Erica Jeal 

Tamsin Waley-Cohen: Harris/Adams concertos CD review – athleticism and conviction

  
  

the violinist Tamsin Waley-Cohen
Under American skies … the violinist Tamsin Waley-Cohen Photograph: Patrick Allen

Roy Harris may be the most all-American composer you have never heard of. He was born in an Oklahoma log cabin and paid his way through Berkeley partly by driving a truck, before following his contemporary Copland to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger. His 1949 Violin Concerto is an ambitious work, sprawling but dynamic. Slower sections are rhapsodic, drawn-out and soaring – A Bluebird Ascending, perhaps – while more driven passages have the wide open landscape sound so evocative of the US, and which one might have previously labelled Coplandesque. The exuberant, hoe-downish opening and abrupt ending sound more modern; they could almost be by John Adams, whose dense, multi-layered 1993 concerto is the other work recorded here. Tamsin Waley-Cohen handles its gruelling solo part with athleticism and conviction, and both pieces benefit from the punchy playing of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and insightful conducting of Andrew Litton.

Watch video of Tamsin Waley-Cohen
 

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