‘My dear, you should learn to conduct your own music’, Stravinsky said to Aaron Copland sometime in the mid-1940s, ‘every composer should.’ Around that same time, Copland was asked to step in and conduct the Cincinnati Symphony in Appalachian Spring as Eugene Goossens was suddenly indisposed, but felt he didn’t have the necessary skills. ‘I date from that episode a determination to learn how to conduct at least my own works’, he told his biographer Vivian Perlis. With experience (and some coaching from Leonard Bernstein), he found his way relatively quickly – and he seemed to enjoy it. ‘I always felt that composing was the really serious business; conducting was for fun’, he told Perlis, but he also wanted to leave a record of how his music should be performed. ‘I tended to look for a clean sound and to avoid the sentimental, overly romantic approach. I may have been influenced by Stravinsky, whose conducting seemed to me dry and precise.’

All but a few of these recordings have been previously available on CD. In the 1990s Sony released several box-sets in a series entitled The Copland Collection, and I assume these are those same remasterings. Given that the original Columbia LPs did not boast particularly great sound, it’s difficult to know what an up-to-date, careful remastering might reveal, although what’s here remains quite serviceable. What is new to CD is barely a disc’s worth: the premiere recordings of the Clarinet Concerto from 1950 (featuring Benny Goodman, the work’s dedicatee) and the Piano Quartet from 1951 (with Mieczysław Horszowski, Alexander Schneider, Milton Katims and Frank Miller). There are also four recordings from 1935 featuring Copland as pianist – including the premiere recording of the piano trio Vitebsk – although these were recently reissued by Parnassus as part of ‘Copland Before the LP’, an invaluable and generous single-disc programme.

The 1950 recording of the Clarinet Concerto is a disappointment. Copland’s conducting is sluggish at times and the Columbia String Orchestra’s tone isn’t always sweet or entirely in tune. Goodman sounds much more at home with the work in his stereo 1963 remake, providing a greater feeling of spontaneity, and Copland seems to have learnt a thing or two in the interim as well, as the latter performance flows more naturally and is more supply phrased. The Piano Quartet (1950) – a serial work, although you’d never know it as it’s tonally based – was recorded when the ink was barely dry on the page by the performers who premiered it. And what an intense performance it is. Schneider’s intonation isn’t always secure but I prefer this starkly etched interpretation to the 1966 stereo recording featuring members of the Juilliard Quartet with the composer at the piano. Granted, the central Allegro giusto movement flows more easily in the later version, but in such sharply angled music I wonder if that’s actually a good thing.

Now, let me state emphatically that if you’re at all interested in 20th-century American music, this set is essential. Copland might have lacked Bernstein’s interpretative imagination and flair but his stick technique became reasonably competent, and when he worked with an orchestra he felt comfortable with, the results can be very good indeed. He first conducted the LSO in 1958 and they were to become his studio orchestra of choice. They play, he later said, ‘as though they still love music’. And the pleasure both conductor and orchestra take in their music-making is quite audible in their underrated album containing both the Short Symphony and Dance Symphony, for instance, or in their richly evocative recording of Billy the Kid.

That said, this box doesn’t quite give us the full picture and should be supplemented with the pair of late-1950s recordings Copland made with the LSO for Everest. The earlier recording of Billy sounds fresher and more joyous than the remake, and is coupled with a broad and often heartfelt reading of Statements (especially in the Bartókian ‘Subjective’ movement). And I far prefer the incisive and characterful Everest recording of the Third Symphony to the spacious 1976 account with the New Philharmonia Orchestra – Copland’s last recording for Columbia.

A few of the recordings here feature Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic. There’s a bristling account of the jazz-inflected Piano Concerto with the composer at the keyboard, coupled with Bernstein conducting Music for the Theatre, another vastly undervalued work. And the final disc in this 20-CD set contains Lenny’s premiere recordings of Inscape and Connotations. The booklet provides the liner notes for each of the original LP albums but no introductory essay.

This review originally appeared in the May 2024 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue – subscribe today