Lou HARRISON
(b.1917)
Concerto for violin percussion orchestra (1940, 1959)
[20.29]
Concerto for organ with percussion orchestra (1973)
[23.19]
Eudice Shapiro (violin)
David Craighead (organ)
Los Angeles Percussion Ensemble/William Kraft
rec 1975, 1977
CRYSTAL CD850
[43.56]
AmazonUS
Harrison is well served on disc provided you are prepared to trawl a myriad
different catalogues.
His frame of reference is typical of open-minded and eclectic Californian
culture; an affluent state - home to a film industry that paid the bills
for hosts of writers and musicians. Here was a milieu enriched by Europeans
fleeing pogroms and oppression. This culture provided the mulch for Harrison,
and his teachers Cowell and Schoenberg.
The gamelan patter-clatter of the violin work (properly entitled in Esperanto
- Koncherto por la Violono Kun Perkuta Orkestra) has less to do with
Schoenberg than with the singing line of the Alban Berg concerto. Its vitality
echoes into the Leonard Bernstein Serenade flickering with rhythmic
interest. The orchestra employs brake drums (is this where Herrmann's score
for White Witch Doctor got its inspiration?), plumbers' pipes, galvanised
washtubs, coffee cans, flower pots, wind chimes, clock coils - a battery
of clanging metallica. The full complement is rarely used in deafening
complexity. The preference goes to a tinkling reverberating webweave over
which echoing staccato the legato of the violin floats in a spiced cantabile.
The work has been played in concert by Eudice Shapiro and before her by Anahid
Ajemin. The organ work follows a similar pattern with the juxtaposition of
chanting keyboard lines chastened by dissonance and counterpointed by slow
or fast counter-patterns from the percussion. The concerto (no Esperanto
this time) is in five movements with the centre of gravity being a trio of
sections (andante - largo - canons and choruses). The canons drift
in leisurely convoy with Vaughan Williams' Second and Eighth symphonies.
The flanking allegros are a combination of warm extruded Franck, Poulenc
and dance rhythms.
Short measure I am afraid but a pairing of ineluctable logic. The age of
the recordings does not show. This will be welcomed by the open-minded.
Rob Barnett
Ordering address
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Orders from outside the USA please contact Crystal direct for quote.
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28818 NE Hancock Rd
Camas, WA 98607
phone 360-834-7022, fax 360-834-9680
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