Copland: Orchestral Works, Vol. 3 - Symphonies

Album review

Aficionados unfamiliar with Copland’s Dance Symphony might well be surprised by the sometimes grim, even Gothic, nature of a piece with a title more logically suggesting a rather carefree spirit. The dark aura of the work is a residue of its origin as a ballet on a grotesque vampire theme, composed in 1922-25 but neither staged nor performed complete in concert during its composer’s lifetime. The initial stimulus for this one-act ballet was Murnau’s expressionist film Nosferatu, at the time when Copland was studying with Nadia Boulanger in France. The work boasts numerous dynamic rhythmic patterns which Copland readily confessed were influenced by Stravinsky and jazz. The programme goes on with Statements (1932-34), ‘a manly bouquet, fresh and sweet and sincere and frank and straightforward’ according to Virgil Thomson’s review published in the New York Herald Tribune. Statements falls into the distinctively modernist genre of pithy, dissonant miniatures, not unlike what Prokofiev might have written during that same period. Copland later would refer to Statements as his ‘hard-bitten’ pieces, their gritty soundscapes very different from his more popular works which engaged with melodious folk traditions.

Copland continued his close friendship with Nadia Boulanger after his return to the United States from Paris in the autumn of 1924, and celebrated it with the composition of a Symphony for organ and orchestra, which she first performed in January 1925 in New York, with Walter Damrosch conducting the New York Symphony. After the conclusion of the piece, Damrosch infamously told the audience that if a composer could write a work such as this at the age of only twenty-three then ‘within five years he will be ready to commit murder’. Although he was pleased with the work, Copland soon came to realize that the lack of major venues housing organs meant that a version for orchestra alone would be assured of more performances. He subsequently reworked the entire piece, a process which mostly required straightforward substitutions of the organ material with additional parts for woodind, brass, and piano. The newly configured Symphony No. 1 was given its first performance by Ansermet and the Berlin Philharmonic in 1931, and it is this version that is here recorded by the BBC Philharmonic orchestra. © SM/Qobuz