Aaron Copland / Miss Saigon

On this day in classical music: Aaron Copland’s “Quiet City” was given its premiere by the Little Symphony at New York City’s Town Hall in 1941. The work’s inspiration came from Irwin Shaw’s 1939 play, for which Copland wrote the music. While its orchestral version is the one most often heard today, Copland’s original scoring was for trumpet, saxophone, clarinets and piano. “Quiet City” is a melancholy tribute to New York City. Listen to Antonio Pappano and the Orchestra of Santa Cecilia perform “Quiet City.” Andrea Lucchi is the trumpet soloist, with Mary Cotton playing the English Horn. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu06sqSIRdE

On this day in the musical theatre: “Miss Saigon,” Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg’s follow up to their megahit “Les Miserables,” closed on Broadway after a run that approached 10 years. The story parallels that of Puccini’s opera “Madama Butterfly.” In the stage musical, an American GI falls in love with a Vietnamese bar girl. Listen to Jonathan Pryce perform “The Amercian Dream” on the 1991 Tony Awards broadcast. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZJx5XjB9tw 

Musical musings: For all that seems galling about “Miss Saigon” — and for all that is indeed simplistic, derivative and, at odd instances, laughable about it — this musical is a gripping entertainment of the old school (specifically, the Rodgers and Hammerstein East-meets-West school of “South Pacific” and “The King and I”). Among other pleasures, it offers lush melodies, spectacular performances by Mr. (Jonathan) Pryce, Miss (Lea) Salonga and the American actor Hinton Battle, and a good cry. Nor are its achievements divorced from its traumatic subject, as cynics might suspect. Without imparting one fresh or daring thought about the Vietnam War, the show still manages to plunge the audience back into the quagmire of a generation ago, stirring up feelings of anguish and rage that run even deeper than the controversies that attended “Miss Saigon” before its curtain went up. Yet the text is not the sum of a theatrical experience, and however sanitizing the words and corny the drama of “Miss Saigon,” the real impact of the musical goes well beyond any literal reading. America’s abandonment of its own ideals and finally of Vietnam itself is there to be found in the wrenching story of a marine’s desertion of a Vietnamese woman and her son. The evening’s far-from-happy closing tableau — of spilled Vietnamese blood and an American soldier who bears at least some responsibility for the carnage — hardly whitewashes the United States involvement in Southeast Asia. “Miss Saigon” is escapist entertainment in style and in the sense that finally it even makes one forget about all the hype and protests that greeted its arrival. But this musical is more than that, too, because the one thing it will not allow an American audience to escape is the lost war that, like its tragic heroine, even now defiantly refuses to be left behind. – Frank Rich in The New York Times

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