Product Description Having taken up the post of music director with the Colorado Symphony in 2013, Andrew Litton has chosen a highly fitting program for the orchestra's first recording on BIS: the Wild West, it's folk music, traditions and legends loom large in Aaron Copland's ballet scores Billy the Kid and Rodeo. The two works were the result of the composer's search during the early 1930's for a new musical language. Copland himself described his reasons for this as follows: 'An entirely new public for music had grown up around the radio and the phonograph. It made no sense to ignore them and to continue writing as if they did not exist. I felt that it was worth the effort to see if I couldn't say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.' In the two ballets, this new direction can be felt in the immediacy of the music, but also in Copland's use of cowboy tunes. A similar approach, but with Mexican themes, characterizes the slightly earlier El Salón México, inspired by a visit to a dance-hall in Mexico and the atmosphere he experienced there. Whereas these three works belong to the most popular in Copland's entire production, the opening piece, An Outdoor Overture, is something of a rarity - especially on disc. Composed in the same year as Billy the Kid, the overture was part of an educational campaign with the slogan 'American Music for American Youth' and it's snappy rhythms and colorful orchestration will have made it as successful in it's original purpose as it is here, as a curtain raiser. The Colorado Symphony is obviously enjoying itself in this all-American program, as is it's conductor Andrew Litton, who joins the revelry as honky-tonk pianist in the Celebration section of Billy the Kid and the Ranch House Party in Rodeo, before bringing the disc to a rollicking end in that ballet's closing section, Hoe-Down. Review "...this album is a solid account of Copland's music. In all four of the selections, it offers an unabashed slap-your-thigh delivery of many of the idioms through which Copland practically defined "American music...""...Litton has certainly teased out many of his music's finer qualities..." --Stephen Smoliar, Examiner.com, January 10, 2016"This is "meat and potatoes" repertoire for a conductor like Andrew Litton, and he doesn't disappoint. He has the Colorado Symphony playing at the top of its form. The Outdoor Overture has both swagger and brilliance, and it never sounds as though it was composed for a youth orchestra (which it actually was). Of course Copland deserves some of the credit for that too, but this doesn't diminish the care and affection that Litton lavishes on the music." --David Hurwitz, Classicstoday.com, January 20, 2016"So we did the complete Billy the Kid and the complete Rodeo," Litton continues. "And it was so much fun for me and the Colorado Symphony to learn the rest of the pieces because you play the suites all the time... but not the complete ballets. And there really isn't that much more that was cut... but some of the music is absolutely gorgeous, and of course, when you play it all the way through, it makes total sense. So we had fun doing the complete ballets. And we did El Salón México and the Outdoor Overture. So it was a great first project with the Colorado Symphony for BIS and I'm very pleased with the results." --Julie Amacher, ClassicalMPR.org, March 16, 2016