STUART MILLSON assesses some horizon-broadening CDs

Part of the pleasure (or occasionally, the necessary discomfort) of reviewing music, is to find unfamiliar works and composers – in genres, perhaps, not entirely to your taste – and embarking upon a process of self-training – dismissing your prejudices, trying to clear your mind and hearing the music as if it is the first music you have ever heard. Of course, the exercise is nearly impossible, but there are occasions when you genuinely begin to find an attraction to something that, hitherto, you might never have listened to.

The first such CD in this month’s review pile fits into the latter category: the chamber music of Justin Connolly (1933-2020) – an overlooked figure even in the realm of contemporary music, who, in the late-1950s came under the wing of Roberto Gerhard (composer of the choral-orchestral The Plague) and symphonist, Peter Racine Fricker.

Connolly, who became a teacher in his own right, developed what could be described as an astringent, even hard style, something which can be found and felt in a three-movement String Trio (Op. 43) – a work which might complement a Britten String Quartet, or the quartet by Stephen Matthews (a tonality-challenging work given some years ago at the English Music Festival).

Yet there is much light and shade in the score, and it would be fair to say that Connolly, like Britten, in his quest for a pure form of music, did not turn his back entirely on folklore. In Ceilidh, Op. 29, written with younger musicians in mind and performed in the US during the country’s bicentennial celebrations, the composer retains his customary ‘gimlet focus’ on technicality, but hints at an old-world atmosphere with movement titles such as, Gathering, Dordfiansa (spear-clashing dance), Night, and Four-hand reel. Recorded in venues as various as the Royal Academy of Music and the studios of the Australian Broadcasting Company, Melbourne, the passionate devotee of contemporary music and audio perfection will find the Justin Connolly collection essential listening.

Another contemporary-music CD – Distant Voices, New Worlds, Songs, Landscape and Histories – brings together the Sky Rhythms of Ed Hughes, Shirley J. Thompson’s Hymn to the Evening, Evelyn Ficarra’s What Larks, and Rowland Sutherland’s Modes from the Downs (the latter two pieces, both written three years ago).  In Sky Rhythms, Ed Hughes adapts words taken from the Mass Observation Archive Day Survey, from 1937 – an interesting and involving weaving together of everyday thoughts, worries concerning the world situation, and an evocation of Sussex – of England. Here are some extracts (the words of one, Mary Robinson):

I live in a seaside bungalow town, in a furnished bungalow,

Very small and draughty,

but fortunately,

looking out across open fields and country

to the South Downs…

… To the news’ agents

Daily Herald Placard

Stalin might do something to make our bread dearer

Further depressed by news in paper

which hopes that England will not let France down…

… The air is splendid,

we get whatever sunshine is going,

and witness superb skyscapes,

Felpham, where Blake lived, is near…’

A modern ‘Lark Ascending,’ a contemporary ‘Land of Lost Content,’ a ‘Paradise Postponed,’ or the paintings of John or Paul Nash, Evelyn Mary Dunbar, John Piper, Eric Ravilious – all of these thoughts and associations came into my mind in this strongly modern setting, which includes electric guitar, as well as flute and clarinet. Expertly performed, this production by Sussex musicians (ensembles, The New Music Players, The Orchestra of Sound and Light) shows that the landscape inspiration in our artistic DNA is unbroken.

A mellow tonality of summer warmth and wandering can be enjoyed in Shirley J. Thompson’s An Hymn to the Evening (a setting of Phillis Wheatley, from the eighteenth century) and in Matthew Sheeran’s Languet Anima, in which echoes of fourteenth-century music gently appear and drift for an all-too-brief three minutes — a piece reminiscent of modern orchestral settings of Byrd or Dowland.

Finally, to the music of Arthur Butterworth (1923-2014), a one-time player in the Hallé Orchestra (incidentally, his signature appeared, alongside that of his orchestral colleagues on the score of Vaughan Williams’s Eighth Symphony – premiered by Manchester’s great orchestra) – but he went on, not in the orchestral ranks, but to forge a career as a composer.

Not for Butterworth, though, the challenges of atonality, the abandonment of convention by the brave, new ‘Manchester School’ of Maxwell Davies, Goehr and Birtwistle. In Butterworth, we are taken by the hand, rucksacks on our backs – as if by a musical Wainwright – to the peaks and tarns of the North, in a rhapsodic, but never sweet or self-consciously nostalgic survey of sky, rock, scrubby path, rainfall, tufts of moorland grass vibrating in the wind, and eerie, supernatural forest shadows. The Fifth Symphony from 2001-2; Three Nocturnes, Northern Summer Nights; The Quiet Tarn; The Green Wind – the listener will revel in the Sibelius-like passage of clouds, the full use of the late-romantic orchestra (with some gorgeous harp moments) and a sense of escapism, dreamy altitudes, and communing with Nature. As Butterworth proves, not all contemporary music has to conform to one standard. And as the South Downs composers also reveal, modernism need not be removed from a wider audience.

CD details: Justin Connolly, Music for Strings (plus…), metier label, mex 77209; Distant Voices, New Worlds, metier, mex 77131; Arthur Butterworth, Symphony No. 5 etc, Dutton Epoch, CDLX 7253. Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by the composer