Large claims have been made down the years on behalf of Aaron Copland’s third symphony, written at the end of the second world war. But significant questions have also been asked, including by Copland champion Leonard Bernstein, who nevertheless made two recordings of it. Ryan Bancroft’s high energy account of the symphony, the centrepiece of the latest concert in the Philharmonia Orchestra’s autumn Let Freedom Ring season of American music, did not quite resolve the puzzle.
Serge Koussevitzky, who conducted the 1946 premiere, called Copland’s third the greatest US symphony ever written. It unquestionably gives voice to an optimistic postwar American spirit that chimed with the composer’s left wing New Deal politics and aesthetic. The finale, crafted around Copland’s then little known Fanfare for the Common Man, helped secure its place in the repertoire.
But the symphony’s size and the brashness of some of the orchestral writing, not least in the finale, have an uncomfortably bombastic side. Bancroft’s reading, fearless and fiery, tried to push such doubts to one side, and came close to succeeding. But it is hard to shake off the feeling that Copland is stretching his voice too far. The darker mood of 21st-century America makes the third a fascinating period piece, but no longer the work of our times that it once seemed.
Samuel Barber’s violin concerto of 1939, by contrast, has achieved an established place in the repertoire over the same decades. Apparently playing on the same Guarneri instrument with which Isaac Stern made the landmark recording under Bernstein in the 1960s, Renaud Capuçon proved himself a five-star successor to Stern. Capuçon had all the expressive tonal warmth and legato for the first two movements and all the brilliantly fast-fingered technique required for the hair-raising presto finale.
Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte for string orchestra, written in 2011, which began the concert, offered uncomplicated delight. Ironic and unpredictable, it starts in tidy neoclassical vein before the harmonies and forms are dissolved and deconstructed into an extended pizzicato cello solo, played with theatrical wit by Karen Stephenson.