Customer Reviews

Copland: Music for Films

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Recently rehearsing the Red Pony and Our Town in a mostly undergraduate orchestra, I was struck by how absolutely foreign the music seemed to the players. I made the (rash) assumption that this musical idiom would be so ingrained in American-trained instrumentalist...So tellingly different than my experiences at the age, where I played Copland several times a year. Let's hope my obesrvation is just an anomaly, and that his music lives on. It deserves to!

Well, with recordings like this one, Copland's legacy has a good advocate! This Midwestern orchestra just shines in this kind of music--the strings are sweet, but yet balance that sweetness with a clarity that is jaw-dropping. For example, I don't think Ormandy's incredible Philadelphia players would be as idiomatic in this music as St. Louis. Philly's warm tone, so apt in the music of the late Romantics, would just get in the way of Copland's wonderful orchestration.

What can I add? Slatkin stays out of Copland's music's way, which is all to the good. Don't mess with perfection! The Red Pony is great fun. Our Town is moving. The Heiress Suite is fine, but not my favorite Copland. Music for Films is music that communicates so well what the different movements are supposed to depict...etc. Great sound, too.

This is the definitive sampler of Aaron Copland's film scores. I listen to this superlative album almost every week. The performance by the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra under Maestro Slatkin is simply stellar and the selections include every note the composer ever wrote for the silver screen. The CD opens with the justifiably popular suite from "The Red Pony", one of the most distinguished American film scores of the forties. Its down-home atmosphere and nostalgic undertones are quite infectious. The wonderful Americana atmosphere of "Our Town" is both moving and gentle. A true piece of musical poetry. There is also a world premiere recording of Copland's Academy Award-winning score for "The Heiress", another wonderful display of the composer's gift for American lyricism. Leonard Slatkin rivals other famous Copland champions such as Leonard Bernstein and Michael Tillson-Thomas for the sheer pastoral beauty he is able to bring forth in the composer's music. Mr. Slatkin's conducting is filled with the appropriate amount of intimacy and power and his orchestra perform with incredible gusto. The "Music for the Movies" suite includes two excerpts from the "Of Mice and Men" score: a gentle and unforgettable musical portrait of John Steinbeck's Salinas country. In short, this CD belongs to every music lover's library. Sound quality is spacious and full-blooded. Don't pass up this one!

In a way, filmgoers have been listening to Copland's film scores nearly every time they go to the cinema, since film composers have been shamelessly ripping off Copland for the last half-century or so. When you listen to the "Our Town" suite, do you get the nagging feeling that you have heard this music somewhere before? No doubt you have, in dozens of derivitave film scores from the 1980's and 1990's, sometimes (shamelessly) right down to the exact chord progressions.

How nice it is then to be able to go back to the source, and have rendered in so superb a fashion as it is by Slatkin & the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. Slatkin, as usual, upholds his reputation as one of the leading interpreters of American music.

This CD contains the premier recording of "The Heiress Suite," which is a delight to listen to, and of course the fairly well-known "Red Pony" music. Is their a more quintessential piece of "Western" music than the "Walk to the Bunkhouse?" How does a jewish boy from Brooklyn nail it on the head so perfectly, anyway?

Other selections include "Music for Movies," a collection of bits & pieces from an assortment of Copland-scored movies that Copland arranged in 1943, and "Music for Radio," an earlier composition that isn't really "movie music," but fits well with the rest of the compositions on this CD.

Instead of wasting your time on movie soundtracks that are nothing more than just derivitave hack jobs, listen to music by a composer who had truly mastered his craft.

When I purchased this collection I was already very familiar with Mr. Copland's more popular fanfaric motifs. I was astounded at how much I enjoyed the wonderful division of both sweeping dramatic themes and friendly, home-grown melodies. His film scores for the 1939 'Of Mice and Men' and the 1940 'Our Town' are a testament to classic films set in simpler times. The 'Red Pony' tracks for which the compilation is named are a magical digression from the listener's pre-conceived notions of Copland western fare. When one expects "Rodeo" (arguably one of Copland's most famous themes) one instead receives a gentler and sometimes powerfully moving score. The crowning jewel of this collection, however; is the beautiful suite from his Academy Award winning score for William Wyler's 1949 film of 'The Heiress.' When listening to this magnificent piece of musical history I am reminded how so many great scores are unavailable to listeners of today, and only through recreation and re-recordings can we re-capture those glimpses of film score artistry. I can only hope that many lost or hard to find works continue to be found or recorded so that film score and music lovers in general can continue to discover and rediscover the joy and beauty of our masters in film composing.

