The Tender Land
Ravinia Festival, June 24
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Copland and Thomson were a part of the same between-the-wars regionalist movement that propelled the painting careers of Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. Indeed, the scores for Appalachian Spring or Billy the Kid could make appropriate background music for an exhibit of Benton’s work. But the regionalist movement ran out of gas with our involvement in World War II, and a new internationalist fashion took over. Copland–by then honored and earning a good living from his teaching, ballet suites, and high-class film scores–tried to move back into the avant-garde, taking up 12-tone composition just as it was being dropped by others closer to the cutting edge.
The opera has both musical and dramatic problems. All of Copland’s greatest hits, the works that landed him on “Top 100” classical radio stations, were originally intended as background–background for ballet, background for movies. He’s the 20th-century American equivalent of Delibes. This isn’t music you have to concentrate on; it doesn’t have what it takes–style, immediacy, importance–to make it as foreground, though his gift for selecting effective bits of folk music and making his own use of them is very much on display. The show isn’t a dramatic grabber either. Copland and his librettist, Horace Everett, set a Steinbeckian tale of ordinary people, but they’re a bit too ordinary.
The smaller roles were all well filled, and the chorus sang and danced energetically in the big second-act party scene. There were a number of diction problems; Byrne and Owens dropped the most words, but only tenor Norman Engstrom, in the comprimario role of Mr. Splinters, was completely understandable.
The familiarity of these shows can make it easy to overlook the composer’s artistry. His scores are concise but complete; there’s nothing wasted, nothing unnecessary–and nothing left out. He had a rare gift for melody, and he never set sad or angry words to oompah-pah music. His use of orchestral color was superb, and he knew how to sum up a character in a couple of measures: you know all you need to know about Tosca’s passionate, jealous nature within a few minutes of her first entrance, even if you don’t know a word of Italian.
Baritone David Evitts deserves special mention for conveying the essence of his character, Sacristan, with vocal coloring and a few well-chosen gestures. The other comprimarios–mostly from the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists–sang well.
