Some time ago Chandos dipped its toes into the world of American music, following Neeme Järvi to Detroit. That experiment met with mixed success. Now, with more extensive commitments to orchestral music by Bernstein, Ives, Ginastera, and now Copland, they seem to be getting serious. This first release in a projected Copland orchestral music edition features the label’s house orchestra, the proficient but rather bland BBC Philharmonic.
John Wilson, a talented conductor with a wide-ranging repertoire, gets his musicians to infuse a healthy dose of color and character into their playing, at least most of the time. The suite from Billy the Kid is terrific from start to finish: crisp, clean, and rhythmically vibrant. Appalachian Spring, similarly, is impressively shaped, with very well judged transitions between sections–but then, it’s really hard to kill Appalachian Spring. The Hoedown that concludes Rodeo is superb: not too fast, and full of ear-catching detail, but the opening Buckeroo Holiday goes too quickly to make its full impact. Excitement in Copland is always more a function of rhythm than speed; Andrew Litton’s recent BIS disc contained much of this same music and had a similar problem, albeit with slightly better execution.
The remaining items aren’t so impressive. This has got to be one of the dullest ever versions of the Fanfare for the Common Man. The BBC Philharmonic brass play with an excessive legato smoothness and a notable lack of brilliance. In El Salón México the problems are all Wilson’s fault. From the fussy diminuendos at figure 7 to the vulgar portamentos that deface the gentle string melody at figure 8 (Copland marks it “carefree, with a naive and pure expression”), Wilson seems more interested in what he can do to the music than in realizing Copland’s intentions. Why add extra glissandos to the clarinet solo in the central episode, before figure 28, when Copland asks for only one? It’s tacky.
And so the program turns out to be a mixed bag. There’s a lot that’s good here, and more than enough to indicate that the series has real potential, as long as Wilson behaves himself.
