Copland: Rodeo (Four Dance Episodes)

Following the huge success of the previous release of outstanding ballet product, including the magnificent 50 CD box set A FESTIVAL OF BALLET, the ten BALLET EDITION albums and I LOVE BALLET, EMI Classics presents a further eight albums of ballet music.

These 2CD mid-price sets, drawn from the catalogues of EMI Classics and Virgin Classics, present a selection of the best-loved and most popular ballet music by the great composers, performed by the world’s leading artists.

Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein were two outstanding American composers who both contributed hugely to the musical scene in the USA. Both wrote ballets that broke new ground: Copland on themes that echoed the vast and lonely expanses of the American prairies, and Bernstein on the hectic life in New York in the middle of the 20th century. This album presents complete performances of Copland’s Billy the Kid and Appalachian Spring and Bernstein’s Fancy Free and Facsimile, as well as extracts from other works including Bernstein’s powerful Symphonic Dances from his smash hit musical West Side Story.

This is the sixth release in EMI's American Classics series, a series devoted to releasing the Company's extensive catalogue of American music of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Aaron Copland wrote some of the greatest ballet scores of the 20th century and on this disc there are two, both with a 'Western' theme: Billy the Kid, from 1938, and Rodeo (1942). The story of Billy the Kid follows the life of the infamous outlaw and is most famous for its incorporation of many cowboy tunes and American folk songs. Likewise Rodeo uses traditional American folk tunes in their original form, with very little alteration by the composer. In the Beginning is a work from 1947 to a text from Genesis and is a rare example of Copland's choral writing.

While Copland’s hugely successful celebration of the American West, Rodeo, has become an American classic, Dance Panels is barely known despite working beautifully as a concert work. Based on popular Mexican melodies, the glittering, even exotic El Salón Mexico is one of Copland’s most frequently performed works. Of his rhythmically complex Danzón Cubano, inspired by a visit to a dance hall in Cuba, in which there were two orchestras playing at both ends, the composer himself wrote: “I did not attempt to reproduce an authentic Cuban sound but felt free to add my own touches of displaced accents and unexpected silent beats.” GRAMMY® Award-winning conductor Leonard Slatkin’s recording of Copland’s Lincoln Portrait (8559373-74) received “the kind of performance that brought tears to my eyes” (Audiophile Audition).

This 2-CD compilation contains 147 minutes of music by leading American orchestras and conductors including the Cleveland Orchestra with Lorin Maazel, the Boston Baroque with Martin Pearlman, the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra with Leonard Slatkin, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra with Robert Shaw & Andrew Litton and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra with Robert Spano & David Zinman. They perform works by Copland, Holst, Vaughan Williams, Hindemith, Berlioz, Shostakovich, Enescu and Handel.