Aaron Copland
      The Populist

* Billy the Kid Suite
* Appalachian Spring
* Four Dances from Rodeo

San Francisco Symphony/Michael Tilson Thomas
BMG 09026-63511-2 Total time: 76:30

Summary for the Busy Executive: Raising the bar.

So there I was, taking my nephews on a CD shopping trip (where I let
them pick out two CDs apiece from the inventory of their local Tower,
although I made sure we started in the classical section), when I hear
this absolutely incredible Billy the Kid coming over the store speakers.
I hopped to the front desk to ask the manager who, what, and how much,
and that's how I came upon this disc.  I snapped it up there and then.
Hearing the rest of it was even better.  The local Tower has disappeared,
but the disc remains available.  I'd call this one of my picks of the
year, if it weren't already several years old (my reviewing pile of discs
doesn't seem to shrink).

So popular - indeed, so ingrained - has this music become, we have
difficulty imagining a time when people ran from this music as Ugly and
Modern.  Here's an excerpt from Lazare Saminsky's Living Music of the
Americas (1949):

   A feeble score is the Appalachian Spring: music anemic and
   insignificant. ... Copland cannot forget the coachmen's and
   wet nurses' dances, Petrushka's liveliest. His Appalachian
   peasants sound more like Appalachian Cossacks. ... Now to the
   magnum opus, the loudly trumpeted Lincoln Portrait. ... After
   a short-lived attempt at the grand line, the petit maitre
   appears in all his nakedness. We see pitifully clearly what
   the new dress of the king is. It is the dress of a compiler
   whose loud trumpets try to herald an imposing creator; the
   dress of a master of small deeds who has the audacity to trade
   in things sacred.

The opinion may not be familiar, but the rhetoric surely is -
the classic whine and metaphor of listeners up against the new.  The
popularity of Copland's so-called "easy" scores rose in the Fifties,
at least ten years after they were written, when Bernstein began to
drum them into our heads through concert performance and through LP.
Bernstein's own composing idiom derived from Copland (among others), and
at least early on he regarded Copland as his artistic father.  He made
these scores live as no other had, investing them with a nobility and
grandeur.  Other recordings of the era, including Copland's own, lack
the authoritative stamp of the classic which Bernstein put on the music.

I never thought I'd hear anyone better Leonard Bernstein in this
repertoire, but, by God, Thomas has done it.  For one thing, he yields
nothing in interpretive punch and has at his disposal a better orchestra
than Bernstein's New York Phil.  This comes out especially in the quiet,
lyrical sections of these scores.  Even those critics who disliked
Copland's music tended to praise his soft orchestral textures, sounds -
like that of the opening to Appalachian Spring - which instantly proclaim
the composer.  Thomas gives you not only the soft shimmer, but the
constituent parts of the sound, clear and in perfect balance within the
texture.  San Francisco plays these moments with chamber-like sensitivity
of ensemble and beautiful tone besides.  Yet they yield nothing to
Bernstein in vitality or power in the quicker and the "big-shoulder"
sections.

Billy the Kid and Rodeo appear in their suite incarnations.  We miss
about ten minutes from the complete Billy and about three from the
complete Rodeo.  Appalachian Spring's another story.  Instead of the
familiar orchestral suite or even the relatively-familiar "original"
chamber version (more on this later), we get an orchestration of that
chamber version, which Copland undertook at the request of Ormandy,
who recorded it for Columbia.  Copland never published it, and Thomas's
may be only the second recording.  I consider the cuts from the suite
significant, in that they radically alter the emotion of the ballet.
If you haven't heard the chamber version (a remarkable piece in its
own right), these cuts may come as a shock. The work becomes less of a
picture-postcard.  Essentially, Copland excised all the darkness from
the score.  The chamber version restores some of this, as does the Ormandy
orchestration, and that's all to the good.  However, it's still not the
complete, one-and-only original Appalachian Spring.  In the published
chamber version, Copland couldn't resist further tightening.  As far as
I know, only Andrew Schenck recorded the original score for Koch's "Music
for Martha Graham" series (Koch 3-7019-2 H1).  Samuel Barber's original
score for Cave of the Heart (Medea), finishes that program.

Thomas's reading gives us an architectural integrity to the score that
I, for one, never suspected.  Oh, sure, there are the variations on
"Simple Gifts" and the "my end is my beginning" afterwards, but Thomas
shows us how certain motifs change throughout the work.  The opening on
the unison into that radiant quasi-bitonal chord, for example, has its
anguished counterpart in the opening to the restored cut.  Since that
section "interrupts" what we normally think of as the variations, the
brief return of "Simple Gifts" seems not only to lead us out of the
shadow but to regard both the restoration and the return as a
transformation of the ballet so far.

A fine, fine recording that moves to the front of the line for all three
works.  One of Thomas's best.

Steve Schwartz