American Mavericks – Cowell, Harrison and Varèse by Tilson Thomas

Somewhere in a filing cabinet of American musical history there is a folder marked “modernists who got left behind,” and Henry Cowell’s name is written on it in large letters, right above Lou Harrison’s. Both men spent careers being described as important rather than being played, which is one of the crueler fates a composer can suffer — respected into obscurity. This disc, taken from concerts by the San Francisco Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas, argues rather persuasively that the neglect has been a civic embarrassment.

Start with Varèse, since he anchors the program and gives it ballast. Amériques is a monster — 125 players, a battery of percussion that includes a siren imported straight off the streets of Varèse’s adopted New York, and a sound-world that still, a century on, sounds like it’s discovering the orchestra for the first time. Tilson Thomas has lived with this music since his days as an assistant to Boulez, more or less, and it shows: he doesn’t try to tame the piece’s sprawl, doesn’t sand down its Stravinskian bones (you hear The Rite everywhere in the bass drum writing, in the stamping ostinatos), but he does give it shape, a sense of accumulating menace that resolves into those extraordinary blocks of orchestral sound. The San Francisco brass, unfazed by wide-open live acoustics, play with a metallic gleam that suits the music’s urban swagger.

But it’s the Cowell that will make listeners sit up. Synchrony opens with a long-breathed trumpet solo, muted, achingly lyrical — whoever is playing deserved a credit and didn’t get one, an omission that borders on discourtesy. From there the piece unfolds episodically, almost cinematically (fitting, given its origins as an aborted Martha Graham project), touching on Bartókian astringency one moment and something closer to Copland’s open-prairie diatonicism the next. It never overstays its welcome. Thirteen minutes, and not a wasted gesture.

The Piano Concerto is the real discovery here, and Jeremy Denk plays it as though he has been waiting his whole career for someone to ask him to. The opening movement, “Polyharmony,” is built on Cowell’s signature tone clusters — forearm smashed on the keyboard, elbow doing work usually reserved for fingers — and yet it never sounds like a stunt. Denk finds the music underneath the mastery, and that opening gesture, a granite chord blooming into color, grabs you by the lapels. The slow movement, pointedly titled “Tone Cluster,” is where Cowell shows real depth: dark, ruminative, with harmonic language that anticipates Messiaen by a good decade (Cowell got there first, worth remembering, even if history gave the credit elsewhere). The finale, “Counter Rhythm,” is sheer high spirits — cross-rhythms tumbling over each other, Denk clearly enjoying himself, the orchestra chasing him with real wit. You’d think, hearing this, that the piece would have entered the repertoire alongside the Copland or the Barber. It hasn’t. Programming committees have a lot to answer for.

Harrison’s Concerto for Organ with Percussion Orchestra is the disc’s oddball delight — the phrase “thoroughly enjoyable and slightly dotty” comes to mind and refuses to leave. Harrison studied with Cowell in the 1930s and absorbed the older man’s appetite for tuning systems and non-Western sonorities; here that means gamelan-inflected percussion writing — gongs, thundersheets, tuned brake drums for all I know — wrapped around an organ part that veers between the ecstatic and the faintly absurd. Paul Jacobs (not the great harpsichordist-pianist of the same name, who died in 1983 — a distinction worth making, since confusion persists) plays with tremendous flair, relishing the music’s theatrical extremes without ever tipping into camp. Messiaen hovers here too, inevitably, in the sheer color-drunkenness of the writing, though Harrison’s sensibility is looser-limbed, more Californian, less liturgical.

Sonically the disc is very good, not perfect — this is live concert material, and you can hear the hall breathing, the odd cough, a stage creak in the Harrison. I’d take that trade every time for the electricity you get in return: the audience’s ovation after the Cowell concerto is no formality, it’s real enthusiasm, earned.

Is there a rival version of any of this? Barely — that’s the point. Cowell’s own recordings of his piano music exist, historical curiosities more than interpretation models; the Varèse has had distinguished outings from Boulez and Chailly, both distinguished, neither more persuasive than this one. For Harrison’s concerto, this may simply be the only serious modern option in circulation.

A disc, then, not just to admire but to actually love — imperfect in spots, alive in every one of them. Cowell and Harrison deserve better than footnote status, and this release makes the case with real conviction. Buy it for the Varèse if you must. Stay for the Cowell. You’ll leave humming a piano concerto nobody told you existed.