Percurama Percussion Ensemble, John Cage, Alberto Ginastera, Lou Harrison

This Naxos disc gathers four works for percussion ensemble from the Americas, played by Percurama Percussion Ensemble of the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen under the French conductor Jean Thorel. John Cage’s First Construction (In Metal), built on the figure 16, stands beside Edgard Varèse’s Ionisation, his first work for percussion alone. With them are Alberto Ginastera’s Cantata para América mágica for soprano and percussion and Lou Harrison’s concerto for violin and percussion orchestra.

The recordings span six years in the Concert Hall of the Academy. Ionisation was taped live on 6 March 2009, when Thorel first worked with the ensemble at the PULSAR festival. The Harrison followed on 9 March 2013, the Ginastera on 8 and 9 March 2014 and the Cage on 8 November 2015. Gert Mortensen, the Academy’s percussion professor, produced them with Niels Rosing-Schow, who also wrote the booklet note. Under the Percurama name, the Academy’s percussion students give concerts with Mortensen, and the school describes its collection of instruments as second to none. Ginastera’s cantata, Op. 27, sets pre-Columbian texts on the conditions of human life, with war, natural phenomena, daybreak, night and love, for soprano Signe Asmussen. Its six movements run from a prelude and song to the dawn, through a love nocturne and the warriors’ departure, to a song of agony and desolation and a closing prophecy. Harrison’s Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra was first played at Carnegie Hall in November 1959 by Anahid Ajemian under Paul Price. Naxos quotes his principle of a single melodic part accompanied or enhanced by rhythmic percussion, here the violin of Niklas Walentin, who graduated from the Academy’s soloist class in 2017. Cage’s eight-minute First Construction opens the disc and Varèse’s piece, at under six minutes, closes it.

Naxos CD 8.574244, released in January 2021, a compilation of recordings made in Copenhagen between 2009 and 2015.