Album review: Tamsin Waley-Cohen, Huw Watkins, An American In Paris (Champs Hill)

This debut programme from the gifted young violinist Tamsin Waley-Cohen is themed around Euro-American musical interaction of the inter-war years, when classical composition was becoming influenced by black American idioms.

This is most evident in Ravel's Sonate No.2 Pour Violon Et Piano in G, in which the pizzicato parts of the second-movement Blues are akin to strumming banjos; and of course in Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, featured here as a five-song suite of Jascha Heifetz's violin transcriptions. But the influence was two-way, as apparent in the languid Art Nouveau lines of Gershwin's “An American In Paris”, written after his visit.

Download: An American In Paris; Sonate No.2 Pour Violon Et Piano in G; Five Selections From Porgy and Bess