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The many sides of Copland
This weekend's Florida Orchestra program salutes the great composer with works both well-known and less familiar to audiences.
By JOHN FLEMING
© St. Petersburg Times, published November 9, 2000
American listeners may think they know the music of Aaron Copland because of the omnipresent popularity of works such as Rodeo, Appalachian Spring, Fanfare for the Common Man and Billy the Kid. But with this year marking the centenary of the composer's birth, on Tuesday, there's another side to Copland that may come as a surprise.
"Which is why people are going to hear the Orchestral Variations," said Michael Christie, guest conductor of the Florida Orchestra in an all-Copland program this weekend. "It's fascinating to see all the different influences Copland had over his 90 years. In the 1920s and '30s, jazz went in and out of his writing, and he flirted with serialism."
Orchestral Variations was an arrangement by Copland of a 1930 piano work that was the apogee of his early serialist period. Yet Christie finds a common thread between it and Copland's more accessible music.
"I find that the rhythmic activity is very similar throughout all of the works," he said. "There's a certain pacing of how he makes climaxes happen, the time he takes in certain places that is consistent from one to another. That's why I thought Orchestral Variations would be approachable and interesting for people. A lot of the music that we associate with Copland seems to have a happy, light, bouncy feeling to it. The Orchestral Variations draw on the same rhythmic activity, but there is a darker hue to it."
To be sure, the orchestra will be playing plenty of standard-issue Copland, including El Salon Mexico, Quiet City, Rodeo and the Lincoln Portrait, with Tampa's poet laureate, James Tokley, delivering the narration.
Christie is guest conducting the orchestra at a propitious time, when the music directorship is soon to be available, with Jahja Ling stepping down at the end of the 2001-02 season. Christie could be a candidate.
"I guess anything is fair game, but I'm not really going into it with any preconceived notion," said Christie, who was booked before Ling announced his resignation.
At 26, Christie is one of the most honored American conductors of his generation. A native of the Buffalo, N.Y., area, he was still a trumpet student at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio when he won a special prize for outstanding potential in the Sibelius Competition for Conductors in Helsinki, Finland. That opened the door to a wealth of conducting opportunities, including much work in the Scandinavian countries. He was invited to assist well-known conductors such as Franz Welser-Most and Daniel Barenboim.
In September, Christie was named music director of the Colorado Music Festival, a seven-week summer festival in Boulder. Several Florida Orchestra members play in the festival. He was also recently named principal guest conductor of the Helsingborg Orchestra in Sweden.
One of the highlights of Christie's career was conducting Sibelius' Symphony No. 3 with the Helsinki Philharmonic. "They're the orchestra that premiered the darn thing, and that was pretty exciting just to hear how the strings played it," he said.
He finds parallels between Sibelius and Copland, both composers with a strong national identity.
"The difference is, unlike Sibelius, Copland didn't have a national stipend to write in a certain form. He was going from ballet commission to Hollywood to the Boston Symphony. His career was more of a hodgepodge. And it's very exciting for us that he produced such great works of varying styles, where Sibelius was more entrenched in the typical romantic European structures."
Both Copland and Sibelius also stopped composing in the last 20 years of their lives.
"Maybe these guys really said all that they had to say," Christie said.
MUSIC PREVIEW
The Florida Orchestra, with guest conductor Michael Christie, plays an all-Copland program at 8 p.m. Friday at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, 8 p.m. Saturday at Mahaffey Theater and 7:30 p.m. Sunday at Ruth Eckerd Hall. Tickets: $20-$38. (813) 286-2403.
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