Two of the pieces on this splendid collection received their premier recordings: the ballet scores Grohg and Hear Ye! Hear Ye! Both are rich, rigorous works and are wonderfully interpreted by these first-tier orchestras under the direction of Oliver Knussen. The third piece, Prelude For Chamber Orchestra, is actually Copland's rearrangement of his Organ Symphony's first movement. ScoredaddyThis music is hardly recognizable as that of America's greatest composer of ballet music. These are very early works of a composer fresh from Europe and from studying under Nadia Boulanger, who taught Copland to rely on folk sources for his music. This, for Copland, meant jazz. Grohg (written in 1922-25, revised in 1935) was Copland's first orchestral work, inspired by the German film Nosferatu, about a sorcerer bringing corpses alive to dance for his pleasure. If the only Copland you're interested in is the one who wrote Appalachian Spring, then this isn't for you. Still, the music is engaging and instructive. Paul Cook
Grohg - Ballet in One act (1922-25, revised 1932)
1. Introduction, Cortège and Entrance of Grohg 7:40
2. Dance of the Adolescent 6:27
4. Dance of the Streetwalker 3:42
5. Grohg imagines the Dead are mocking him 4:41
6. Illumination and Disappearance of Grohg 1:59
7. Prelude for chamber orchestra 6:04 (1924, arranged 1934)
Hear Ye! Hear Ye! - Ballet in One act (1934, version for small orchestra, 1935)
8. Scene i (Prelude) 1:36
9. Scenes ii-iv (The Courtroom; Dance of the Prosecuting Attorney; Danse of the Defense Attorney; Quarrel) 4:48
10. Scene v (The Nightclub hostess sworn in) 0:47
11. Scene vi (The Chorus-girls' first dance) 3:31
12. Scene vii (First Pas-de-deux) 2:49
13. Scene viii (Pas-de-deux continued; First murder) 2:54
14. Scenes ix-x (The Courtroom); The Noneymoon Couple sworn in) 1:30
15. Scene xi (The Chorus-girls' dance with doves) 2:18
16. Scene xii (Second Pas-de-deux with murder) 3:45
17. Scenes xiii-xiv (The Courtroom; the Waiter is sworn in) 1:24
18. Scene xv (The Chorus-girls' third dance) 1:29
19. Scene xvi (Third Pas-de-deux and Murder) 3:24
20. Scenes xvii-xviii (The Verdict; The Courtroom) 1:57
1. Introduction, Cortège and Entrance of Grohg 7:40
2. Dance of the Adolescent 6:27
4. Dance of the Streetwalker 3:42
5. Grohg imagines the Dead are mocking him 4:41
6. Illumination and Disappearance of Grohg 1:59
7. Prelude for chamber orchestra 6:04 (1924, arranged 1934)
Hear Ye! Hear Ye! - Ballet in One act (1934, version for small orchestra, 1935)
8. Scene i (Prelude) 1:36
9. Scenes ii-iv (The Courtroom; Dance of the Prosecuting Attorney; Danse of the Defense Attorney; Quarrel) 4:48
10. Scene v (The Nightclub hostess sworn in) 0:47
11. Scene vi (The Chorus-girls' first dance) 3:31
12. Scene vii (First Pas-de-deux) 2:49
13. Scene viii (Pas-de-deux continued; First murder) 2:54
14. Scenes ix-x (The Courtroom); The Noneymoon Couple sworn in) 1:30
15. Scene xi (The Chorus-girls' dance with doves) 2:18
16. Scene xii (Second Pas-de-deux with murder) 3:45
17. Scenes xiii-xiv (The Courtroom; the Waiter is sworn in) 1:24
18. Scene xv (The Chorus-girls' third dance) 1:29
19. Scene xvi (Third Pas-de-deux and Murder) 3:24
20. Scenes xvii-xviii (The Verdict; The Courtroom) 1:57
Grohg performed by the Cleveland Orchestra ; other selections performed by the London Sinfonietta. All works conducted by Oliver Knussen.
