What does America sound like? To many ears it sounds like Aaron Copland, and the three ballet scores featured on this CD are why. What now seems like a mainstream national style was quite original when 'Billy the Kid' arrived, a music educated in Paris but bursting with New York energy and chutzpah and hankering to go west. The integration of American folk tunes into a modernist palette, alive with polytonality and vigorous rhythmic displacement, had never been achieved so successfully before, nor has it since. Of course 'Appalachian Spring' followed the same formula down a somewhat more genial path and became the most beloved of all American ballet scores.
Since the 1960s the performances of Leonard Bernstein have had no rival in this repertoire, but now they do. Even among Michael Tilson Thomas' many fine discs of American music, COPLAND THE POPULIST stands out, as these well-known pieces are made to sound fresh and alive again. This 'Billy' is a great, energetic dancer, yet has wonderful delicacy, stopping to smell the cactus roses, as it were, on the way to a tragic fate. 'Appalachian Spring,' for all its beauties, is more attentive than usual to its darker side, especially as it includes the rarely heard "revival" scene, an edgy, propulsive, and forward sounding episode that immediately precedes the final Shaker apotheosis.