Collection: Orchestral & Ballet Works (CD)

At the time of his eightieth birthday, in 1980, I asked Aaron Copland if he felt comfortable about having written enouch music. "Comfortable is hardly the word," he retorted. "And nobody's ever done enough." Still, he considered himself "lucky to have been given so long to be creative." Music lovers may well feel that they have shared in his luck; after all, concert life would be much the poorer without such Copland masterpieces as the Third Symphony, the Clarinet Concerto, Appalachian Spring and Billy the Kid, to name only a few.

Copland, who has been in frail health for several years, recently celebrated his ninetieth birthday. The patriarch of American music has not been composed for nearly a decade, but, as he remarked to me some time ago: "I'm amazed that I don't miss composing more than I do. You'd think if you have spent fifty years at it you'd have the feeling that something was missing, and I really don't. I must have expressed myself sufficiently." The present album, an extensive compilation of Copland's own interpretations of many of his most popular pieces, gives impressive evidence of the quality and variety of his achievement.