•This week’s column is a summer roundup of the best of contemporary British music drawn from the large pile on my desk. In The Dream of the Rood (NMC), the Northumberland-based composer John Casken (b1949), whose music is steeped in the literature and landscape of the north, has turned to earlier traditions, notably the 12/13th-century Notre Dame school of Paris. He has ideal collaborators in the Hilliard Ensemble, Asko/Schönberg Ensemble and conductor Clark Rundell.
Also on NMC, performed by the Goldfield Ensemble, Paths is an intriguing introduction to the vivid soundworld of Erika Fox, with faint musical echoes of her Hasidic upbringing. Born in Vienna in 1936, she arrived in England at the age of two, and her moment, overdue, has at last come.
• Rundell, together with Andrew Manze, is also conductor on Gary Carpenter’s Set (Nimbus), performed by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Carpenter’s open-minded, high-energy music has no borders. Iain Ballamy makes light work of his jazzy Concerto for Tenor Saxophone and Orchestra, and mezzo-soprano Kathryn Rudge is the eloquent soloist in Love’s Eternity.
I’d also recommend Mark-Anthony Turnage’s A Constant Obsession (Resonus), with tenor Nicky Spence, Chamber Domaine and conductor Thomas Kemp; The Orchestral Music of Jonathan Dove (Orchid Classics), including the suite from his highly successful opera Flight, with countertenor Lawrence Zazzo and the BBC Philharmonic, conductor Timothy Redmond; Songs of Renewal (Dove, McDowall, O’Regan, Todd, Watkins, Weir, Williams), a cornucopia from Bath Camerata, conductor Benjamin Goodson (Somm); and another fine choral disc, the Elysian Singers’ One Equal Music (Signum Classics), in which they perform works by James MacMillan, conducted by Sam Laughton. All well worth a listen.
• Rocks falling in the Alpine Tyrol, feet crunching through snow, a chair scraping across the floor, the noise of poplar trees: check out the sounds that inspire composers, featured on Radio 3’s Hear and Now and available (if you can find it; worth persevering) on BBC Sounds.
