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11 concerts

2025-10-30 19:00 Stora salen

University of Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra

Programme

Aaron Copland (1900-1990) Appalachian Spring, suite Copland was a child of the new century, and would come to embody the new era's hopes for the American way of life - not least through the cowboy ballets Rodeo and Billy the Kid. His career was long and rich. He was one of Leonard Bernstein's favorite composers. In the 1920s, he had been a student of the legendary Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and then quickly came under the wing of the conductor Koussevitsky. It was for his Boston Symphony Orchestra that he early composed some of his most brilliant works. Although Copland composed in most genres, he has been most noted for his colorful, rhythmically vital and magnificent orchestral music. The art of ballet particularly interested him and in 1943-1944 he composed Appalachian Spring for Martha Graham's ballet group. She premiered it in October 1944. The orchestral theater in the Library of Congress theater in Washington DC is very small, accommodating only an ensemble of 13 musicians, and for such an ensemble the ballet was also composed. But in the spring of 1945, the composer arranged a shortened version of the ballet for symphony orchestra, something that turned out to be his most performed work. It was Martha Graham who chose the title for the ballet, and she took it from a poem by Hart Crane, which really had nothing to do with the plot. The ballet tells the story of a settler community in Pennsylvania at the turn of the last century. In the slow introduction, we get to know the main characters: the settler woman with a habit of moving in the wilderness, the preacher, the young foreman and his fiancée, as well as a group of four women in the preacher's entourage - all participating in the dance. A quiet prayer takes place and then a love duet. The preacher leads a new dance which reveals his Irish background, and several of the people take up their own dances until the preacher blesses the young couple with a new prayer - and here Copland has also included the old salvation tune The Gift to be Simple. The ballet ends with the young couple left alone and strengthened in their new house. Stig Jacobsson

Intermission 25 min