At the peak of his powers, America's greatest composer,
Aaron Copland, a gay Jewish socialist from Brooklyn, brought
a story to life. The Tender Land, an opera, was
a quintessentially American tale of rural poverty and
the disintegration of family; of labor and itinerant workers;
of strangers and ignorant suspicion; of youth and aging.
Harshly critical of McCarthy-era paranoia, it laid open
the evils of the country's growing prosperity and the
middle-class complacency of the 1950s.
It bombed.
What went wrong with Copland's highly anticipated first--and
only--opera when it debuted in 1954 at the New York City
Opera, only to vanish into the dustbin of American musical-theater
history? Oregon Symphony Resident Conductor Murry Sidlin
has just released the first recording of his answer to
that very question--a revised chamber version of Copland's
masterwork.
Back in 1975, when Sidlin was a young conductor with
the National Symphony, he heard Copland conduct his excerpted
suite from The Tender Land. The young man was stung
by the work's emotional honesty and quiet Americana forcefulness.
"I was pretty naïve at the time," Sidlin says about
the question he posed to the 75-year-old composer right
after the performance. "I said, 'Mr. Copland, that is
a wonderful piece of music. Is the rest of the opera any
good?'"
Little did Sidlin know that he'd just hit the nail on
the head of the biggest disappointment of Copland's professional
life. Fortunately for him, Copland was extremely generous
toward young musicians. That his youthful bravado culminated
in the new recording of The Tender Land 25 years
later is a testament to Sidlin's tenacity.
Sidlin's dogged evaluation of the opera revealed an essential
flaw: The delicate dramatic work was overwhelmed by the
full orchestral sweep of the score. "The full orchestration
makes the opera out of proportion to itself," says Sidlin.
"Onstage you had a wonderful chamber opera, with Grand
Opera overwhelming it from the pit."
Sidlin completed his version in 1987. The revision allows
each of the singers his or her own sparse chamber accompaniment,
rather than a symphonic wave that batters their fragile
lines. As Sidlin tells it, Copland greeted the cast after
the 1987 premiere with tears in his eyes and said: "Thank
you for saving my child."
It's clear what a milestone that moment was in Sidlin's
life. It also broke the ground for a popular eruption
of the work, rousing it from dormancy. Until Sidlin's
'87 revision, there had been only seven attempts to produce
the original fully orchestrated version. Since Sidlin's
breakthrough there have been 32 productions--all using
his reorchestrated chamber version.
This new recording should accelerate that trend. From
the awakening strains of the opera's introduction, this
is pure Copland at the peak of his Americana phase. Sidlin's
stripped-down chamber model puts the raw rev back in Copland's
distinctive tonality, elucidating the music's subtlety
and allowing us to hear it anew. An underlying loneliness
and yearning in the score is brought home by the spacious
ensemble playing of Third Angle New Music Ensemble.
This cast of Northwest all-stars is outstanding. Milagro
Vargas sings the role of Ma Moss, the opera's most tragic
figure, with great emotional depth. Grandpa, so difficult
to play sympathetically, is sung with subtle strength
by Richard Zeller. And Suzan Hanson brings a youthful
freshness to the headstrong teenager Laurie.
You'd think, with a long-dreamed-of recording just behind
him, Sidlin might relax. Instead, he's busy planning the
2001 video production of the opera, which is to be filmed
on location at an Oregon farmhouse. "Once that video is
on the shelf on its rightful place alongside Aïda
and Boheme," says the now white-haired conductor,
"I'll pack it in and move on to something else."
