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Reviews - Ivan Hewitt, The Times
A review of the NPO's debut CD, 'Lou Harrison: For Strings'
'Modern music so often means anxiety, complication and harsh
sounds. So it's refreshing to encounter the optimism and
innocent joy of Lou Harrison, one of those great musical
explorers and innovators that America produced in the 20th
century.
As the three pieces on this CD show, Harrison ranged far and
wide. There are re-creations of medieval dances, strenuous
fugues, slow movements with that wide-open prairie feel of Aaron
Copland, and a sinuous, plaintive melodicism born out of
Harrison's long study of Asian music. In the two Suites written
in 1948 and 1960 there are moments of dark complication, but in
later years he achieved a marvellous serenity, exemplified here
by the Concerto for Pipa (a kind of Chinese mandolin). In this
piece you find evocations of the Russian balalaika, Neapolitan
folk-song and even a medieval dance. It sounds like the worst
kind of cross-cultural m?lange, but it's done with such
simplicity that, miraculously, it comes off.
The soloist is Wu Man, who is to the pipa what Ravi Shankar was
to the sitar, and her performance has a winning delicacy and
tact. And the strings of the New Professionals live up to their
name, playing with scrupulous precision in the slow movements
and incisive energy in the fast ones.'
Ivan Hewitt, The Times
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