Grohg was recorded in Severance Hall, Cleveland, Ohio on May 3, 1993. Other selections were recorded in Walthamstow Assembly Hall, London, UK on June 29-30, 1993
5 comments:
320kbps MP3 + SCANS
http://rapidshare.com/files/115107939/arncplnd-grog.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/115101658/arncplnd-grog.part2.rar
Grohg
Copland's major Parisian composition was a ballet score originally called Le Necromancien and later retitled Grohg. As he remembered it, he based the title on a Danish author named Grog (the h added "to avoid an alcoholic connotation!"), whereas it surely derived from the Parisian poet Fernand Gregh, whose poem "Reconaissance" he had set at Fontainebleau. Copland undertook the ballet-his first orchestral score~ithout realistic expectations that it would be produced; rather, he intended it primarily as a study in orchestration and form. He began the ballet proper in Berlin in June 1922, fimshed the reduced piano score inParis in June 1924, and completed the orchestration back in the States in November 1925.
"My Ballet is progressing very slowly but surely," he wrote to Boulanger from Berlin in August 1922. "I still can't find a satisfactory story to go with it all, but I continue to develop the separate dances." Then, one evening that fall, Copland and Clurman saw the German silent horror film Nosferatu, a Symphony of Terror. "By the time we reached home at night," he remembered, "I decided that this bizarre tale would be the basis for my ballet. Harold had never written a scenario, but he was eager to try."
A masterpiece of German cinema, Friedrich Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), starring Max Schreck, was a free adaptation of Bram Stoker's 1897 Dracula (making Grohg a Dracula ballet once removed). Partly in response to copyright considerations, Murnau and his screenwriter, Henrik Galeen, revamped Stoker's original story, using many of the English novel's characters, images, and ideas in new contexts. Both tales,however, are fundamentally psychosexual dramas that draw upon images of sexual hysteria, sadomasochism, and confused gender identity.
Nosferatu takes, as its particular premise, an explanation for the outbreak of bubonic plague in Bremen, Germany, in 1838. Knock, a realestate agent in the vampire Nosferatu's power, persuades his clerk Waldemar Hutter to travel to Transylvania to close a real-estate deal with one Count Orlock (or as we know him, Nosferatu, from nosferat, a Romanian word for a kind of vampire). Leaving behind his devoted wife, Ellen, in the care of friends, Hutter travels to Transylvania. An up-to-date businessman, he laughs at the local peasantry's superstitious fear of Nosferatu. Soon after arriving at Nosferatu's castle, Hutter cuts his thumb at the dinner table and is understandably startled when his leering host sucks his bleeding finger. The next morning he finds marks on his neck that he assumes are insect bites. Only Ellen's love, which telepathically protects him, awakens the obtuse Hutter to the danger he is in.
Hutter and Nosferatu both race back to Bremen. Accompanied by coffins filled with rats, Nosferatu spreads the plague wherever he goes, including, at last, Bremen. Hutter safely returns, but he and Ellen cannot resume the bourgeois idyll of bygone days. In the meantime, Knock, now totally deranged, escapes from a mental asylum and is pursued by a frenzied mob. Taking her cue from the Book of the Vampires, Ellen offers her blood to Nosferatu and keeps him at her bedside until sunrise. As the sun rises, Nosferatu disintegrates; Hutter mourns his wife's death, but Bremen is saved and Nosferatu's castle ruined.
Copland and Clurman adapted the film to suit their own purposes, making their protagonist a necromancer, a "sorcerer who loves the dead and vainly seeks affection among them. He can make them dance in so far " as he does not touch them." In a French sketch of the ballet scenario, theyt further described Grohg as having a hooked nose and gigantic eyes, a i' figure "tragic in his ugliness, tragic-and pitiable." The one-act ballet! takes place in the "large courtyard of Grohg's domain. The stage is empty, except for a high, thick, semi-circular wall at the back, from the top of which, at right and left stage, descend two flights of stone steps pointing towards the center." In a preliminary note to the score, Copland and Clurman emphasized that the work was not intended as a "macabre or realistic ballet" in the tradition of the Grand Guignol, but rather as a "fantastic" and "symbolic" work. The dead should not look dead, they warned, the coffins not look like coffins, and the lighting "should be unrealistic and varied."
