Higdon: Duo Duel & Concerto for Orchestra

Album review

Composer Jennifer Higdon is known as a fine orchestrator and, moreover, one who is adept at playing to the strengths of her instrumental collaborators. Hear her Harp Concerto played by its dedicatee, Yolanda Kondonassis, sometime. Here, the beneficiaries are percussionists Matthew Strauss and Svet Stoyanov in the opening Duo Duel. This is not the fiery operatic drama the title might suggest, although it is intensely virtuosic. Instead, it alternates the fireworks with delicate percussion textures that lead the listener into charmed realms. The Concerto for Orchestra perhaps takes Bartók's work of the same name, also with five movements, as a point of departure and harks back to the old concerto grosso genre, but it is at a whole level of virtuosity. This work, from 2002, has been recorded before, but this reading by Robert Spano, leading the Houston Symphony Orchestra, is probably optimal. Here, again, the percussionists, led by Strauss, sizzle and clatter. As much as any other contemporary composer, Higdon has threaded the needle between avant-garde innovation and popular appeal; the textures she creates are genuinely new, but they are accessible to anyone. A major contemporary music release, great for people who say they "don't like contemporary music."
© James Manheim /TiVo