Copland: Four Dance Episodes from Rodeo / Prairie Journal / Red Pony Suite / Letter From Home

"…lively performances in the Copland tradition…" Gramophone Magazine, Awards 2006

For many years Aaron Copland held an unassailable position in the music of the United States of America. The son of Jewish emigrants from Poland and Lithuania, he was born in Brooklyn in 1900 into circumstances comfortable enough to allow him the study of music. He took lessons from Goldmark, a distinguished emigrant from Vienna, and in 1920 went to Paris, where he studied with Nadia Boulanger, the first of her American pupils. In Europe he was able to meet a number of the leading young composers of the day and to see performances by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. At the same time he was feeling his way towards a characteristically American style of composition that should be as clearly recognisable as the national style of the late nineteenth-century Russian composers.

In 1924 Copland returned to America, where his compositions began to attract interest. At the same time he continued to maintain contact with musical trends in Europe and with expatriate American composers. He organized important concerts of contemporary American music, which he did his utmost to publicise through his writing and lecturing, the second activity intermittently at Harvard. During the course of an exceptionally active career he exercised a strong influence over a younger generation of composers, without in any way fostering an exclusive nationalism. His achievements won him awards of all kinds, at home and abroad, from the Pulitzer Prize in 1945 to the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1970. Copland's final years were shadowed by increasing debility. He died in 1990.

The suite The Red Pony was taken by the composer from his score for the 1948 film of John Steinbeck's novel of that name. The film, starring Robert Mitchum and Myrna Loy, centres on the boy, Tom, his grandfather and his parents, and their life on a ranch in California. The suite, described by Copland as a suite for children, consists of six scenes, with music that the composer described as 'folklike', although the themes are all original. There was a suggestion that the music should be accompanied by a spoken narrative, to be delivered by Steinbeck, but the writer demurred at the idea of a version for children.