Copland: Suite from The Red Pony, Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, Music for the Theatre – Wayne Marshall (organ), Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Andrew Litton

The dynamic Litton / Dallas combo presents a musical profile of the quintessential American composer Aaron Copland, representing three aspects of his music. The delightful Music for the Theatre, written by the young Copland in the 1920s, bows to the American jazz idiom that was newly thriving in that decade. Not only does the music incorporate jazz ideas, but its instrumentation emulates a jazz band in sound and size.

Copland had total artistic freedom – ‘music should take over to express the emotions of the characters’ – as he wrote his score for The Red Pony, a 1949 film about a California ranch boy whose father gives him a pony. The annotator Laurie Shulman writes that ‘Copland followed the same instincts that served him so well for his American ballets. The music is in his “folksong” style, yet all of the themes are original, a fact of which he was very proud’.

In his Organ Symphony, Copland commented to his biographer Vivian Perlis, ‘you hear rhythms that would not have been there if I had not been born and raised in Brooklyn’. This is also the symphony that provoked the famous comment from Walter Damrosch, after its premiere in 1925: ‘if a gifted young man can write a symphony like this at twenty-three, within five years he will be ready to commit murder!’ The famed Nadia Boulanger, who played the organ at the same premiere, found that ‘the work is so brilliant, so full of music’. The stunning sonic and musical qualities of the Symphony are enhanced by the participation of the internationally known British organist Wayne Marshall, who has worked with Maestro Litton on both sides of the Atlantic.