COMPOSERS: Anderson
LABELS: NMC
ALBUM TITLE: Anderson
WORKS: Book of Hours; Four American Choruses; Symphony; Imagin'd Corners; Eden
PERFORMER: Birmingham Contemporary Music Group/Oliver Knussen; City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus/ Simon Halsey; CBSO/Martyn Brabbins
CATALOGUE NO: 3121
Between 2001 and 2005 Julian
Anderson was composer-inassociation
with the City of
Birmingham Symphony. This
mixture of live and studio recordings
brings together the five works he
produced during his tenure and
makes a neat chronological sequel to
the collection of his works from the
1990s that was released in August
by Ondine. Three are scores for the
orchestra alone – the earliest of them,
Imagin’d Corners, uses the CBSO’s
horn quintet as a concertante group
arrayed around the auditorium,
while both the Symphony (called
that, Anderson revealed, for want
of any more apposite title) and the
Brancusi-inspired Eden are singlemovement
works. The dazzling
Book of Hours, composed for the
Birmingham Contemporary Music
Group, is one of Anderson’s greatest
achievements so far, building from
the simplest beginning – the first
four notes of a major scale – into a
wonderfully rich study of thematic
transformation and texture, coloured
by digitally synthesised haloes of the
instrumental sounds.
Recordings are generally excellent,
with the spatial effects of Imagin’d
Corners nicely evoked; only the
performance of Eden – the premiere
at the 2005 Cheltenham Festival
– occasionally seems a little rough around the edges, but then to my
ears the work itself never quite comes
into focus. On the other hand the
meshing of live electronics with
the bejewelled ensemble writing in
Book of Hours registers much more
effectively here than it did at the
first performance in Birmingham.
Admirers of Anderson’s ever more
assured music shouldn’t hesitate.
Andrew Clements