Copland had a knack for writing music that is both accessible and substantive. For this reason, his film music not only suits the action on the big screen but is worthy of concert performance as well. The style of the music in this collection is evocatively pastoral, familiarly Coplandesque, but there are surprises, too. All the music is great but this disc is worth acquiring if for nothing else than for the Heiress Suite, reconstructed by Arnold Freed and receiving here its world premiere recording. It is really a glorious and moving eight-minute piece but this leaves one longing for more! Slatkin and his polished Saint Louis players are the perfect advocates and the RCA recording is first class.

This compilation of of Copland's film music is terrific. It is in actuality not just his film music but music he wrote for plays, film, and radio. Our Town, a piece Copland wrote for Thornton Wilder's classic play, is simply beautiful. Check it out and you went regret it.

This album is worth it just to get the world premiere recording of "The Heiress Suite" reconstructed by Arnold Freed. Also of note are Walk to the Bunkhouse from "The Red Pony" and New England Countryside. Leonard Slatkin conducts these pieces with great emotional feel that states that this is the same America that Copland wanted to us to embrace.

Nobody, absolutely nobody, does Copland better than Slatkin and St. Louis. It may be fairly important to have the ballets--Appalachian Spring, Rodeo, Billy the Kid, etc--which are incredible works, but the music on this disc is without a doubt some of Copland's most enjoyable. I listen to this disc more than any other copland disc I have.

No one can elicit an unmistakably American nostalgia quite like Aaron Copland. In fact, I've often thought of much of Copland's music as I think that of Vaughan Williams to Britain. Many music lovers may take exception, but there it is. All the music here rings familiar, at least to those who've been the least bit exposed to American public radio and the Turner Classic Movies cable channel. The meltingly nostalgic themes are often stark and cushy, but always memorable -- sigh-inducing in their simplicity and consummate in their expression of a yearning for a bygone era. In my opinion, this is some of the most wonderful, if persistently and artfully manipulative music ever made for Hollywood. Despite Copland's inimitable way with developing and hammering home his marvelous themes, one still feels that in the wrong hands this can easily turn gooey and irrepressibly maudlin. Not so here, however, as Leonard Slatkin and the Saint Louis Symphony prove to be every bit inside the idiom as Bernstein ever was, displaying an honest kinship with Copland's equally genuine American ethos and free of any overt Hollywood vulgarity. I do love and enjoy this, and the recording is just as fabulous.

The music on this disc might be somewhat less frequently performed than Copland's most famous ballet scores (although generally not exactly rarities), but it is still top-drawer Copland. Slatkin and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra provide stylish and colorful readings, even though one could imagine just a tad more spectacle or brilliant excitement in some of the numbers (primarily the Red Pony). But that's nitpicky - the gorgeous sound and general sweep and power Slatkin and his players achieve is second to none, and the playing itself is of the highest quality imaginable.

Copland had long been interested in film music but didn't actually try his hand at it himself before 1939 (`the City'). What followed was a string of imaginative, inventive, colorful and masterly film scores, culminating perhaps in The Red Pony - at least as a concert work. I haven't seen the movie, but the music is a gorgeous take on the slightly nostalgic, mythical representation of the West - a brilliant work of spirited nature painting and (subdued) heroism with a strong epic sweep to it. I cannot quite pinpoint what I feel these performances are missing, but at least there is too little of that epic sweep here - the performances at hand are jaunty and spirited and colorful, but Slatkin seems to treat the numbers as separate pieces of light music, and although he works some magic with the score he seems to miss the cumulative impact it has in certain other versions. Still, if Slatkin's might not be the first choice in the Red Pony, it is nevertheless a stirring performance with colors and textures at least as impressively realized as anywhere else.

Our Town is one of Copland's earliest film music efforts; a relatively solemn and quiet moving work drawn from the music to a movie describing the everyday life of ordinary people, the score - while not as spectacular as some of Copland's other scores - has a quiet strength to it that yields a truly remarkable musical experience. The Heiress suite was reconstructed by Arnold Freed; he did as convincing a job as I can imagine is possible of cobbling together the various fragments into something resembling a workable whole, but the music still sounds rather disjointed and with little overall impact or structure, even though it contains some really good musical ideas.

Music for Movies is a suite Copland himself assembled from music from `The City', `Of Mice And Men', and `Our Town'. Despite drawing on disparate source material the resulting suite is among Copland's most brilliant and stirring works, full of sinewy strength and optimism, striking tunes and thoroughly brilliant orchestral effects. The Prairie Journal (or Music for Radio) is another delectable, spirited work and also the work that receives the best overall performance on this disc; a fierce and firey performance that dances along with true swagger and gorgeously shaped melodies. But in all the works, beside the Red Pony, which seems almost a little inhibited, Slatkin and the Saint Louis players are the most satisfying advocates imaginable, with idiomatic performances full of power and beauty; overall, then, this is a splendid release which deserves a solid recommendation.