Aaron Copland redux

For as long as I recall classical music played a major part in my life from handed down records, broadcasts listened to an concerts attended that over the decades has lead to collection of favourites by various composers.

Parts of this have been mentioned on this blog over the years as I moved from buying performances on lp records and cassettes to now standard Compact Disc and High Definition download

Chunks of my collection are in one respect time periods where I picked what I could as my interests were piqued remaining without being reassessed in the light of newer recordings and improved mastering of older ones.

Aaron Copland is one of America's greatest composers, period, someone who had the art of getting a lot in without losing touch with American home spun idioms and relative simplicity.

It was around Nineteen-Ninety that got to hear across a weekday broadcasting slot the majority of his compositions in an excellent BBC Radio Three "This Mornings Composer" series of programs much of which served as my 'template' for collecting recordings of them around that era.

The mainstays in that era were Copland's own recordings for Columbia (now Sony Classical) records that in 1991 were compiled into three cd box sets.

I bought two at the time as they had the bulk of the works I wanted even if the early sixties sound left a little to be desired but that other set sounded poor so I never got it or its content

Following getting the Super Audio Player  I started this process of reassessment as its reproduction of regular cds  exceeded my previous players looking replacing by better sounding and sometimes played versions of which last months Mozart entry was one example.

There precious few recordings of Copland's Clarinet concerto or of Dance Panels and I had formed the view for my purposes, the two Sony Classical boxes I bought in the early nineteen-nineties would benefit from being replaced and this would be a good start point adding two works and replacing my original of 1925's "Music for the Theatre"

Leonard Slatkin is one the best leading conductors and advocates of Copland's music and he recorded for RCA a series of works featuring the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra well compiled of which this adds the not often heard Organ Symphony with Simon Preston and two other symphonies in modern wide ranging digital sound.

Copland mastered the art of writing film music that both didn't get in the way of the screen action and equally wasn't just soundtrack fodder, capable of being appreciated in its own right.

This disc featured the Red Pony, Music for Movies a arrangement of film music in the forms of a suite, Our Town and seldom recorded Prairie Journal (Music for Radio)which was broadcast on the radio.

This disc featured his Third Symphony and Music for a Great City which benefits from a modern recording.

Naxos had an excellent series of discs covering American Composers and I own most of the Samuel Barber titles but this one appealed as these main two works were in the third box I never bought although I've always loved The Tender Land suite written around life on a Southern Farm during the nineteen-thirties, his Piano Concerto and two collections of American Songs originally intended for piano and voice but transcribed here for orchestra and chorus.

I just love singing along to "I Bought Me a Cat".