The ballet opens with a short introduction featuring a portentous three-note knocking motive (presaging later Copland works as different as Appalachian Spring and Night Thoughts). One by one, four groups of "servitors" drag out four coffins (three in the revised version) to music terrifying or jittery. Grohg enters and calls for the first dead, an adolescent (of indeterminate gender). Grohg looks "tenderly" at the adolescent, who, at his command, begins a lively dance, the servitors joining in from time to time. Grohg-his sad, yearning theme pitted against the youth's perky music-is moved by the adolescent and begins to dance himself, albeit "awkwardly." When the adolescent finally becomes aware of Grohg, he (or she) recoils in horror, at which point the "wounded" Grohg violently strikes him (or her) down.
The servitors bring forth the second dead, an opium-eater, about whom Grohg "wearily" begins a slow, static dance. At a moment in the score marked "Visions of Jazz" and "misterioso," the opium-eater joins Grohg in the trancelike music; when the servitors join in a little later, the music momentarily becomes hectic. "Moved to pity," Grohg removes the spell and the servitors return the opium-eater to his coffin.
The third dead, a streetwalker, begins an "apache dance," a flirtatious waltz alternately pert and mock-sentimental. When she attempts to flee Grohg's advances, the angry necromancer strikes her, too. The fourth dead, a beautiful young girl, dances as if dreaming; eventually Grohg partakes in her slow, hypnotic waltz. After a passionate climax, he gently kisses her, the kiss represented by a solo viola melody containing quarter tones. The girl awakens and shudders with disgust as Grohg, in a frenzy, grips her.
Then, in a lively dance full of polyrhythms and changing meters, the servitors and the four dead mock Grohg, mimicking his authority and violently striking him. After failed attempts to assert his power, Grohg picks up the streetwalker and flings her into the crowd. At this point, the stage darkens except for a light illuminating Grohg's head. The gloomy introductory music returns as Grohg slowly retires, "as if the action had happened only in his imagination." He disappears from view as the curtain falls.
Although Nosferatu, with his hooked nose and bulging eyes, clearly provided the physical model for Grohg, the relationship between the film and the ballet has eluded commentators. Peter Laki characterizes the ballet as "one of those productive misreadings where an artwork inspires another artist to create something original." Ronald Caltabiano and John Mugge further argue that Grohg seems less like Nosferatu than it does The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Petrushka, both of which also feature ominous authoritarian figures. But whereas the conflicts in Petrushka largely unfold among the puppets themselves, in Grohg the drama takes place between Grohg and his subjects. Nor is Grohg a heartless manipulator like Dr. Caligari or Petrushka's sorcerer; on the contrary, Copland's yearning music for the "tragic and pitiable" Grohg evokes sympathy for the hopelessly repressed necromancer, who can bring his beloved dead to life but cannot touch them, who exists in an endless cycle of sadomasochistic episodes.
This brings us back, after all, to Nosferatu, a figure of desperate sexual-at times homosexual-yearning, as such observers as Jack Kerouac, Robin Wood, and Lotte H. Eisner have pointed out; indeed, since the late eighteenth century, homoeroticism had been such a prominent feature of vampire tales that by Murnau's time, the vampire-as-homosexual had become a literary commonplace. At the same time, Max Schreck's Nosferatu-a sly and exotic creature of legendary wealth-projected stereotypically Eastern and, more specifically, Jewish associations, making it necessary, in the wake of Nazi propaganda, for friends like Lotte Eisner to vigorously deny any anti-Semitic designs on Murnau's part. Whatever Murnau's intentions-and a fascination with and fear of Eastern Europe undeniably underlie the film, as they do the Stoker novel-it is little wonder that Copland, himself homosexual and Jewish, should find Nosferatu an intriguing figure. Like Murnau, however, Copland took an ironic if not necessarily campy view of his antihero; Grohg is the composer's Pierrot, his Petrushka, his Miraculous Mandarin-a hapless and lovelorn outsider.
