Though it provides the overall title for this first album devoted to Raymond Yiu’s music, The World Was Once All Miracle is arguably the least convincing of these three orchestral scores. A song cycle to poems by Anthony Burgess, it was commissioned for the writer’s centenary in 2017, and first performed at the Manchester international festival that year. Though it certainly makes a more positive impression in this recording (taken from a later performance, conducted by Andrew Davis, with baritone Roderick Williams as the brilliantly articulate soloist) than it did at the premiere, the music still seems less personal and vital than the works flanking it, as though Yiu’s concern to register the wide range of Burgess’s talents had inhibited his own instinctive eclecticism.
Just how widely Yiu spreads his net of reference and allusion is gleefully demonstrated in the earliest piece here. The ingredients in The London Citizen Exceedingly Injured, from 2012, include the story of an 18th-century bookseller, George Orwell’s novel 1984, London’s Chinatown and Elgar’s Cockaigne Overture, creating an 18-minute “symphonic game” that’s part concerto for orchestra, part musical travelogue, and crammed with vividly evocative instrumental writing.
Virtuoso handling of the orchestra is also a feature of Yiu’s Symphony, first heard at the 2015 Proms. It doubles as a song cycle for the countertenor Andrew Watts, with settings of texts by Walt Whitman, Constantine Cavafy, Thom Gunn and John Donne; the one purely orchestral movement, a scherzo that comes second in the five movements, is headed by a quotation from Basil Bunting, and also reveals the symphony’s musical seed, a Scarlatti keyboard sonata.
While the poems share a theme of loss and remembrance, the symphony is anything but morosely introspective. There are pile-ups of Ivesian complexity, wisps of dreamy lyricism, evocations of 1970s disco (for the Gunn setting) and a final outburst of unmistakable radiance. Six years after the premiere (the performance here is a recording of that event) it still seems fresh, totally original and hugely impressive.
This week’s other pick
NMC’s portrait of Martin Suckling is also devoted to orchestral music. Whether through design or carelessness, the disc gives no dates for the four Suckling pieces that Ilan Volkov conducts, but they range from Release, first performed in 2013, to This Departing Landscape, introduced two years ago. The most substantial is the Piano Concerto, played on the recording with typical intensity by Tamara Stefanovich. Its heart is a becalmed intermezzo, cloudy with microtones, that’s perhaps the most involving music here. But there’s a bit too much that’s well-behaved about the outer movements of the concerto, just as The White Road, for flute (Katherine Bryan) and orchestra, seems rather generic, for all its careful craftmanship. And while the opening of Release, alternating massive common chords with tangles of microtones, is striking in its own right, what follows is less compelling.
