MARBECKS COLLECTABLE: Copland: Music for Piano

"This music distils that same spirit of small-town and rural America that you find in the paintings of Edward Hopper and the plays of Thornton Wilder. In fact some of the music was actually written for the film version of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. These pieces, like Copland's famous ballet scores such as Billy the Kid, have an astringent, rather touching lyricism that occasionally descends to a naive 'folksiness'.....The constant alternation in these works between static grandeur and energetic forward propulsion is difficult to bring off in performance, but Eric Parkin achieves it very well, and he avoids sentimentality in the 'folksy' pieces....this is a fine disc." (BBC Music)