Maxwell Davies is one of the most prominent and revered names in contemporary music. On this CD we present chamber music written between 1952 and 1987 performed by the Kreutzer Quartet and renowned soloists. A Sunday Times 'Disc of the Year', 2003.

Michael Finnissy is widely acknowledged as one of the foremost composers of our day, and generally linked with the “new complexity” movement. The composer describes Mississippi Hornpipes as a “cut-up” of American folk-fiddle tunes. In Seterjentens Fridag, fragments of traditional melodies and generic figuration are welded together. Irish violinist Darragh Morgan has recorded over 50 CDs for labels including NMC, Naxos, Nimbus, and Signum. Irish pianist Mary Dullea, has commissioned and premiered works from composers as varied as Michael Finnissy, Johannes Maria Staud, Donnacha Dennehy and Gerald Barry.

Rooted tonality spiced with dissonance.

The Welsh composer William Mathias died at the grievously young age of 58. I knew his name because of the Sinfonietta on a Pye LP (GSGC 14103). His music came to mean more to me when in 1975 I taped from BBC Radio 3 the first broadcast performance of This Worldes Joie. It was conducted by the composer who directed massed choirs – including children’s choirs - and the BBC Welsh Orchestra. The soloists were Kenneth Bowen and Janet Price. I listened obsessively to this extravagantly orchestrated work on tape and became increasingly impressed and won over. His writing for voices is orally intriguing and inventive; the same applies to his startling way with the percussion. There are echoes of Britten but the music breathes a deeper humanity and a more yielding emotional air. You can now hear that piece on Lyrita SRCD325 having first been issued on an EMI Classics LP (ASD3301). After that choral broadcast from the Fishguard Festival I scanned the Radio Times and added recordings of his orchestral pieces Requiescat, Litanies, Vistas, Helios and Laudi. Hearing his Elegy for a Prince I was further won over by the lapidary Baxian orchestral technique and ceremonial-magical atmosphere - the aural equivalent of druidic tapestry in motion. As for his Dance Overture it is irresistibly catchy and has more rumba in it than the Arthur Benjamin genre pieces.

Mathias wrote three symphonies and three string quartets. We can hear the three quartets conveniently assembled on this disc by a quartet who performed the Third Quartet and who were then invited to tackle all three. This they did at three separate recording sessions so there is no sense of a gabbled or ill-thought through results.

The First Quartet is dedicated to Alun Hoddinott and his wife Rhiannon. It inhabits a sombre world afflicted, to varying degrees of intensity, by anxiety. The language stands between the gloomier reaches of the ensemble writing in Warlock's The Curlew and the later Bartók quartets. This is leavened but never completely dispelled by a Bartokian didicoi wildness of the violins at 16:38. At 19:20 the violin primo is memorably heard high in the stave whistling wistfully. The music ends in a not unclouded tenderness. The music of the four movement Second Quartet takes wing although always feeling the pull of sorrow. The solo violin carries this flighted buoyancy (tr. 2 4:02) but there are also vigorous chafing insect-stridulant voices. The second movement smacks of folk music veering between the Celtic muse and the Appalachian hills. There’s also a Britten-like pizzicato which in this close recording pings in the ears with physical impact. The andante returns to the gloomy undertow of the First Quartet. The finale has the exuberant complexity of the Tippett Concerto for Double String Orchestra as well as the seething weave of insectiform lines. Mathias's last quartet – The Third - was not intended to be his last. He had accepted a commission from the Lindsays but death intervened. The third is in three movements. Lyrical release can be found in the first movement as can springy Tippett-like ideas often set amid potently grave reflective writing. The finale begin dramatically with a sort of suppressed shriek and soon develops a strongly etched rhythmic energy - a rough magic that also ends the piece.

Interesting that all three of these serious works have an Eastern European leaning amid a rooted tonality spiced with dissonance.

-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

A fine anthology of recent music for trumpet by American composers, in basically tonal ''post-modernist'' idiom and with a wide range; three pieces for trumpet with piano in traditional ''sonata-accompaniment'' style, songs with trumpet obbligato and two works for trumpet and tenor sax duo, quite unique works from two very differently inspired composers. These are first recordings and feature one of America's foremost trumpeters, Chris Gekker, currently Professor of Trumpet at the University of Maryland, who has appeared as guest soloist with the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony and other leading orchestras and opera companies. Fine performances throughout from Chris Vadala, Clara O'Brien and Rita Sloan, who is also a faculty member at Maryland and also of the Aspen Music Festival among many other activities.

