There's an exotic, sensual waltz and a pulsing, percussive final movement that I think of as Billy the Kid meets Jaws. Here, Copland mixes yearning with dissonance as an emotional tool. Later, he turned that music into his Dance Symphony. At age 22, he wrote a ballet score to a vampire story called Grohg. The opening's spiky dance rhythms and the second movement's simple gestures would both return with a more developed sound (and stronger melodies) in later works like Appalachian Spring.Įven early on, Copland loved to steal from himself. 2, better known as the Short Symphony, dates from the early 1930s. A more playful atmosphere highlights the second movement, and an avant-garde fugue in the style of Bartok emerges in the finale.Ĭopland's Symphony No. In the symphony's opening, you can almost sense Copland searching for his voice. He later reworked the piece for orchestra alone, which is the version I recorded. Its premiere performance - when Copland was just 25 - featured his teacher, Nadia Boulanger, as soloist with the New York Symphony. In all of these works, you can hear Copland's trademark characteristics just starting to emerge.Ĭopland's first symphony was called Symphony for Organ and Orchestra. They are works of great imagination, humor and beauty, and they are rarely, if ever, heard in our concert halls.
Recently, I had the opportunity to record the "other" symphonies by Copland by that, I mean those other than his well-known Symphony No. Throughout my conducting career, I have been fascinated by composers' lesser-known sides - especially those of American composers like Copland, Barber, Bernstein and even Gershwin. When I made my subscription debut with the New York Philharmonic in 2000, it happened to coincide with the Copland centenary, and I was able to conduct Connotations, the piece I had heard so many years ago in that Bernstein rehearsal. I became fascinated with his non-American-sounding works, like Orchestral Variations, Connotations and some of his early compositions, which pre-date his interest in folk music and that signature Copland style that we know from his Appalachian Spring. That was a defining moment for me, because it opened my mind and ears to the multidimensionality of Copland as a composer and artist. The avant-garde sounds were from Copland's Connotations, and all at once, my preconceptions about Copland flew out the window. So imagine my shock when I sneaked into a New York Philharmonic rehearsal as a teenager to discover Leonard Bernstein conducting an angular, atonal, but gripping piece by none other than Aaron Copland. Like most everyone, when I hear Copland's music, I see the majesty of the Grand Canyon: I feel my breathing expand and relax with the open skies of Colorado and Montana I sense the calm of a clear river running through the mountains. Aaron Copland's music can be divided into the brash early pieces and the bucolic later ones.