You can almost smell the incense in the title work of this authoritative disk of three major 1980s works for Javanese percussion orchestra by Lou Harrison (1917-2003). The Aptos-based composer's seductive setting of his own paraphrases of the early-20th-century Greek poet Constantine Cavafy’s evocative poetry is drenched in cross-cultural history and eroticism, two of the grand old musical maverick’s favorite subjects. The veteran new music tenor and Harrison interpreter John Duykers shines in a fairly traditional Javanese structure that features an adequate male chorus and some beguiling suling (bamboo flute) passages.
Commissioned to commemorate the death of a pacifist, environmentalist, and former Indonesian ambassador to the U.S., A Soedjatmoko Set employs a text from the Ramayana often used in Javanese shadow puppet plays. In the lustrous second movement, “Isna’s Song,” the goddess Sinta finds refuge from injustice and travail in the wonders of nature — a parallel to Harrison’s return from an unpleasant decade in New York to the West Coast’s pastoral pleasures. Radiant vocalist Jessika Kenney’s extensive training in Javanese pesindhen singing makes her an effective interpreter for Harrison’s floating, ethereal paean to Mother Earth.
From the piano concerto's dramatic, stentorian opening chords, through the delicately haunting second movement, to the outpouring of sheer joy in the exuberant final movement’s glorious efflorescence of memorable melody, you can feel Harrison’s delight in that tart tuning’s pure tone intervals. Eschewing the Romantic model of the heroic soloist battling the orchestra, soloist Adrienne Varner (who plays in the Cornish College based gamelan and studied the music in Java) rightly makes the piano the lead dancer in a cooperative troupe, suiting both traditional Javanese practice and Harrison’s own ideas of music as the practice of a blissful community. It's simply some of the most jubilant music I've ever heard.
This and Harrison's other piano concerto (the other composed around the same time, but for Western orchestra and premiered by Keith Jarrett) rank among the most exhilarating ever composed by an American, though they’re rarely performed because the piano must be retuned out of the compromised standard equal temperament. Here and throughout this superb collection, the composer, who died in 2003, would have appreciated director Jarrad Powell’s long history with Harrison's music and sensitivity to matters of tuning and interpretation.