Michael Finnissy is one of the acknowledged geniuses in the field of new music, with a style which can be exceptionally adventurous (and difficult) but almost always retains a tonal core which reveals his myriad influences and inspirations often from folk music and classic literature. Of the current recordings in our catalog, those featuring works for string quartet, with or without other instruments, have been the most regularly popular. Here we welcome back the Kreutzer Quartet, one of London’s premiere ensembles, together with leading clarinetist (and Principal of the Royal Northern College of Music), Linda Merrick. This is the 13th in the Métier Finnissy series, celebrating the work of one of today’s leaders in the new-music world. The album contains the Clarinetten-Liederkreis (‘Clarinet Song Cycle) which features Merrick; the other works are all for string quartet. Included is Finnissy’s ‘continuation’ (not ‘completion!) of Bach’s unfinished final part of The Art of Fugue. A spellbinding and astonishingly perfect piece of four part counterpoint which extends and stretches Bach’s structures.

This new release contains all world premiere recordings. This album is being released in honor of the 70th birthday of one of the foremost composers of modern music, Michael Finnissy. The release contains detailed program notes, as well as booklet notes in English. Soprano Clare Lesser, clarinetist Carl Rosman, and pianist David Lesser perform the works on this album with aplomb.

FINNISSY The History of Photography in Sound • Ian Pace (pn) • METIER 77501 (5 CDs: 326:48)


The music of English composer Michael Finnissy (b. 1946) is difficult to categorize. It is exceptionally multifaceted in both its surface and substance. It is music that is filled with its own original ideas (and textures that sound like nobody else), but at the same time it is constantly making explicit references to other music. His music’s difficulty ranges from nearly unplayable fiendish complexity to exceptional plainchant-like simplicity, frequently within the same piece. Finnissy’s notation is likewise extremely varied, and almost all his scores exist in his astounding calligraphy.


The History of Photography in Sound (1995–2001) is Finnissy’s largest piano work at nearly 5.5 hours in length. Any attempt to summarize the piece in a brief review will fall significantly short of pointing out even a fraction of its facets. The pianist Ian Pace has been associated with Finnissy’s music since he (Pace) was in school, and he recorded this work shortly after its complete premiere about decade ago. For whatever reason, it is only now appearing on CD, but its release is a major event for those interested in Finnissy’s work or significant piano literature. Many of the individual movements/sections were composed as separate projects/commissions and premiered by different pianists. This excellently-produced CD box set also includes an extensive set of booklet essays by Pace (who is also a musicologist), and an even more extended version filled with musical examples is available online. In addition to his concert career (as a new music specialist), Pace is a very outspoken and caustic critic of academic musicology, and in recent years has become a very public advocate for investigation into the many sexual abuse scandals in British music schools.


Finnissy is himself a pianist, and his large catalog is dominated by works for the instrument. For him it has clearly been a source of continual musical inspiration, and the role of the piano in even his non-solo works is also extremely significant, even including an opera where the “orchestra” is simply a single virtuoso pianist. Each of the 11 sections of The History bear a descriptive name, ranging from “North American Spirituals” to “My parents’ generation thought War meant something” to “Kapitalistisch Realisme (met Sizilianische Männerakte en Bachsche Nachdichtungen).” As is nearly always the case in Finnissy’s work, the piece abounds with references and quotations to other music: from Bach to 19th-century music hall songs, and from Berlioz to Inuit traditional music. Sometimes these references are very explicit, but often there is simply a fragment of a melody embedded within the “tenor line” of a larger texture; these would certainly go unnoticed were it not for the composer’s trademark arrows carefully identifying the sources in the score. One of the booklet essays specifically addresses the quotations, and it challenges—in a typically Pace-ian confrontational style—the general critical response to these myriad references as nothing more than a sort of “found object tourism.” Pace breaks down all the different types of quotations into various categories, examining how each category of material is “weighted” in different ways throughout the sections of the work. The external references made in The History are not purely musical, either; literature and philosophy also make appearances. The sixth section, “Seven Immortal Homosexual Poets,” is conceived as a musical version of a poetry anthology, and each poet is treated in turn, wordlessly.


The composer has given Pace’s performances and this recording his enthusiastic recommendation, so it is to be assumed that the performance is definitive. No other pianist (aside from the composer himself) has been more closely associated with Finnissy’s music, and thus Pace brings to the project a true mastery of the composer’s interpretative challenges. Like many of Finnissy’s pieces, there is enough content in The History to keep one engaged through a near lifetime of listens. Certainly there are precedents for large-scale piano works of this scope, or even significantly longer ones: including numerous work by Sorabji and Frederic Rzewski’s “novel for piano,” The Road. In most cases of such large scale works, the pieces end up being quite representative of their composer’s preoccupations and principal artistic concerns. The History is no exception, and thus stands as a major work of a major composer. For those who are completely unfamiliar with Finnissy, they may wish to start with shorter works, almost all of which have been recorded. However, for those who wish to take an unforgettable journey, this is a work, like much great art, that embraces everything and, in the process, tells us something about ourselves.


