Bernstein: Fancy Free, ballet

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.

These days the Overture to Bernstein's comic opera Candide requires little introduction as it has, within the past few years, taken on a degree of popularity to rival that of the suite from Bernstein's West Side Story.

Leonard Bernstein's Second Symphony of 1949 was inspired by W.H. Auden's poem The Age of Anxiety, published in 1947. The poem seemed perfectly to capture the mood of the 1940s. The story is of a group of lonely souls sitting in a bar at night pondering the human condition. Edward Hopper's famous 1942 painting Nighthawks explores a similar theme.

Bernstein's 1944 ballet, Fancy Free, finds the composer in a much more characteristically up-beat mood with a story of three sailors having a good time on shore leave in New York.

recorded in New York, 1952