condition (record/cover): NM / EX

Lukas Foss's The Prairie (1944), a cantata for soloists, chorus, and orchestra setting Carl Sandburg's poem of the same name, is the work that established his early reputation as a gifted and ambitious young American composer. It won the New York Music Critics Circle Award in 1944 and was hailed as a significant contribution to the tradition of American choral music. From the vantage of Foss's later career - his turn toward improvisation, indeterminacy, and extended technique - The Prairie reads as both a starting point and a point of departure: the Americana of Copland and Harris absorbed and processed through a young composer's particular intelligence, the work of someone who would shortly move somewhere entirely different. On Turnabout.