Copland Proves a Hit With CD Buyers

Americans like their serious composers to be accessible, to be populists, to be fun guys. Thus, we have enshrined the Aaron Copland of “Appalachian Spring,” “Billy the Kid” and “Rodeo”--who is approaching his 88th birthday--as an official national treasure. And that is why we have discarded Charles Ives, quite the rage around 1970, but subsequently found to be too complex, his populist leanings too deeply embedded in a thorny technical language.

Still, and somewhat alarmingly, Copland’s most popular works have lately been relegated to a curious sort of limbo by the makers of live concerts, in which his music rarely appears. He has, it would seem, been deemed insufficiently solemn for the company of Beethoven and Stravinsky, thus providing another example of the gulf between the concert audience and the record-buying public: Copland is appearing with unprecedented frequency on compact discs snapped up as quickly as they are being issued.

CBS Records is the dominant force here since they have in their catalogue the bulk of the composer’s output, with Copland himself as conductor and pianist.

The most valuable of their CD reissues to date (CBS 42431) has as its centerpiece the full original version, for 13 players, of the 1944 ballet score--for Martha Graham--of “Appalachian Spring,” which includes some eight minutes of music deleted by the composer from his suite for full orchestra. The performers are a group of top New York free lances, including such deceased stalwarts of the modern-music scene as pianist Paul Jacobs and violinist Broadus Erle.

While the score retains its appeal in its full-orchestra guise, there is a simplicity, a sweetness in the original version that the more “public” version cannot quite match.

The program further includes the 1942 “A Lincoln Portrait,” in which the laid-back narrator is Henry Fonda, and a vigorously directed “Billy the Kid” suite that can hold its own even beside the stunning (also reissued in CD format), more loose-jointed version by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic.

The full-orchestra “Appalachian Spring” suite is included (on CBS 42430) with “Fanfare for the Common Man,” the standard “Rodeo” episodes and complete “Old American Songs.” Baritone William Warfield is the soloist in the orchestral edition of the songs, which sounds both arch and overblown when compared to the lean, incisive piano-accompanied original--splendidly projected by baritone William Parker and pianist William Huckaby on the tiny, Louisiana-based Centaur label (2022, CD).

Copland has been at pains to point out that his music for the 1948 film of Steinbeck’s “The Red Pony” was entirely of his own devising. One is reminded, in the CD reissue (CBS 42429) of this undervalued score, that no one creates and can get away with folksy disingenuousness the way Copland can. His “popular” tunes--or his arrangement of others’--are inevitably on the mark. The program further offers the three “Latin” scores: the delectable “El Salon Mexico” (to which the composer-as-conductor imparts a wonderfully klutzy, lurching lilt almost from the opening measures), “Danzon Cubano” and, less interestingly, the “Latin-American Sketches,” as well as the affecting snippets Copland deemed worthy of preserving from the 1940 Sol Lesser film of “Our Town.”

An earlier composer-conducted “Spring” and a “Billy the Kid” suite with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy appear in RCA’s mid-price Papillon series (6802, CD). But the real interest here lies in a superb remastering of the orchestral suite from Copland’s failed 1954 opera, “The Tender Land.” The 20-minute score is ravishing stuff (as is much of the opera)--above all for its soaring love music, which Copland ultimately combines with a Revivalist song, “Zion’s Gates,” to create one of the loftiest moments in American music.

The “Tender Land” music is, to these ears, also the finest of the composer-as-conductor offerings, in large part because of the playing of the 1959 Boston Symphony, with its gloriously rich, disciplined strings and the vibrant, stentorian brasses that brought it a reputation at the time as the world’s greatest French orchestra.

Copland’s major virtuoso work, the 1950 Clarinet Concerto, was never really the graceless affair promulgated in concert and in the blasting recorded performance (CBS 42227, CD) by its dedicatee, the late Benny Goodman. Ample evidence that it is a far more subtle and varied work is provided by Gary Gray, familiar to local audiences for his work with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Gray’s more tender and varied--but by no means understated--reading, with the sympathetic collaboration of the Royal Philharmonic under Harry Newstone, gives equal prominence to the concerto’s lyric spans and mood sequences and its more obvious jazz elements.

The generous and attractive recital (on Unicorn-Kanchana 9066, CD) also includes music for clarinet and orchestra by Lutoslawski, Malcolm Arnold and Rossini.