condition (record/cover): NM / VG+ (in shrink)

Aaron Copland's two most demanding and least performed solo piano works, together on Odyssey. The Piano Variations (1930) is among the most austere things Copland wrote - a severe, concentrated set of variations on a four-note theme, the influence of Stravinsky and Bartók evident, the populist warmth of his later work entirely absent. It cost him much of his audience when it appeared and has retained a reputation for difficulty that keeps it out of most recital programmes. The Piano Fantasy (1957) is longer and still more complex, engaging with twelve-tone procedures in a way that Copland never systematised but used freely. Two works that present a Copland quite different from the composer the concert hall usually offers.