Clarinet Concerto
Slowly and expressively -
Cadenza -
Rather fast
Aaron Copland was born 100 years and 11 days ago in Brooklyn, New York. By the time he died, in 1990, he had become one of those rare artists, like Elgar or Sibelius, who personify the creative life and aspirations of an entire nation; "The Dean of American Music". He started out in the early 1920s like many of his young American contemporaries, studying with Nadia Boulanger in Paris , producing iconoclastic, self-consciously "modern" music , and experimenting with jazz - at that time taking Europe by storm as the musical expression of everything new and exciting about America. Such artists enjoyed something of a vogue in Europe between the wars, but the work of composers like Virgil Thomson and the self-proclaimed "Bad Boy of Music" George Antheil has not lasted. Copland realised early on that jazz and neo-classicism weren't enough to see him through. "It was an easy way to be American in musical terms, but all American music could not possibly be confined to two dominant jazz models; the 'blues' and the snappy number", he wrote. After the success of his Piano Concerto (1927) he moved on into stark modernism, but, realising that this alienated his audiences, worked still harder to create a personal style that would reflect popular music without compromising his personal voice. His success was total. With his works of the late 1930s onwards, and particularly his ballet scores "Billy the Kid" (1938), "Rodeo" (1940) and "Appalachian Spring" he perfected a musical language that is completely distinctive and unmistakeably American. Scored in primary colours, Copland's mature music has a breadth and simplicity which evokes both the freedom and the loneliness of America's great cities and vast open spaces. It assimilates not only jazz, but the many other folk musics of America, from Latin dance to bluegrass fiddle tunes and Shaker hymns, yet in a style so personal that it can be identified as pure Copland from the first bar.
"The Clarinet Concerto is cast in a two-movement form, played without pause and connected by a cadenza for the solo instrument. The first movement is simple in structure, based upon the A-B-A song form. The general character of this movement is lyrical and expressive. The cadenza that follows provides the soloist with considerable opportunity to demonstrate his prowess, at the same time introducing fragments of the melodic material to be heard in the second movement. Some of this material represents an unconscious fusion of elements obviously related to North and South American popular music. (For example, a phrase from a currently popular Brazilian tune, heard by the composer in Rio, became imbedded in the secondary material in F major.) The overall form of the final movement is that of a free rondo with several side issues developed at some length. It ends with a fairly elaborate coda in C major."
R.G.Bratby 2000
Copyright Classical Notes.co.uk 2000
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