Copland: Piano Concerto - The Tender Land (Suite); Old American Songs

Review Already the fastest-growing regional orchestra in the United States, the Elgin Symphony Orchestra will make a quantum leap Tuesday with the release of its first commercially recorded compact disc. And it's for none other than Naxos, which, since its founding in 1987, has become the world's best-selling classical music label. The ESO's disc, part of Naxos' critically acclaimed "American Classics" series, contains music by Aaron Copland (1900-90). I have listened over the past several weeks to an advance copy of the recording, and can say without hesitation that it is one of those discs that lovers of classical music (and Copland in particular) will return to time and again. To have professional music organizations of the high artistic level of the ESO and St. Charles Singers in our area is especially gratifying. -- The Chicago Daily Herald, Bill Gowen, May, 2008 An all-Copland disc introduces the Elgin (Ill.) Symphony Orchestra on the Naxos label Robert Hanson and his orchestra give a persuasive performance of the orchestral suite from Copland's opera, "The Tender Land." The love music blossoms under Hanson's baton. The conductor and his orchestra catch the jaunty, jazzy charm of Copland's Piano Concerto. Soloist Benjamin Pasternack revels in the bluesy opening movement and sounds comfortable in the jazz-flavored second movement. -- Courier Post Online, Robert Baxter, June 2008 But for a project like this, not just any record company would do. The world's largest classical label, Naxos, sent out their firstline team of engineers from LondonTown under the leadership of legendary engineer Tim Handley. You can sure find Naxos CDs at your local book store/ music mart. These magazines' critics will have nothing but fun reviewing this disc. Relax, sit back and let the brass section of the Elgin Symphony under Hanson take you to musical nirvana right from the first track of the disc, The Tender Land Suite. The Naxos sound engineers have done their job brilliantly. When you hear brass you are sitting directly in front of the trumpets. When you hear the piano, you are on the piano bench dodging those marvelous hands of Pasternack as he "tickles the ivories". And when you hear the voices in the Old American Songs (10) you are right there standing by the soloist in front of Director Jeff Hunt's St. Charles Singers hearing great musical Americana. Only rarely are orchestras given the privilege of doing studio recordings these days. It is far cheaper to simply record a "live" performance. A studio recording, however, allows the musicians to make corrections and adjust their performance for greater clarity and effect. Having heard one of the fine live performances of these Copland works, what I hear on their CD surpasses even the live performance. The Elgin Symphony Orchestra has reached a new musical "high", in this, their first professional CD recording. I smell a 2008 Grammy nomination. -- The Beacoon News, Jim Edwards, May 2008 Naxos here adds to its "American Classics" series another very fine release to an already impressive discography of Copland's works. Indeed, it's beginning to look as if when done Naxos may well have given us a "Copland Complete" collection. None of these pieces of course is new to the recorded catalogs, but they are among some of the composer's less familiar and less popularized scores. The Suite in three movements from The Tender Land is an orchestral extract Copland himself made from his 1954 opera of the same title. The opera, his second, met with as little success as his first, The Second Hurricane. Note contributor Joseph Horowitz offers an interesting insight into The Tender Land, asserting that beneath its fairly simplistic, folksy, Depression-era plot of a farm girl who longs to escape the homestead with a somewhat suspicious drifter who happens by, there lies a darker, more sinister subtext of Copland's brush with Joseph McCarthy's Subcommittee on Special Investigations. Copland, like so many other high profile "lefties" of the time, was accused of contacts with known members of the Communist Party. The complete opera has had a handful of recordings, as has the suite, the latter most notably by Copland himself conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1959. It is still available in a couple of different configurations, both on RCA. The writing is typical of Copland's "Americana" style--the first movement, slow-progressing open brass chords and lyrical, arching, wide-interval melodies in the winds and strings; the second movement, a party polka in the composer's hoedown Rodeo manner; and the third movement, a return to the life of a dustbowl tumbleweed. The Piano Concerto (1926) was an early effort by the 26-year-old composer who had, nonetheless, already stirred enough attention to receive a commission from Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony to write it. It's likely, though not a fact certain, that Copland's models were Gershwin's recently written Rhapsody in Blue
ASIN: B001716IVG
VSKU: DBV.B001716IVG.G
Condition: Good
Author/Artist:Aaron Copland|Robert Hanson|Elgin Symphony Orchestra|St Charles Singers|Benjamin Pasternack
Binding: Audio cd
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Condition Notes: Individually inspected: Guaranteed to play perfectly or your money back. Case may show wear and may be in library packaging. Ships Fast!