Lou Harrison, Tim Fain, Michael Boriskin, Post-Classical Ensemble

This disc gathers three works by Lou Harrison that trace two of his lasting enthusiasms, percussion and the gamelan music of Indonesia, with the violinist Tim Fain as soloist. The Concerto for Violin and Percussion, dated 1940/1959, sets the violin against an ensemble of non-pitched percussion. The Grand Duo for violin and piano (1988) is a five-movement work that Naxos calls gamelan-infused chamber music. Double Music (1941), written jointly with John Cage, comes from the percussion concerts that the two friends gave in San Francisco. The label calls Harrison a protean innovator who espoused world music before it had a name, and the disc follows both his writing for percussion and his merging of Western and Indonesian idioms.

The concerto and Double Music were recorded on 13 March 2016 at Omega Studios in Rockville, Maryland, with the PostClassical Ensemble conducted by Angel Gil-Ordóñez, and the Grand Duo on 19 April 2016 at L. Brown Recording in New York, with Michael Boriskin at the piano. Joseph Horowitz was executive producer and wrote the booklet notes. In the concerto the percussion builds a clattering, finely coloured backdrop for long, expressive violin lines, with a Largo cantabile between two vigorous outer movements. The Grand Duo runs to 35 minutes across a Prelude, Stampede, A Round (Annabel & April's), an Air and a closing Polka, and Double Music is a seven-minute piece for the percussion ensemble alone. In The Strad's 2017 account, Fain plays the Grand Duo with Brahmsian intensity, judicious portamento and a narrow vibrato. The same review called the concerto "a compelling, deeply human experience" in Fain's hands and enjoyed the humour of the Polka. It found Boriskin struggling to match the violinist's energy and the ensemble "strangely mechanical" in Double Music.

Naxos CD 8.559825 in the American Classics series, released in 2017, with a fold-out booklet of notes in English.