Lincoln Portrait

Academy Award winner F. Murray Abraham narrates for the New York Philharmonic’s performance of Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait on the second program of Summertime Classics. Bramwell Tovey conducts.

Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, written after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, has come to stand as one of the most patriotic scores ever penned. Rather than having a singer intone Lincoln’s words, Copland opted to give them to a narrator and to “draw a simple but impressive frame” around the words.