Lou Harrison - Music of Lou Harrison (1991)

Tracklist:
1-3.Concerto in Slendro (1961) [9:37]
Daniel Kobialka (violin);
Machiko Kobialka (tack piano I); James Barbagallo (tack piano II);
Patricia Jennerjohn (celesta); Don Marconi (percussion); Jerome Neff (percussion)
Robert Hughes, conductor
4-6.Three Pieces for Gamelan With Soloists (1978-9) [20:15]
Gamelan Sekar Kembar
7-11.String Quartet Set (1978-9) [26:27]
Kronos Quartet
David Harrington (violin); John Sherba (violin); Hank Dutt (viola); Joan Jeanrenaud (cello)
12-14.Suite for Percussion (1942) [9:38]
The Manhattan Percussion Ensemble
Paul Price, conductor

These gamelan-inflected works – pretty much a given with Harrison - are mostly from the 1970s with two insurgents from the 1940s and 1960s. He had been attracted to the sound of the gamelan since the 1930s and encountered in San Francisco in 1939. The Concerto in Slendro was written on a freighter travelling to Japan. It romps into action with a Lark Ascending-style movement at speed revolving around a gamelan canvas. There’s a peaceful blessing in the Molto adagio and a busy birdsong dithyramb for the final vigorous Allegro.
An ambling Main Bersama-Sama has French horn and flute in peaceful yet purposeful serenade over and through metallic gamelan patterning. The Threnody for the Mexican composer Carlos Chavez is from 1979, the year after the Bersama. It is a rhapsody for solo violin and gamelan ensemble. The music is in subdued light and evokes consoling groves of trees. Susan Bates makes a superb job of this viola-accented piece. The Serenade was written for the wedding of the two named parties. This is effectively a concerto for the suling – the Indonesian vertical flute – and a troupe of gamelan players, eleven of them. They here include both the composer and his life-long partner William Colvig. Just when you expect this piece to settle into a pattern it rushes away in a rapture of its own – hypnotic but not somnolent. It does away with a wonderful metallic resonance. The String Quartet Set is played by the superb Kronos quartet. Its five movements variously suggest the world of the viol ensemble but lightly seasoned with 1930s Tippett. The music is concentrated. In the Plaint it is faintly semitic and despondent, in the Estampie dervish wild and in the Rondeaux relaxed and slowly curvaceous. The Usul finale sways with the rhythmic iterations of Turkish music. Some of this echoes the writing of Alan Hovhaness … or vice versa. The oldest piece here is the inventive three movement Suite for Percussion, written during the USA’s first full year of the Second World War. Its whispers, crinkling noises, startling reports and hammering remind us again that in the 1930s Harrison worked in the Chinese Theatre in California. He was often to be found hunting in scrap-yards and junk shops in search of a piece of metal with the right sound. Brace yourself.
The liner notes – a sustaining meal in themselves - are by Harrison biographer Leta Miller, professor of music at the University of California. Miller is the author of two books on Lou Harrison: (Composing a World: Lou Harrison, Musical Wayfarer. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998; reprint, University of Illinois Press, 2004 and with Fredric. Lieberman: Lou Harrison. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006) as well as the Harrison article in the New Grove Dictionary of Music.


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