The Copland Clarinet Concerto. The Copland Piano Concerto. Ever wish that Aaron Copland had written a violin concerto?
Well, Utah Symphony associate concertmaster Gerald Elias has fixed that, and this week and next audiences in Provo, Salt Lake City and Logan will be able to hear the results.It all began nine years ago when Elias, then on sabbatical from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, was choosing repertoire for an upcoming recital tour of Australia and New Zealand.
"I was at Patelson's Music House, right behind Carnegie Hall, just browsing to see if I could find anything interesting," he recalls, "and came upon the Copland Violin Sonata, which I didn't even know existed. So I bought it and played through it and was immediately taken with it."
The upshot was that the Copland sonata, which dates from 1943, got included on the tour program. "And the more I got to know the piece," Elias says, "the more it seemed to me that, implicit in the piano writing, were the kinds of orchestral colors he had been using in the symphonic music he was writing at the same time. So as soon as I got back from sabbatical, in 1987, I started tinkering around with some ideas I had for it. And ultimately I fully orchestrated the piece."
The resulting score was premiered in Colorado Springs the week of Copland's 90th birthday, with Elias as soloist and former Utah Symphony associate conductor Christopher Wilkins directing the orchestra. "It was just before Copland died," Elias says, "and before the concert I got a letter from his publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, whose permission I needed, saying, `Mr. Copland said good luck with it.' "
That was in November 1990. Three years later Boosey & Hawkes published Elias' orchestral version of the sonata, and this week it becomes the central item on a Utah Symphony classical subscription program that will also feature Bizet's Symphony in C major and Stravinsky's "Petrouchka."
Associate conductor Robert Henderson will be on the podium, with concerts scheduled at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 28, at Brigham Young University's Harris Fine Arts Center; 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Sept. 29 and 30, at Abravanel Hall; and 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 2, at Utah State University's Chase Fine Arts Center.
(Thursday's program will also include BYU music professor Stephen Jones' ". . . sing the earth . . .," premiered by the orchestra last June at the Utah Arts Festival.)
Though not making use of familiar melodies a la the ballets "Billy the Kid," "Rodeo" and "Appalachian Spring," the sonata is very much in Copland's "Americana" vein, a mood possibly intensified by the onset of World War II. (Following its completion, the composer dedicated it to the memory of a friend recently killed in the South Pacific.)
At the time of its premiere, composer/critic Virgil Thomson praised its "calm elevation and . . . buoyancy" and, in a 1974 interview with Phillip Ramey, Copland himself acknowledged its basic simplicity.
"It is certainly one of the least complex pieces that I've ever written," he reflected. "Actually, when you look at my works of the early 1940s - `Our Town,' `Fanfare for the Common Man,' `Rodeo,' `Lincoln Portrait' - I seem to have been going through a pretty `plain' period. You might say that the Violin Sonata, of 1943, is well on the way to `Appalachian Spring,' composed the next year. And there the musical materials are very plain indeed. . . ."
"Above all, the work is lyrical and emphasizes the singing qualities of the violin. There is little pretense to virtuosity."
Elias agrees. "It's not a virtuoso piece in the traditional sense," he says of the sonata, "or as thickly textured as much mid-20th-century violin music. For me it evokes the same kinds of feelings as `Appalachian Spring,' the slow movement in particular giving a sense of great open spaces. There's even an inclination toward `fiddle music' at times."
Indeed, Elias says, it was that very spareness in the writing, especially in the piano part, that suggested the orchestration.
"Once you play a note on the piano," he explains, "it decays almost immediately. Nevertheless in the piano score the second movement begins with a low octave in the piano that lasts about six bars, at a very slow tempo. My feeling was that, if that sound could be sustained even on a very soft level, it would lend a degree of color and musical tension."
Since previously he had only reworked scores the other way - i.e., transcribing orchestral pieces for violin and piano - Elias initially sought help from veteran arranger John Williams, then director of the Boston Pops.
"He very kindly went through the score with me and made some suggestions for balancing and clearing things up a bit," Elias says. "But I have to say that the greatest help for me was simply sitting in the orchestra and listening as actively as possible to what composers were doing with it, particularly Copland. It was very revealing. Here were things I had been playing for many years and I found myself listening to them in a totally different way."
Since then, Elias says, his orchestration appears to have been taken up by other violinists. "I understand there was a performance last year in North Carolina." As a result, he got his first royalty check last June - something he smiled over with Williams when they ran into each other at Tanglewood later that summer.
"It's really an effort to recreate that Copland sound," he says of his version of the sonata. "I certainly didn't want to do anything that was contrary to anything he might have written. At the same time I didn't want it to sound like a bad copy."
And why does Elias think the sonata isn't performed more often in either of its versions?
"Perhaps one reason is that every movement ends softly," he speculates. "Occasionally there are fireworks, but basically it's just a very beautiful, very sublime piece of music."
Tickets to the Sept. 28-Oct. 2 performances are available at their respective locations. For information call 533-NOTE.