It seems almost bizarre that
Copland
's music for the 1939 documentary film
The City
has never been released on a recording. The notes quote the opinion of the critic
Mark Swed
that it is "an astonishing missing link not only in the genesis of
's Americana style but in American music and cinema," and it was the composer's ticket to the better-known film scores he wrote in the 1940s. The documentary shows a New England village as it transforms into a poverty-stricken mill town, a bustling city, and finally, a hypothetical planned "New Town." Perhaps performers have felt that the "New Town" section is anticlimactic in comparison with the virtuoso "The City II," a striking portrait depicting a fire engine, a busy lunch counter, and traffic, containing a passage that prefigures minimalist music. However, that single section is worth the price of admission here, and the whole thing is representative of
's musical and social thinking at a key transitional point in his career. As if this were not enough, the score for the film
Redes ("Nets")
by
Silvestre Revueltas
makes a fascinating complement to
, in whose career the importance of Mexico has not been fully appreciated. The documentary for which
Revueltas
wrote the music (co-directed by
Fred Zinnemann
, who later directed
High Noon
) depicts the struggles of Mexican fishermen as a monopoly takes over their livelihoods, and
praised
' tumultuous score. The performances here by the
PostClassical Ensemble
under conductor
Angel Gil-Ordonez
were originally made for a video featuring the influential writer
Joseph Horowitz
, who has investigated the populist strain in American music, but they stand as highly listenable on their own. ~ James Manheim