MUSIC REVIEW : ‘Tender Land’ a Fitting Finale to Copland Fest

The late Aaron Copland’s opera “The Tender Land” was already a relic in 1954, the year in which it was composed.

Set on a Midwestern farm in the 1930s, its dramatic images summon up NRA, WPA and James Agee/Walker Evans, with a dollop of McCarthy Era xenophobia thrown in for good measure. Its musical vocabulary, however, is ripest ‘40s, folk-and-hymn tune Copland Americana.

“The Tender Land” charms when the composer unfurls one of his soaring, wide-open melodies. But Horace Everett’s mawkish libretto keeps intruding with “poetry” where prose is wanted, and platitudes where we want motivation.

The USC School of Music, in offering the work on Thursday evening (with additional performances this evening and Sunday afternoon) in the university’s Bing Theater, brought off a difficult task with aplomb, providing a fitting conclusion to the laudable USC-E. Nakamichi Copland Festival.

Superbly executed by a student instrumental ensemble under Larry Rachleff’s warm and keenly incisive musical direction (in Bob Zentis’ spare, evocative all-purpose set and with Frans Boerlage’s fluid staging), “Land” touched the heart with snatches of musical inspiration almost as often as it dulled the senses with its vapid dramaturgy.

The opera’s best friend on this occasion was Murry Sidlin, ex-conductor of the Long Beach Symphony, whose chamber reduction of the score made viable what had been an unperformable anomaly: a work for young voices ruining themselves to be heard over the lush orchestration. Here, the singers could not only be heard, they could be understood.

The principals on Thursday, ably backed by the USC Chamber Singers, winningly projected Copland’s colloquialisms: Susan Holsonbake as Laurie, youthfully awkward but with burgeoning adult awareness; Scott Herrick, as her lover Martin, conveying (intentionally?) a certain indecisiveness that kept the character from seeming threatening, and Scott Raines, who coped manfully with the basso growlings of Grandpa Moss.

Particularly impressive were Anita Krause, the possessor of a honeyed mezzo, as Laurie’s kindly mother, and Tod Fitzpatrick as Martin’s rowdy sidekick, showing strong stage presence in a frightfully cliched role and a firm, forceful baritone.