McPhee: Tabuh-tabuhan - Ung: Inner Voices - Harrison: Suite for Symphonic Strings

Album review

Harrison-Ung-McPhee was one of the finest recordings of contemporary music to appear on a major label in the 1990s, a 1994 effort by the American Composers Orchestra under Dennis Russell Davies that appeared on UK Decca's imprint Argo. It features the Suite for Symphonic Strings of Lou Harrison, originally commissioned for the Louisville Orchestra in 1961 and first recorded under Robert Whitney for the orchestra's own label. The Suite for Symphonic Strings is one of Harrison's characteristic suites, cobbled together out of various movements ranging from throughout his career. However, this particular suite is one of his most successful efforts in that vein, and Harrison utilizes tasteful percussion to underscore imaginative tropes of old dance forms, ranging from French renaissance dances to the music evocative of Pacific Rim cultures, though he does not directly invoke them here. The other older work is Colin McPhee's imaginative concerto Tabuh-Tabuhan (1936) based on Balinese music; at the time Davies recorded it for Decca, this important work hadn't been seen on disc since Howard Hanson waxed it in the 1950s with Eastman-Rochester. The third, and most imaginative choice of the program, is Inner Voices by Cambodian composer Chinary Ung; this wildly colorful and strongly visionary piece is extremely flexible in its approach to orchestration and while unconventional, something about it captures the ear. Davies' Argo disc made a conspicuous number of strides in its time, among them, it demonstrated that contemporary orchestral music need not be punishing or uncompromisingly repetitive to be fresh, and that there is a sense of continuity from composers such as Harrison and McPhee to later developments, which, in mid-century, were regarded as isolated and cut off. However, when Polygram merged with Universal Music Group in 1998, the low-performing Argo line was one of the first labels trimmed from the roster, and this fine disc disappeared along with it. It was reissued in 2008 by the small Phoenix label.
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