Four Dances from Rodeo

Buckaroo Holiday

Corral Nocturne

Saturday Night Waltz

Hoe-Down

Copland didn’t like cowboy songs, he thought. He wasn’t sure either that, as a musician born in Brooklyn of Russian-Jewish parents and trained in Paris, he was the right composer for a ballet set in the Wild West. He was persuaded to overcome his scruples, however, and his score for Billy the Kid, which contains no fewer than five cowboy songs, turned out to be far more successful than he had feared when it was first performed in Chicago in 1938. Even so, when the Ballet russe de Monte Carlo approached him with a project for Rodeo, to be staged in its 1942 season at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, he was very reluctant to commit himself. "Oh no!” he said to the choreographer, Agnes de Mille, “I’ve already composed one of those. I don’t want to do another cowboy ballet! Can’t you write a script about Ellis Island?" But she convinced him that what she had in mind was “going to be different" and Rodeo - which is more entertaining if less dramatic than Billy the Kid - proved to be even more successful than its predecessor.

The concert suite, Four Dances from Rodeo, contains all but five minutes of the original ballet score which, like that of Billy the Kid, is remarkable for its athletic rhythms and for its lean orchestral textures with not an ounce of fat on them. It too makes liberal use of authentic cowboy tunes. The opening Buckaroo Holiday sets the bustling scene with brilliantly orchestrated and vigorously syncopated snatches of melody, some of them based on the rail-road workers’ song “Sis Joe,” and finds a quieter corner among lyrical woodwind and brass before twenty-four bars of saloon-bar vamping set up the entry of “Sis Joe” in full-orchestral colour. The other main theme “If he’d be a buckaroo by trade” is introduced, after a little more vamping, by a comic trombone whose sudden silences are as amusing as its unsophisticated phrasing. This new tune (which is derived like “Sis Joe” from the Lomax collection Our Singing Country) is passed to trumpet and from then on then dominates most of the rest of the piece.

A timely poetic episode Corral Nocturne is inspired not by traditional material but by Copland’s sensitivity to atmosphere, which expresses itself in exquisitely evocative scoring, poignant fragments of woodwind melody and subtle rhythmic movement against a changing metrical background.

The Saturday Night Waltz is no Viennese ball. That much is clear from gruff sound of the open strings of the massed fiddles in the opening bars and, when it makes its first entry on oboe, the slow tempo and sentimental personality of a waltz tune echoing the traditional “Old paint.” The middle section sets an even slower viola melody against a rhythmically supple clarinet counterpoint. Hoe-Down also features the country fiddles, first of all in a square-dance tune called “Bonyparte” - not without the intervention of a little more vamping, this time featuring pizzicato basses - and then in a version of “McLeod’s Reel.” Virtuoso exercise for strings though it is, wind instruments are by no means excluded from the celebration, trumpets and clarinets least of all.

Rupert Avis©