Aaron Copland

1 Old American Songs
2 12 Poems of Emily Dickinson
3 In the Beginning
4 Lark
5 The Tender Land (abridged)

William Warfield (baritone)(1); Adele Addison (soprano)(2); Margaret
Miller (mezzo)(3); New England Conservatory Chorus(3, 4); Robert Hale
(baritone)(4); Joy Clements (soprano)(5); Claramae Turner (mezzo)(5);
Richard Cassilly (tenor)(5); Norman Treigle (bass-baritone)(5); Richard
Fredericks (baritone)(5);
Columbia Symphony Orchestra(1), New York Philharmonic(5), Aaron Copland
(piano)(2) and conductor(1, 3, 4, 5)
Sony SM2K 89329 Total time: 75:23 + 65:58

Summary for the Busy Executive: The celebration continues.

Volume 3 of Sony's "A Copland Celebration," the CD continues to explore
the byways of Copland's output, with rarities like In the Beginning,
Lark, the Dickinson poems, and The Tender Land.

William Warfield turns in a classic performance with both sets of the
Old American Songs.  He and Copland made a mono recording of the original
piano version.  Don't miss that one either (on Sony SM2K 89326; see my
review), one of the great vocal recitals.  For the remake, Warfield's
in slightly rougher voice, but damn, does he sing well, with lines that
go on forever and a real flair for singing American English.  This is
also one of Copland's best outings as a conductor.  I've tended to regard
most of his recorded readings as "authentic," rather than blood-stirring,
especially with Bernstein competing.  But Copland the conductor seems
to catch fire from Warfield.  He gets the power, the lyricism, and even
the fun from the score.  For me, a landmark stereo recording.

Adele Addison was usually one of my favorite singers.  In fact, when I
first heard this listless recording from her and Copland, I blamed the
work.  A subsequent recording with Jan DeGaetani, in not particularly
good vocal shape, set me in my ways.  However, this view shattered when
I heard Copland's mono account with mezzo Martha Lipton (also on SM2K
89326), which confirmed the judgment I had usually read: this cycle
stands among the very best American songs.  But the songs share a
similarity of mood and a spareness in the piano writing that can, with
insufficient attention from the performers, wear on you.  Addison's tone,
though higher in timbre than Lipton's, takes on a dull edge.  Lipton
seems to understand the poems better and finds more emotional and phrasing
variety.  Pianist Copland catches the dolefuls from Addison.  His
beautifully lyric playing for Lipton is nowhere in sight here.

Lark, an a cappella piece, comes from the late Thirties.  Copland didn't
particularly care for the sound of an unaccompanied choir, preferring
to mix choral singers with orchestra.  Outside of student work for Nadia
Boulanger, he wrote, as far as I know, only three a cappella works. Lark
suffers from its text - a soupy, knock-off Whitman text by Genevieve
Taggard, in an idiom familiar to anyone who's heard the non-Lincoln text
to the composer's Lincoln Portrait.  Copland in later years was slightly
embarrassed that he had set the poem at all.  Lark also sets the problem
of a choir that can master Copland's Thirties Modernism.  The work tends
to come at you in short pieces, as if the composer had written it a line
at a time. My own college choir performed this work, and we got to sing
it for the composer (after he had already recorded it).  We knocked him
out.  He told me he regretted that hadn't waited for us.  The NEC choir
doesn't nearly come up to our level.  They have intonation and blend
problems up the wazoo.  One doesn't hear the part-writing, but sort of
a wad o' sound, especially detrimental to the virtuosically contrapuntal
section which makes the piece for me.  Furthermore, Copland can't overcome
the plods.  The account stops and starts.  One doesn't sense a continuing
thread to the work.  I admit a conductor must work hard for it, but it
can be found.

Similar problems bedevil In the Beginning, a choral counterpart to
something like Appalachian Spring.  This is, first of all, a masterpiece
of modern choral music and of text setting - Genesis complete from chaos
to day 7.  Copland may not have liked the a cappella choir, but you'd
never know it from this.  He comes up with new, beautiful choral textures,
based perhaps on his "pastoral" orchestral vein, but thoroughly suited
to the chorus.  The New England Conservatory Chorus does much better in
this more demanding work but suffers still from a certain dullness of
tone.  Again, Copland's tempi tend to lumber rather than dance, which
predictably weaken the quick passages.  Soloist Margaret Miller, however,
stands out - the best performance of this demanding role I've heard.
Overall, however, the composer's results aren't a patch on Gregg Smith's,
who recorded the work long, long ago for an Everest LP.

Copland called opera, famously, the "forme fatale," indicating the
simultaneous attraction and wariness he felt toward the genre.  He
began with an American equivalent of a Brechtian Lehrstueck, The Second
Hurricane, a school opera similar in function to Weill and Brecht's
Der Jasager.  He had few American operas to use as models.  He didn't
particularly care for either Gershwin or Thomson's examples, and something
like Hanson's Merry Mount or Taylor's The King's Henchman probably struck
him as, at best, quaint.  On the other hand, the opening of Rodgers and
Hammerstein's Oklahoma!  seemed to promise something: an American subject
treated in a genuine American way. He began working on a musical based,
I believe, on Erskine Caldwell's Tragic Ground, but gave it up after a
while.  Nevertheless, the pot started to bubble, and in 1954, he completed
The Tender Land.  This was, by the way, B.  H.  Haggin's candidate for
the Great American Opera.  The music in it is gorgeous, Copland at his
most radiant.  Yet, it's not really all that good an opera.  Copland
may sing but doesn't characterize people all that well, and the plot -
basically, Is There Life after High School?  - comes over as a bit
feckless.  You don't care enough about most of the characters - with
the exception of the ingenue - to worry about the outcome.  The initial
reviews were mixed, and Copland decided to revise and abridge, cutting
out the only plot line that seemed remotely interesting - two drifters
falsely accused of rape and murder, a reflection of the McCarthyism of
the time.  In its abridged form (which we get here), the opera reminds
me of a Whitman sampler.  Better you should hear it complete (Brunelle
on Virgin Classics or Sidlin on Koch).  Even so, it doesn't really suit
opera stages.  Both the dramaturgy and the sensibility are a bit amateurish,
frankly.  The opera seems locked into the opera-workshop circuit.

A shame, really. The music itself soars.  Copland gets a first-rate cast
- with Joy Clements, Richard Cassilly, and Norman Treigle both ardent
and as believable as Copland's music allows - and a New York Philharmonic
playing as well as it ever did for Bernstein.  The New York Choral Arts
Society raises the emotional roof in the glorious choral parts, for me
the best passages of the opera.  Don't worry about the plot.  Enjoy the
tunes.

Steve Schwartz