Jarvi doing Copland

Here's Neeme Jarvi doing Copland 3 better than any American except for... maybe Michael Tilson Thomas? But honestly, other than an MTT broadcast with the LSO I'm not sure I've ever heard a performance this great. This is a colossally hard symphony to play, and if you don't believe me, listen to any recording that Copland conducts - it's faster than any other conductor, and no orchestra can keep up with him. Lenny's recordings are obviously very moving, and never moreso than in reflective pastoral music, but... come on, if Copland 3 does not whiz by, it's a very long slog, and Bernstein makes it longer. Perhaps because it's too difficult for orchestras to play at full tempo - even the New York Philharmonic, or perhaps because he is trying to make the work sound more profound - something which, contrary to so much critical opinion, this work already is and needs no help from conductors to be. Jarvi doesn't get perfect playing from the Sydney Symphony to sound more 'American' than the New York Philharmonic. The fast string counterpoint in the finale has to sound like bluegrass fiddling. The second movement is another of those scherzos like Prokofiev 5 and Shostakovich 8 that have to sound like an aural equivalent to Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times - only here, Chaplin's Tramp is being lionized as the Common Man. So many of the fanfares (not the obvious one) have to sound like the raw American power that won the war - the factories, the weapons, the sheer awe of America's war machine - about which, if you really listen, Copland is not nearly as gung-ho about it as the music might make it seem. The mid-slow movement dance has to sound like as much a contra-dance as anything in Rodeo.

It's a very tough piece to play, and much more emotionally sophisticated than it ever gets credit for being. Sadly, musicians are still figuring it out. Not Jarvi though, he gets the whole thing. The pastoral passages have all sorts of eerie moments that anybody hears when out in the open spaces of nature, of which the US has more than nearly any country on earth. Jarvi deliberately underplays the Fanfare for the Common Man - mostly at a mere forte though he crescendos toward the end of it. The second appearance is the important one: if you don't hold back before the climax, there isn't much room for the climax to mean anything. He seems to hold back the tempo for the string counterpoint after the fanfare - probably because you need three weeks of rehearsal to get that passage right, but when the winds and brass take over, he goes fully up to Copland's speed, and we're suddenly hearing an American work of momentum, optimism, heroism and symphonic argument fully worthy of Beethoven. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuhwkKIqOvo