By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER [NY Times, 23 January 2007]

Aaron Copland worried about the durability of “The Tender Land,” his opera about a traditional, humble, rural 1930s family suspicious of outsiders and their morals. But it seems uncannily relevant: contemporary America is still often touted as a place whose small-town heartland, inhabited by plain-spoken, wary and conservative folk, is framed by cities teeming with deviants and elitists.