Roy Harris may be the most all-American composer you have never heard of. He was born in an Oklahoma log cabin and paid his way through Berkeley partly by driving a truck, before following his contemporary Copland to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger. His 1949 Violin Concerto is an ambitious work, sprawling but dynamic. Slower sections are rhapsodic, drawn-out and soaring – A Bluebird Ascending, perhaps – while more driven passages have the wide open landscape sound so evocative of the US, and which one might have previously labelled Coplandesque. The exuberant, hoe-downish opening and abrupt ending sound more modern; they could almost be by John Adams, whose dense, multi-layered 1993 concerto is the other work recorded here. Tamsin Waley-Cohen handles its gruelling solo part with athleticism and conviction, and both pieces benefit from the punchy playing of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and insightful conducting of Andrew Litton.
