Aaron Copland
Aaron Copland wrote the open, slowly shifting harmonies many still hear as the sound of American music. His vernacular style of the 1930s and 1940s gave ballet, song and chamber works a plain-spoken clarity that reaches from folk song to fanfare.
The ballets Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid and Rodeo, Fanfare for the Common Man and the Third Symphony fixed that populist voice. On these recordings the same hand appears in smaller forms: the piano piece Night Thoughts, ending in tolling bells; Vitebsk, a trio built on a Jewish folk theme heard in a play; the dramatic Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson; and the Old American Songs, folk material set with directness rather than decoration. Later he folded serial technique into works such as the Piano Quartet without abandoning the melodic and harmonic instincts of the earlier music.
Aaron Copland is featured on the following titles
A Shropshire Lad
Baritone Blake Fischer and pianist Claire Cooper, winners of the 1998 Song Recital Award, present English and American folk, traditional and art songs by Butterworth, Copland, Finzi and Britten.
ABC of American Art Song
Melanie Duncan blitzed the 1999 Mietta Song Recital Award, taking the Popular Choice award and the Musical Partnership with accompanist Claire Cooper as well as the Award itself. This is her recital of twentieth-century American art song.
20th Century Piano Trios
Highly acclaimed Trio Melbourne presents 20th Century Piano Trios, a collection of rarely heard and newly recorded works that includes first recordings of pieces by Australian composers Peter Sculthorpe and Julian Yu.
Compositions by Aaron Copland also appear on
Night Thoughts
During the long still nights of Melbourne’s Covid lockdowns, pianist Len Vorster listened widely and thought hard about what he heard. Those evening ruminations became this programme of fifteen nocturnes and night pieces, from Schumann’s circle to Copland.