Search - Roy Harris, Third Angle New Music Ensemble, Susan Smith :: Roy Harris: Chamber Music

Great pieces, capable performances, cheesy notes

Jeffrey Quick | 03/10/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Here are three of Roy Harris' finest chamber works, all from the '40s : the Piano Quintet, Violin Sonata, and String Quartet No. 3. It's nice to have modern recordings of these pieces. I think Harris has been unjustly neglected, and we won't know how unjustly until we get an integrale of the symphonies (esp. #11, said to be the most pessimistic). He's not a perfect composer; there's a tendency to noodle between third-related chords, though less so in these particular pieces than some. But he has a unique stylistic voice. These are capable performances, if a little laid-back.



The notes by Daniel Felsenfeld are pretty dreadful: "Influence of the Teutonic continent", "cross between a gentleman and a crank, between a maverick and a rube", "a high European sense of harmonic progression" (which, for all his root mobility, Harris really DOESN'T have, in the sense of directed harmonic function.). Then there's his list of "American symphonists": Schuman, Berger, Shapero, Diamond. He starts and ends well (Diamond may be our greatest American symphonist, at least of his generation.) But Shapero only wrote one symphony, and while it's a doozy, if one symphony makes a symphonist, then Beethoven was an opera composer. And Berger never wrote one at all, and precious little orchestral music; Sessions would be a better choice to fill that seat.



And the cover...why is it that "rural...open spaces" conjures up dilapidated barns? Is there something broken about Harris' music? Are we hicks too stupid and improvident to throw a coat of paint on our barns? How come when the "country landscape" is evoked, you never see a nice steel milking parlor with new silos, and a rust-free combine in the fields?



All that said, I would definitely buy it again."

American Counterpoint at Its Best

L. M. Johnson | Vancouver, Canada | 05/06/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Half a century ago, I was transfixed, as a teen, the first time I heard Harris' famous Symphony No. 3. This powerful and eloquent symphony can stand up to any in the history of symphonic writing, and it is completely American in its character, even as it uses classical forms such as the fugue. "Roy Harris: Chamber Music" offers a wonderful and representative selection of the same powerful mind and heart at work in the more intimate genres. The music has the same high quality, and the String Quartet # 3 is remarkable in its form: four prelude-and-fugue movements. Again, it is as if a Baroque master like Bach had grown up in the New World, but with all sorts of lyrical elements from the American experience. Gershwin, Copland, Barber, Harris: these are the kinds of composers who made American classical music so impressive in the 20th C., and I am delighted that some of Harris' thougtful and haunting chamber music is now available."