Copland

[LMcD]

http://bufvc.ac.uk/tvandradio/lbc/in...70021201119723

It's on EMI Classics CDC 754539-2, which is available from Amazon.co.uk - cheapest offer £6.26 including postage. (Cassette £7.49 on ebay).
Apparently she changes 'Fellow Americans' to 'Fellow Citizens'.

[richardfinegold]

It's the corniness of the grandstanding, on the one hand, and the sentimentality, on the other, that also leaves me cold. My preference for a modernish American composer idiom is for Virgil Thompson, one of whose borrowed folk tunes - might have been from "Louisiana Story"? - was also used in Copland's Rodeo, heard today. All that said, Maya Angelou's rendition of "Lincoln Portrait" brought pleasure for the first time in hearing the work - my version having the male speaker competing for the very demagoguery she beautifully avoids against the orchestral grandiosity. I have managed to avoid the Thatcher version.

Heard John Malkovich narrate Lincoln Portrait once with the CSO. When it’s done well it can be quite effective. It is Patriotic without being jingoistic.
I didn’t quite understand your comparison of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R in the interwar period. The latter was certainly the newer country, having been created about 15 years previous. As a Revolution, it was eating it’s own children while trying to export its Revolution internationally, as the French Revolution had tried to upset the International Order of it’s time while devouring itself internally during the Terror. The U.S. was in comparison a much more established country that was being shaken to the core as the economic principles upon which it based its Political System seemed to have failed, raising the spectre that the Totalitarianism that was sweeping Europe and Asia would as a reaction happen here and destroy Political Freedoms in its wake. Communism had achieved Mass Popularity with millions formally joining the Party (most of whom would abandon on it when the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the treachery of Stalin’s Agents in Spain became well known). The opportunistic Politicians
who ran HUAC delighted in dredging up these old affiliations so that they could hold power over them