It’s the Season for ‘Appalachian Spring’

The recording industry, which seldom fails to respect composers’ major anniversaries, particularly those slighted in the concert hall, has been sparing indeed in its recognition of the 90th birthday of Aaron Copland, arguably the most important musician this country has produced.

Three years ago, CBS started issuing on CD its splendid collection of composer-conducted performances of the 1970s, with the object of completing the re-release project in time for Copland’s 90th birthday last month.

Nothing of the sort has happened. Among the missing are the “Organ” Symphony and “Short” Symphony, the excerpts from “The Tender Land” (a more vital realization of this problematic work that the overly respectful complete recording recently released by Virgin Classics), the Piano Concerto and “Vitebsk,” the latter two with the composer as keyboard soloist, and many other compositions vital to a rounded picture of their composer.

Other companies have not proven hotbeds of activity either, with much duplication of available works or, simply, lack of interest.

“Appalachian Spring” remains the recorded favorite, but these days in the original chamber version for 13 players, created for Martha Graham in 1944, rather than the composer’s later concert suite for full orchestra.

Three new chamber versions are on the market, but only one deserves the label “complete original version.” It comes to us from a fine ensemble called the Atlantic Sinfonietta, which, according to the printed insert, “divides its activities chiefly between New York City and Massachusetts” (Koch 7019).

Andrew Schenck conducts this lively, dancey and lyrical account of the still-rarely heard complete score, which presents material not included in the orchestral version--six minutes of darkly dramatic music, adding an element of danger to what can at times sound just a bit too sweetly disingenuous.

The Koch CD, recorded with appropriate intimacy and warmth, contains another “original, complete”: the work its composer, Samuel Barber, called “Medea” and wrote for Martha Graham’s ballet “Cave of the Heart.” In this case, neither of the composer’s two subsequent full-orchestra versions has made much more headway in the repertory than the small-ensemble original.

One searches in vain here for the composer’s characteristic, endearing lyrical goo. “Medea” is terse, arid stuff, with strong suggestions of Stravinsky’s late-’30s and ‘40s neoclassicism. The juxtaposition with the contemporaneous, similarly scored “Appalachian Spring” makes sense, but it is also unfortunate.

The New York-based St. Luke’s Chamber Orchestra is not on its best behavior under Dennis Russell Davies’ direction in a scrappy, perhaps hastily prepared chamber “Appalachian Spring” shorn of the aforementioned “dark” passages.

The two other works included in this Copland program (Musicmasters 7055) are worthwhile rarities, well-executed by members of the St. Luke’s orchestra: the poignant, under-appreciated 1961 Nonet for Strings and the Two Pieces for String Quartet, elegant souvenirs of the composer’s membership in the 1920s Paris workshop of Nadia Boulanger.

“Appalachian Spring” also figures in a Copland program by conductor William Boughton and his English Symphony Orchestra (Nimbus 5246). The edition employed (and rather stiffly played) is an unsatisfactory compromise, with strings added to the chamber scoring and the usual cuts enforced, giving us the best of neither world.

The program further includes “Quiet City,” its solos too brashly played and loudly recorded; a charmless reading of the Four Dance Episodes from “Rodeo,” and a Nonet that sounds sleepy beside Musicmasters’ intense account.

A charming curiosity is the composer’s idiomatic arrangement for solo piano of the usual “Rodeo” episodes, part of a CD devoted to Copland’s keyboard music (Nimbus 5267). The pianist is Alan Marks, who may be remembered as an Affiliate Artist at the Los Angeles Music Center more than a decade ago.

Marks brings a big technique and plenty of rhythmic kick to the dances, sensitive coloration to the rare and attractive “Four Piano Blues” (published in 1949 but with elements dating back to the ‘20s) and the requisite dexterity and frowning authority to the knuckle-busting Piano Variations of 1930.

The value of Marks’ transcriptions of Copland’s “Old American Songs,” however, eludes this listener. Voiceless and textless, the songs’ pungent charm evaporates, leaving us with a set of slender parlor pieces.

Copland completed his tremendous Third Symphony in 1946 but only during the past decade has it been programmed with anything resembling frequency. Its belated popularity has much to do with the passionate advocacy of the late Leonard Bernstein.

While the lush, grandly rhetorical Bernstein/New York Philharmonic recording (Deutsche Grammophon 419170) is one no Copland fan is likely to be without, the Symphony lends itself to a variety of approaches, such as the more stark and orderly alternative offered by Leonard Slatkin and his splendid St. Louis Symphony (RCA Victor 60149).

The coupling is the tough, compelling and seldom-heard “Music for a Great City” (New York), which Copland derived from his score for the 1961 film “Something Wild.” Slatkin and the orchestra capture the work’s ferocious rhythmic drive to perfection and RCA’s recording, in both works, combines optimal clarity with roof-raising power.