FANFARE: Carson Cooman

Includes work(s) by Brian Ferneyhough. Ensembles: BBC Singers, Lontano. Conductor: Odaline De la Martinez.

FERNEYHOUGH Flurries. Trittico per G.S. Incipits. Coloratura. In nomine a 3. Aligebrah • Roger Redgate, cond; Ens Exposé • METIER 28504 (58:50)


For a celebrated and prolific composer, Brian Ferneyhough (b. 1943) is poorly represented in the catalogs, with just a handful of discs, and some important archive recordings unavailable. These Metier recordings were made in England in 2003, and they appear now thanks to the Divine Art company in North Yorkshire. Frustratingly, four of these pieces can also be found on competing CDs. The exceptions are Aligebrah for oboe and strings, written in 1996 (the longest piece on the CD at 18 minutes), and Coloratura , a short piece for oboe and piano.


This composer’s music looks fearsome on the page, but to the ear it’s accessible. The meaning is what matters, and Ferneyhough says his music is about “life.” I’d agree: life as it’s lived, thought about, struggled with, reconsidered, is more like Ferneyhough than Pärt.


The earliest piece here is the Coloratura from 1966, an enjoyably non-serial, modernist duo, with the players diverging, and occasionally finding common ground. All the other pieces are far more recent and much more complex on the surface. Flurries (1997) starts out like Carter, but entropy leaves an isolated voice, muttering irritably, 10 minutes later. The Trittico (1989) is, like the celebrated Cassandra’s Dream Song , an example of Ferneyhough’s manically multivocal approach to solo-writing. Life gets wrestled with, and once more leaves you alone with the sound of yourself. Incipits (1996) explores instrumental relations in the context of a series of “new beginnings” every minute or two, but no successful relations are established, and the tonal variety doesn’t add enough interest for me.


Aligebrah and the In nomine (2001) make the CD worth buying for Ferneyhough fans, though some of these other performances lack the final ounce of extremity. Aligebrah meshes oboe with wild lines from nine solo strings, before, as usual, ending with a solitary sound. In nomine carries on a centuries-old tradition, and is brief, to the point, and effective.


Ferneyhough uses music to express complex ideas, but as he points out, music is different from the other arts in the way it exists culturally and in terms of what one can get away with stylistically, with enough people. His own art will therefore have a limited audience, though soloists with an interest in transcendental technique will always be interested. There is wit and an extreme version of sensuality built into his work, especially when experienced live, but this music is often hard work all round. Ferneyhough collectors will want all Ferneyhough CDs, including this one. If you have no Ferneyhough, first get hold of the choral recital on Metier 28501, which may convert you.


FANFARE: Paul Ingram

Dan Dediu (b. 1967) is a Romanian composer whose genius and imagination remain to be fully acknowledged outside his homeland. As violinist Muresanu says, “Dan Dediu is a musical wizard who conjures styles and ideas from different eras, molding them into a cohesive musical discourse that is unmistakably his own.” The composer uses a process he calls ‘hybridisation’, taking existing music and combining pieces and transforming the result into a totally new and individual work. The most explicit example here is the ‘SonatOpera’ Don Giovanni/Juan, combining elements from Mozart and Strauss. But this is only one of the techniques used by Dediu to create his special and magical soundworld which is of today, yet will appeal to a wide audience.

The SonatOpera and A Mythological Bestiary were both written for and premiered by these performers. Violinist Irina Muresanu is a brilliant virtuoso with a singing, lyrical tone; she recently taught at the University of Maryland. She has been described as ‘irresistible’ (Boston Globe) and is a dedicated champion of contemporary music with a substantial discography. She founded the solo violin project ‘Four Strings Around the World’. Pianist Valentina Sandu-Dediu is also an accomplished musician, also known as a published musicologist and music historian.

Judith Weir (CBE), composer and Master of the Queen’s Music, writes: “Ed Hughes' refreshing, cultured, lovingly patterned music is built around a thoroughly contemporary theme; our present-day contemplation of landscape, and how we give it the attention and respect it deserves. Via music, the composer suggests, which works like the weather on a hilly walk in the South Downs. Our perceptions constantly change and re-energise as we encounter familiar objects while colors, shadings and vegetation are in a constant flow of development. The same can be certainly said of all the works in this rich collection, which surge forward with textural warmth and harmonic continuity.”

Ed Hughes’ music has been recognized for its outstanding craft and originality; operas, silent film, chamber, orchestral and piano works have been premiered around the world and recorded for Métier with commissions from Mahogany Opera Group, Brighton Festival, Glyndebourne, London Sinfonietta, I Faglioni and other leading ensembles. The South Downs is a range of chalk hills extending about 260 square miles across the South East of England. Ed Hughes’s music has special qualities which, like the area that inspired it, have universal appeal.

