwarz’s reading of the suite from Billy the Kid is continually elegant, eloquent, and atmospheric. Indeed, in the opening pages, if one did not know the score, one would not immediately associate the music with the story behind it. Schwarz again delights in bringing out the delicate and atmospheric wind textures, and even when strings enter the picture the music has an ethereal, floating quality. This reading is captivating; it is far more impressive than Copland’s own recording with the Columbia Symphony.


This disc is clearly competitive with most recordings of these works and better than some. For the price, highly recommended.


FANFARE: Lynn René Bayley

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: An Outdoor Overture, Appalachian Spring & 8 Poems o

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.