Description

The four works on this disc – all composed in the 1940s – embrace the lingering end of one musical tradition and the vigorous upsurge of another. Mellifluous, retrospective and playful, the ‘Duet Concertino’ and ‘Prelude’ to ‘Capriccio’ were works of Richard Strauss’s Indian Summer – an old man’s refuge from the barbarism of war and its aftermath. What the public thought of them was incidental, even irrelevant. In the same decade, Aaron Copland and other younger American composers were reaching out, via radio, recordings and film, to a new mass audience. The European influence of ‘Appalachian Spring’ and the ‘Clarinet Concerto’, though inescapable, was minimised in a populist, vernacular idiom that absorbed native folk music and jazz.

Disc 1
1. I. Allegro Moderato (Richard Strauss) – Ernst Ottensamer/Stepan Turnovsky/Academy Of London
2. II. Andante (Richard Strauss) – Ernst Ottensamer/Stepan Turnovsky/Academy Of London
3. III. Allegro Ma Non Troppo (Richard Strauss) – Ernst Ottensamer/Stepan Turnovsky/Academy Of London
4. Prelude (Richard Strauss) – Academy Of London
5. I. Slowly and Expressively (Aaron Copland) – Ernst Ottensamer/Royal Northern Sinfonia
6. II. Rather Fast (Aaron Copland) – Ernst Ottensamer/Royal Northern Sinfonia
7. I. Very Slowly (Aaron Copland) – Royal Northern Sinfonia
8. II. Fast (Aaron Copland) – Royal Northern Sinfonia
9. III. Moderate (Aaron Copland) – Royal Northern Sinfonia
10. IV. Quite Fast (Aaron Copland) – Royal Northern Sinfonia
11. V. Still Faster (Aaron Copland) – Royal Northern Sinfonia
12. VI. Very Slowly (As at First) (Aaron Copland) – Royal Northern Sinfonia
13. VII. Calm and Flowing (Aaron Copland) – Royal Northern Sinfonia
14. VIII. Moderate. Coda (Aaron Copland) – Royal Northern Sinfonia