1. Copland's centenary

<< Continued from page 4

Chronologically, the next work in the recording's sequence is the Sextet of 1937, for string quartet, clarinet and piano: a rehash in chamber music form of the Short Symphony that marked the apex to Copland's first phase, often described as radical or even modernist. Copland made the chamber music version because the Short Symphony had been considered by some conductors to be too rhythmically intricate to be negotiated. The sextet version is now a repertory piece, and has proved irresistible when the performance is as wide-eyed and open-eared as is this one: the lonesome sound of Michael Collins' clarinet distils the plaintive poetry within Copland's American exuberance.

During the late thirties and the forties Copland, feeling a need for a wider audience than that attracted by his early works, embarked on a career as a composer of ballet music (often for Martha Graham), mostly on rural rather than urban American themes, and as a maker of the most intellectually distinguished film scores ever created - mostly for films such as the movie versions of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, Thornton Wilder's Our Town, and Henry James's The Heiress. Most people today know Copland through his ballet music, especially Appalachian Spring and Rodeo. This is fair enough, for although these works don't have quite the bite of the early pieces, they are fine music that evolved, even invented, a vernacular American idiom that has become almost public property, so widely has it been imitated. Nor do the ballets and film scores represent a radical departure from Copland's earlier music, for they employ, in a more accessible form, the same principles of 'cubist' reintegration. The most recent work on this CD is the Piano Quartet of 1950; which profits, as do other vintage works, from a mellowing fusion of Copland's youthful austerity and acridity with the more amenable vein of the ballets and film scores. This piano quartet sounds no more like a (European) Mozart piano quartet than Vitebsk sounds like a Mozart piano trio. The lucidity of its textures, and the calm it discovers within agitation, offer a profoundly American experience, employing a serial technique that disowns kinship with Schoenberg by using a row of eleven notes, instead of the chromatically complete twelve. The first movement (Adagio serio), opening in a gentle, wide-spaced quietude, possibly suggestive of empty prairies, grows progressively harsher and starker as the City, or at least unambiguously urban musical manner, encroaches on the American emptiness. It is probably the immense slowness of the harmonic pulse that gives this music its solitudinous awareness of vast (geographic) space; this seems the more striking as the piano writing, in the first movement, grows increasingly percussive, with bluely clangorous false relations. The second movement is a thin-textured scherzo nervily syncopated in an urban context, with no hint of an agrarian landscape . Fragmented, yet tingling with inner energy, the scherzo is succeeded by a slow finale of ineffable calm, pregnant with the still unknowable promise of a New World. This is great music, 'entirely original with me'; and it is superbly played by the Vanbrugh Quartet and by Martin Roscoe, whose command of the savagery and the tenderness of the Copland piano is magisterial.

This is a disc that celebrates both the promise and the threat of Copland's New World - and of our world too, as we totter into the New Millenium. Acquire this CD which, as rarely happens, enhances awareness of where we are, and of what is happening to us.