AMERICAN MAVERICKS

The San Francisco Symphony’s ‘American Mavericks’ festival celebrated modernist pioneers – three of whom feature on this new recording – who shaped the music of the vast continent in the first half of the last century. Captured live in late 2010 and early 2012, Edgard Varèse’s Amériques and Henry Cowell’s Piano Concerto and Synchrony frame Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Organ with Percussion Instruments in a revelatory performance. Paul Jacobs sculpts a nuanced and characterful account of a work saturated in exhilarating melodies and scintillating rhythms, conjuring appropriately excitable and exotic hues from the gargantuan 9,235-pipe, 163-rank Ruffatti organ while cosseting its mysterious, meditative core to hypnotically eloquent effect.

MICHAEL QUINN Read the full review on Agora Classica