In its portrayal of a city in decay, Murnau's film also contains a socialcontext largely absent from the Stoker novel. Bremen appears modern,writes Gregory Waller, "in the sense that its people are isolate , trapped, and afraid in an impersonal urban environment." Upon hearing news of the plague, for instance, all the citizens of Bremen anxiously close their windows and bolt their doors. The film further implies some criticism of capitalism and eugenics, offering hope rather in the form of peasant tradition and what Siegfried Kracauer calls "inner metamorphosis," symbolized by Ellen's sacrifice. Murnau thus establishes ties not only with Dostoyevsky, as Kracauer points out, but with Brecht and other Marxists.
Grohg lacks this kind of clear social context, but the servitors can be seen as an enslaved group that finally rises up against a tyrannical master, or perhaps as a mob in pursuit of a sacrificial victim, like the settlers in Billy the Kid. The portrayals of the prostitute, with her apache dance, and the opium-eater, with his "visions of jazz," more specifically reflect Paris of the times (opium was popular with such French artists as Jean Cocteau). In its own way, Grohg, with its impotent hero cast in a decadent underworld, suggests a musical parallel to Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.
Copland's score is an impressive one, especially for a student work; upon hearing those parts of it arranged as the Dance Symphony (1929), Stravinsky admitted it to be "a very precocious opus" for a composer in his early twenties. The music makes stylish use of the octatonic scale, polytonality, polyrhythms, ear-splitting sonorities, even microtones, a technique apparently inspired by the work of Alois Hiba and perhaps Bloch. Concurrently, it features considerable stylistic range, with echoes of Mussorgsky, Satie, Ravel, Stravinsky, and, by Copland's own admission, Florent Schmitt's The Tragedy of Salome, as well as jazz and Jewish music. Given the ballet's connection with film, this eclecticism possibly owes something to the music heard in the more sophisticated motionpicture theaters of the time; a 1921 showing of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari at the Capitol Theatre in New York included themes culled from Debussy, Strauss, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev. At any rate, in this one work, Copland seems to have integrated the wide range of contemporary European musics he was eagerly seeking out; remarkably enough, it features as well a recognizable personality all its own.
.Although Peter Laki notes a fundamental kinship-though entirely comcidental-to Bartok's Miraculous Mandarin, Grohg also resembles a similarly gothic score by an American contemporary, namely, Roger Sessions's Black Maskers (1923), likewise inspired by an expressionist Source. Both works-composed at the same time, though independently, an ocean apart-initiate a new phase of American music, epitomized by the concert series Copland and Sessions would later codirect. At the same time, Black Maskers is a texturally denser work, closer to Debussy, with a more intensely subjective tone and no obvious connection with popular music; such distinctions portend later differences that would ultimately drive these two composers apart.
Having no opportunity to launch Grohg as a ballet, Copland extracted portions of it for two independent orchestral works, the Cortege Macabre (1923) and the Dance Symphony (1929). He submitted the Cortege, an expanded treatment of the opening dirge, to Howard Hanson, who premiered it at the first of the American Composers Concerts in Rochester on 2 May 1925; Copland later withdrew it, but when Hanson asked to replay it at the very last Festival of American Music in 1971, he "agreed, thinking if Hanson liked it, there must be something good about it!"
In the meanwhile, when it became clear that he would not be able to complete the Symphonic Ode in time to enter it in a 1929 competition sponsored by the RCA Victor Company, he arranged large chunks of the still mostly unknown Grohg as the three-movement Dance Symphony. The first movement conjoins the introduction and the adolescent's dance, skipping the servitors' dirge, which had since become Cortege Macabre; the middle movement consists of the young girl's dance up through the eerie kiss accompanied by quarter tones; and the finale comprises the concluding mocking dance, without the final coda. RCA Victor awarded Copland $5,000 for his effort (the other winners were Louis Gruenberg, Ernest Bloch, and Robert Russell Bennett); Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Academy of Music premiered the piece, which Copland dedicated to Clurman, on 15 April 1931.
