Philharmonia/Bancroft review – fearless and fiery Copland is a dark heart of US programme

Royal festival hall, London
Part of the London-based orchestra’s season of American music, the programme featured Copland, Caroline Shaw and Samuel Barber’s violin concerto, brilliantly played by Renaud Capuçon

Large claims have been made down the years on behalf of Aaron Copland’s third symphony, written at the end of the second world war. But significant questions have also been asked, including by Copland champion Leonard Bernstein, who nevertheless made two recordings of it. Ryan Bancroft’s high energy account of the symphony, the centrepiece of the latest concert in the Philharmonia Orchestra’s autumn Let Freedom Ring season of American music, did not quite resolve the puzzle.

Serge Koussevitzky, who conducted the 1946 premiere, called Copland’s third the greatest US symphony ever written. It unquestionably gives voice to an optimistic postwar American spirit that chimed with the composer’s left wing New Deal politics and aesthetic. The finale, crafted around Copland’s then little known Fanfare for the Common Man, helped secure its place in the repertoire.

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