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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Copland's Three Most Important Piano Works, 22 Jun 2005
Aaron Copland composed at the piano. It was his instrument and he was a competent pianist. Most of the works for which he is best known -- the ballets, the 'Fanfare for the Common Man,' and the rest of it -- were composed initially at the piano and only later orchestrated. These three works -- interestingly presented here in reverse order to that in which they were composed -- are his most important solo piano works. As far as I know they have not appeared on the same CD before. There are, of course, well-known recordings of each of them, most importantly by William Masselos and Leo Smit, but those are getting a bit long in the tooth. So, it is nice to have them gathered here in what are acceptable performances by Benjamin Pasternack, student of Mieczeslaw Horszowski and Rudolf Serkin, former pianist with the Boston Symphony and for some time now a professor of piano at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. I have learned that exactly the same program played by Robert Weirich will be released later this year on the Albany label. Having heard Weirich play the 'Piano Fantasy' in concert, I am eager to hear that release. As I say, these are competent performances. Certainly nothing is lost in these traversals. One can quibble with Pasternack's choices in certain instances -- for instance, he plays the 'Piano Fantasy' noticeably faster than Masselos; the metronome marking for the declamatory opening of the 'Piano Fantasy' is quarter note = 48 and Pasternack takes it at something more like quarter note = 60. Not a huge difference, but enough to feel it. And it gives the opening a different character than one has come to expect. Just a word further about the 'Piano Fantasy': although it is essentially a twelve-tone composition it is not only discernibly by Copland, with his typical jazzy rhythms and accentual displacements, along with other Coplandesque gestures, it is entirely listener-friendly. I can almost guarantee that anyone familiar with and fond of the 'Piano Variations' will have no problem whatever with the 'Fantasy.' [The material in the 'Piano Fantasy' is taken from the early sketches for a piano concerto Copland was writing for William Kapell but which had to be scrapped when Kapell died in a plane crash. The work is dedicated to his memory.] I find little to quibble with about Pasternack's performance of the 'Piano Sonata.' Possibly that's because I am less familiar with it than the other two pieces, and I do not own a score. Still, it has never, to me, seemed to be at quite as high a level of inspiration as the two pieces that bracket it. It is in three movements, a typical slow-fast-slow form, and for me the most attractive is the jazz-inflected middle movement, Vivace, which has a subtle and inward slower middle section. The 'Piano Variations' are much better-known than the other two pieces, and have been recorded many times. The story is often told how Leonard Bernstein at his first meeting with Copland impressed the composer by sitting down and playing the 'Variations' from memory. The 'Variations' are often called 'thorny' or 'difficult', although they have never struck me that way. And certainly Pasternack's way with them is rather more lyrical than one generally hears. This has both advantages and disadvantages. It makes it sound less like the ground-breaking work that it is (both for Copland and for American piano music of the 1930s) but it makes it a bit more accessible to those listeners who might be a bit allergic to the granitic declamatory style Copland used in this work. At the budget Naxos price, I would recommend this issue. I will still be waiting to hear Robert Weirich's CD of these three pieces, though, and am hoping that his performances will have just a bit more élan, edge and depth than Pasternack's. Scott Morrison
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