In 1934 Copland resurrected the only two unused sections of Grohgthe dances of the opium-eater and the streetwalker-for a ballet for Ruth Page, Hear Yet Hear Yet He left the streetwalker's dance largely intact, whereas he used only the more excited portions of the opium-eater's dance for the ballet's climax. In the meantime, something like the opiumeater's slower music had turned up, years earlier, in the Organ Symphony.
Copland also prepared a revised Grohg (1932), shortening the work from about forty minutes to a half hour, principally by omitting the character of the young girl and her solo dance. But he was reluctant to bring the score forth as such, not only because by 1934 he had recycled the entire work, but because, as he commented in 1967, "fantastic and symbolic ballets" had gone out of fashion. Nonetheless, Oliver Knussen, who championed this revised score in the 1990s, judged it "stronger whole than anyone of its temporary homes" and "arguably Copland's most remarkable orchestral achievement prior to the Symphonic Ode," a strong recommendation considering such intervening works as Music for the Theatre and the Piano Concerto.
Knussen premiered the revised Grohg with the London Sinfonietta on 20 June 1992, two years after Copland's death, and recorded it with the Cleveland Orchestra in 1993. Critics uniformly declared the finally aired ballet an astonishing find, even those who had long known portions of it through the Dance Symphony. Knussen pointed out, meanwhile, that although the 1932 revision was superior for concert purposes to the 1925 original, the ballet itself still awaited a performance in either guise. Copland himself had maintained an interest in seeing Grohg staged, suggesting that the ballet might work especially well with a new scenario.
Hear Ye! Hear Ye!
Copland wrote his second ballet, Hear Yet Hear Yet, for the Chicagoan choreographer Ruth Page in the fall of 1934. He had less than three months to compose, orchestrate, and revise the almost forty-minute work-and for a mere $250 (not including royalties). But he was eager to collaborate on a dramatic work and hoped to write something that might appeal to a larger audience than the seemingly prescribed one for the Piano Variations and the Short Symphony.
Although a largely forgotten figure today, Page (1900-1991) was a well-known choreographer and dancer of the time, especially in Chicago. Having imbibed the traditions of St. Petersburg's Imperial Ballet and Paris's Ballets Russes through Pavlova and Adolf Bolm, Page, at age nineteen, was catapulted to fame in the title role of Bolm's ballet The Birthday of the Infanta (music by John Alden Carpenter). In the years between the two world wars, she served as premiere danseuse and eventually director of a number of small, adventurous, and short-lived Chicago dance troupes: the Ballet Intime and the Allied Arts (with Bolm) in the 1920s and the Ruth Page Ballets and the Page-Stone Ballet (with Bentley Stone) In the 1930s. Whether choreographed by Bolm or herself, most of these ballets featured music by contemporary composers and costumes and designs by the gifted Russian artist Nicholas Remisoff.
Page's choreography won a certain amount of prestige or at least notoriety for its assimilation of popular American dance. Inspired by Carpenter-Bolm ballets, she incorporated vaudeville and musical come gestures and movement into her work. Discussing her best-known work, Frankie and Johnny (1938), choreographed with Bentley Stone to a commissioned score by Jerome Moross, Marcia Siegel described it as "equal parts pop art and dance theatre," as "raw, raunchy, and proud of it," "good fun, if not precisely good form." At the same time, Page commanded a thorough knowledge of classical dance, and her Chicago studio, wrote Agnes de Mille, became "the focal point for all ballet training in Midwest."
