Concertos are a popular format among contemporary orchestral composers: they not only tick multiple boxes in the commissioning process but come with a ready-made narrative, involving a visible protagonist in live performance, that appeals to a wide range of audiences. An especially prolific exponent of the concerto, Jennifer Higdon has found remarkable success with her instantiations of the genre. Her Violin Concerto for Hilary Hahn received the Pulitzer Prize in 2010, and the Library of Congress added Colin Currie’s account of her Percussion Concerto to the US National Recording Registry of recordings that are ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant, and/or inform or reflect life in the United States’.

Higdon’s catalogue is not limited to solo concertos: this Naxos release pairs her Concerto for Orchestra from 2002 with the first recording of a more recent concertante venture, Duo Duel, a double percussion concerto composed early in the pandemic in 2020. Higdon refers to the Concerto for Orchestra, which was commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra, as ‘a life-changer’. Its enthusiastic reception initiated a series of commissions that solidified her position as one of the most frequently performed living American composers.

Conductor Roberto Spano, whose advocacy first brought Higdon to widespread attention in the early 2000s, previously recorded the Concerto for Orchestra with the Atlanta Symphony in 2003 (Telarc, 4/04). His conviction that the piece is a landmark of the contemporary American orchestral repertoire remains undimmed, and is even more persuasive in this account with the Houston Symphony. Spano’s command of the arch-form architecture and logic of Higdon’s five-movement work makes for exciting drama. The music begins already white-hot, its propulsive momentum almost frightening in its intensity. Yet Spano and his orchestra avoid the danger of anticlimax, sustaining a sense of suspenseful discovery as the sonic focus shifts from the volcanic tutti of the first movement through a brief scherzando movement for strings to a gallery of solos for the principals in the long third movement – the centrepiece of the concerto. Colour and rhythm become events in Higdon’s high-energy language, so that the fourth movement, spotlighting the percussion section, hurtles forwards into a relentlessly accelerating finale.

Higdon wrote the single-movement Duo Duel (her 15th concerto) as a showcase for the Houston Symphony’s percussionists Matthew Strauss and Svet Stoyanov. Playing only pitched percussion, they share vibraphone and marimba for the first two-thirds of the concerto’s span. If the combination of virtuosity and speed borders on the prolix, the players conjure moments of strange beauty from their dancing cascades of notes. In the final part, each presides over a set of three timpani to enact a pitched battle, the orchestra egging on their thunderous tournament.