Music For Orchestra, Ensemble & Gamelan

Various orchestras and ensembles, Nimbus NI 2571/74 (4 CDs) ****

The American experimentalist Lou Harrison (1917-2003), celebrated here in Nimbus’s reissue of recordings from the Music Masters label, saw himself as a Pacific Rim composer. He embraced and studied the musics of Korea, China and Indonesia, and his interest in and compositions for the Javanese gamelan, an orchestra of percussion instruments, helped spawn a movement that has led to more than 200 ensembles springing up in the US. The pieces recorded here sometimes combine gamelan with voices or western instruments, violin, saxophone, trumpet, and, most intriguingly, given its percussive nature, harp. There are influences from early English music as well. The musical foundation is always melodic, even in the largest piece, the Symphony No 3 of 1982, with only one piece, the Grand Duo for violin and piano, showing the grittier side of Harrison’s musical character. See url.ie/6c45