Copland presumably met Page through Carpenter, who invited him to lecture at the Chicago Arts Club in 1930. When Page proposed a joint venture in 1934-a reasonable collaboration, given his nearness to Chicago that summer-he very likely played for her the never-performed Grohg, which he had recently revised and still hoped to see staged. Page wanted something more in the spirit of his jazz works and devised a scenario about a murder in a nightclub in contemporary Chicago.
The action takes place in a court of law, complete with judge, prosecuting and defense attorneys, and six masked jury members. (Page described the prosecutor as "over-dramatic" and the defense attorney as an "ultra chic, well-dressed type, with cane, gloves and spats.") The plot pivots about the murder of the male member of a cabaret dancing (danced by Page and Stone). The witnesses to the murder-a "Mae type" cabaret hostess and her maid, a pair of newlyweds, and a waiter-provide three conflicting accounts of the murder. The hostess testifies that the female dancer shot her partner, the newlyweds claim that a jealous chorus girl killed him, and the waiter swears that a maniac did it. The lawyers argue after each account, the bored jury finding everyone accused guilty. At the trial's end, the two lawyers shake hands and leave arm in arm. The judge and jury stand and then sit as three hammer strokes announce the next case. Writes Page, "And in that co hearts, though broken, are beating, beating as the hammer strikes calling the next case. Hear Ye! Hear Ye!"
Like the Gershwin musical Of Thee I Sing! (1931), Hear Ye! Hear Ye! drew upon contemporary disenchantment with the Americican court system; Copland did his part by distorting a phrase of "The Star- Spangled Banner" at both the beginning and ending of the ballet. But Page leavened the work's serious theme with the kind of tango, blues, and apache numbers close to her heart. By combining a roaring twenties ambience with a thirties concern for social justice, the ballet struck a strong transitional note.
Page structured the ballet so that the sections for each of the three witnesses-the bulk of the work-contained two parts each: the first part consists of a dance for chorus girls that reflects that particular witness's point of view; the second features a flashback of that witness's account of the murder, including a gunshot heard at the climax. Since the three witnesses project their own personalities onto the dance team, these bifurcated episodes ultimately function as portraits of the individual witnesses-of the sensual hostess, the tender newlyweds, and the manic waiter. This elaborate design gave Page and Stone, who danced in all three flashbacks, an opportunity to refigure themselves according to each witness's perspective.
In creating this scenario, Page presumably took Grohg into account, for it can hardly be coincidence that their structures parallel each other so closely or that the three witnesses resemble in type characters from the earlier ballet: the Mae West hostess recalls the streetwalker; the newlyweds, the young girl; and the black waiter, the opium-eater. Copland even used some of the music for the streetwalker and the opium-eater for, respectively, the hostess's and waiter's account of the murder. In addition, he recycled some other scores from the 1920s: "An Immorality" for the opening overture, "Ukelele Serenade" for the first chorus-girl number, and the "Hommage a Milhaud" from the unfinished Five Sentimental Melodies for the second chorus-girl number, the "Dove Dance." The need both to write the work quickly and to establish a nightclub atmosphere no doubt encouraged such cannibalizing.
After the overture, the curtain rises as three hammer strokes announce that court is in session, followed by the discordant" Star-Spangled Banner." Three brief scenes successively portray the prosecuting attorney (including a specific accusatory motive consisting of accented triads for the brass), the more ingratiating defense attorney, and the two in argument. This entire section is more mimetic than balletic per se, as one might expect in a dance for opposing lawyers. Page choreographed "exaggerated, aggressive movement" for the prosecutor, while for the defense attorney she used "small, satirical movements, suggesting clever, rather smart-alecky answers to the pointed fingers, fists, and lunges of his opponent."
All of the witnesses enter to similar music, including a brass recitative on a single pitch meant to represent the question "Do you swear to tell the truth?" and so on, and a falling third to describe the witness's "I do.” Subtle variations in the witnesses' entrance music underscore their different personalities.
