Aaron Copland

This disc substantially duplicates the repertoire on an all-Copland program produced by DG with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. However, where DG included the Short Symphony, Naxos offers the Clarinet Concerto. While the Nashville Chamber Orchestra doesn’t offer quite the tonal refinement and polish of Orpheus, it basically plays just as well, and its slightly weightier, gutsier, more rustic sonority arguably suits the music even better. In the famous rehearsal disc that accompanied Copland’s own recording of the original chamber version of Appalachian Spring, he can be heard exhorting his players not to sentimentalize the music: “…it’s a little too much on the Massenet-side,” he tells them. Obviously Paul Gambill understands this point, for he offers interpretations ideally poised between warmth and simplicity, full of those clean and clear sonorities that Copland made his own.

Aaron Copland may well be the best-known, the most loved, and the all-around greatest of twentieth century American composers, but his music from the '20s and '30s is still relatively unknown, still relatively unloved, and of still questionable greatness. Was Copland the Modernist too far out to connect to a big audience so he re-created himself as Copland the Populist to become the best-known, most loved, and greatest American composer? But was his Piano Concerto from 1926 really too jazzy and vulgar, his Symphonic Ode from 1928 really too cerebral and severe, his Piano Variations from 1930 really too harsh and austere, and his Short Symphony from 1934 really too rhythmic and complex or was it lack of familiarity made them seem so? From this 1996 recording by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, one would have to vote for the latter because Copland the Modernist is every bit as great a composer as Copland the Populist.

Copland was interested in exploring various methods of composition that might stimulate his melodic and harmonic ideas. It had been twenty years since he had adapted serialism to his own use. He said that "composing with all twelve notes of the chromatic scale can give one a feeling of freedom. It's like looking at a picture from a different point of view." Copland was the first to admit that he did not keep strictly to the rules of serialism. In fact, the sense of a tonal center is rarely missing in the Quartet.

Copland was drawn to the film, Something Wild, an unusual psychological drama about the feelings of a young girl learning to live with violence and with the moods of the city. The scenario required long stretches of uninterrupted music which Copland later shaped into a symphonic suite to satisfy a commission from the London Symphony Orchestra. The four movements are titled: Skyline, Night Thoughts, Subway Jam, and Toward the Bridge.