Edward Cowie is considered by many to be the greatest living composer directly inspired by the Natural World. His post-impressionist works, from the gigantic orchestral Leviathan (his first Proms commission) to his cycles of Bird Portraits and other chamber and instrumental pieces are drawing gasps of admiration from critics and audiences alike. Originally recorded for the University of Hertfordshire’s UHR label, this recording has been restored to the catalogue as part of the quickly-growing Cowie collection on Métier Records. The composer feels strongly that the individual works in the Bach ‘48’ and Debussy’s Préludes(for example) were a series of linked parts creating a greater whole. In his own ‘24’ Cowie has taken that principle but expressed it in his unique way – music that is impressionist, pictorial, descriptive and above all evocative… of place, time, flora and fauna” experiences of both natural and man-made phenomena. The Preludes follow the ‘Bach cycle of keys’ but at the same time are grouped into four books representing the ancient ‘Four Elements’.

Philip Mead studied at the Royal Academy of Music and has had a widely successful career, performing and broadcasting internationally. He had his own series on BBC Radio 3 exploring hidden pathways in piano music. A champion of contemporary composers, he founded the British Contemporary Piano Competition in 1988. He has been awarded honorary doctorates at the London College of Music and the Royal Academy and is a visiting professor of the University of Hertfordshire.

Blue Sounds is a set of meditations on a color - from its abstractness as an electromagnetic wave to Blues as a scale, a genre and a harmonic structure. All three works were written for Tom Hicks and mark a growth in fluency and an experimental approach to the sonority of the piano. Camden Reeves has written for several instrumental groupings but the piano has been a vital part of his life since the age of 5. Included amongst his many activities, he was appointed Composition Fellow with the Hallé orchestra at the age of 22 and is currently Head of Music and Senior Lecturer in Composition at the University of Manchester. Hailed as an artist of ‘magnificent pianism’, Guernsey-born pianist Tom Hicks has been praised for his ‘gorgeously creative playing’ that ‘transports the listener to another place and time’. Hicks is a gold medalist in numerous national and international competitions and holds degrees and awards from The University of Manchester, The Royal Northern College of Music, Yale University and Northwestern University, where he now lectures. His first disc featuring John Ireland’s Sarnia, ‘Tom Hicks: Ireland and Tchaikovsky’ has been described as ‘brilliantly evocative’ by Colin Clarke in International Piano, and ‘gorgeously creative’ by Scott Noriega in Fanfare. This new album follows his March 2022 album centered around the Liszt and Ireland piano sonatas and works by Clarke, Coleridge-Taylor and Stanford.

The Metier catalog which includes all types of contemporary music from the sweetest post modernist song to the most challenging avant-garde works, has nothing like this totally unique piece. Composed by Craig Vear, professor of digital performance and music at De Montfort University in Leicester, England, the work (to put it very simply) is an interaction between an electronically generated score and an improvising cellist. The initial digital score sends the compositional idea to the player, who can then explore defined boundaries and materials, and introduce rerecorded sound (and in live performance, video). Its various movements are based on the 1949 book Blues for a Black Cat and Other Stories by Boris Vian and aim to recreate in sound the imaginative realm created by the book, influenced also by jazz and the esoteric aesthetic of ‘pataphysics. Vear’s work has been described as ‘pioneering’ and ‘hugely exciting’. The work was composed between 2014 and 2018 and is dedicated to Rick O’Donnell and Anna Lum. Cellist Craig Hultgren is a major figure in American new music with over 300 works written for him. After more than 30 years with the Alabama Symphony he now works as a farmer-cellist in Iowa. He has taught in several fine music schools and is a performer of the highest caliber.

Jennifer Fowler was born in Australia in 1939; she moved to England in 1969 and has forged a very successful path as a free-lance composer since then. Over the years she has won several international prizes, and her work has been performed in Europe, Australia and Asia. Her output, which includes orchestral, chamber and instrumental works and vocal compositions, shows a composer with an individual voice within the contemporary mainstream. The works on this album are all receiving their premiere recording. The performers are first class throughout. Soprano Raphaela Papadakis won the National Mozart Competition, had her Carnegie Hall debut in 2014 and has worked with the Royal Opera House, Berlin Staatsoper and Glyndebourne. Mezzo Lauren Easton is a busy operatic performer, her Glyndebourne debut being in 2011. The impact of Lontano on the new-music scene has been profound and dramatic, also enduring. Formed by Odaline de la Martinez in 1976, Lontano has established itself as one of the most exciting and versatile names in the contemporary music world.