After the hostess takes her oath, the music explodes with "Ukelele Serenade," danced by twelve chorus girls. "They do a very sexy dance," instructed Page, "skirts pulled up high and legs, legs, legs much in evidence." For the hostess's subsequent account of the murder, Page requested "an extremely seductive Tango or habanera (jazzed) ending in a kind of apache dance," and Copland obliged with a suave tango (a rarity in his oeuvre) followed by the streetwalker's apache dance from Grogh. At the end of the scene, the accusatory motive sounds and the lawyers bicker.
For the entrance of the newlyweds, Copland quotes Mendelsson’s "Wedding March," sweetly reharmonized with chromatic triads. The chorus girls execute the "Dove Dance," a gentle, fluttering number, languidly orchestrated, that is the picture of innocence; Copland furni this music in response to Page's request for "a minuet with a pigeon in one hand." At Page's suggestion of "a gavotte (or something very dignified, pure and beautiful)" for the newlyweds' romantic remembrance of the murder, Copland composed a kind of jazz siciliana, tinged with a bluesy, haunting melancholy. Once again, the accusation motive resounds and the lawyers argue.
For the chorus number associated with the black waiter, Page specified "twelve negro girls instead of white girls" doing "cartwheels" and jungle jazz." Copland responded with a violently jazzy dance that resembles his snazzy urban landscapes. The waiter's flashback opens contrasting blues section, moves on directly to a depiction of the maniac by way of Grohg's opium-eater music, and climaxes with a return to the frenzied "jungle jazz." The ballet concludes with a return of the music for the court, including "The Star-Spangled Banner" and the judge's hammer strokes, signaling the next case. At the very end, a loud two-note cadential figure associated with the prosecution suggests, perhaps, that it is the American legal system which has been found guilty.
Hear Yet Hear Yet received a successful production, hansomely designed by Remisoff with tabloid headlines flashed on a large overhead screen during the overture and, for the ballet proper, a backdrop of tilting skyscrapers evoking a contemporary world out of kilter; the masks for the jury, wrote Page, "resembled Aaron Copland's extraordinary face." The work remained in Page's repertory for several seasons, winning favorable, if not extraordinary, reviews at both its premieres, in Chicago (1934) and New York (1936). A suite from the ballet was prepared and performed in 1937, but Copland subsequently withdrew both ballet and suite. "The music was really incidental to the dance," he explained, "and 1 have discovered that some music is more incidental than others!" Page's choreography, meanwhile, was lost, she herself hardly remembering the dance in 1969, writing, "I doubt now if it was a very good ballet."
Now that the score is once again available and has been recorded in its entirety, one imagines that it will take its place as one of the real if minor pleasures of Copland's art. The New York Times critic Bernard Holland greeted a rare 1996 performance as "a delight" and "a happy half-hour." A suite that would include such highlights as the "Ukelele Serenade," the tango, the "Dove Dance," the siciliana, the blues, and the "jungle jazz" would probably make an even stronger case for the work. At the least, the ballet, as we can now see, is not the simple burlesque it was long taken for, but rather a work of strength and sophistication (notwithstanding the coarse parody of "The Star-Spangled Banner"). Nor can the ballet be regarded simply as a throwback to the composer's jazz period, despite its incorporation of earlier works. Rather, it makes some surprising movement toward the more commercial appeal of Gershwin, especially in the tango and blues numbers. But Copland never quite followed up along these lines, perhaps because they were geared to the strengths and limitations of Ruth Page from the start, perhaps because he discovered other strategies with which to reach the larger public. It was only the tenderness of the "Dove Dance" that he wound up salvaging. Otherwise, Hear Yet Hear Yet represents the road not taken.
ABOVE PASSAGES FROM AARON COPLAND: THE LIFE AND WORK OF AN UNCOMMON MAN BY HOWARD POLLACK.
I was beginning to think your blog was dead. Thanks god you prove the opposite,
Esta no la conocía.
Mil gracias por compartir música tan bella.
oh, please please
Re-post the first mp3-link
thanks in advance, and remember you are doing a great work sharing Copland with everybody.
Regards
sorry Roger, I no longer have those files
Post a Comment