NMC is celebrating its 30th birthday next month. What launched as a modest cassette-based operation (the name came from New Music Cassettes) has gone on to become Britain’s leading contemporary music label, with a catalogue that includes recordings of many of the most significant British works of our time, from Harrison Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus to Judith Weir’s A Night at the Chinese Opera, Benedict Mason’s Lighthouses of England and Wales to Tansy Davies’s Spine. NMC has assiduously promoted up-and-coming composers too, and typically the bundle of spring releases marking its anniversary ranges right across the age spectrum, from one of British music’s senior figures to one of its brightest new talents.
Not that Bernard Rands, 85 this year, would automatically be considered as a British composer now; he moved to the United States in 1975, becoming a US citizen eight years later, and though there was a flurry of activity here (a festival at the RNCM in Manchester, a Proms commission) at the time of his 80th birthday in 2014, performances of his music in Britain are rare. The recordings in this collection stem from that Manchester event five years ago. They provide striking proof of the vividness of Rands’ orchestral writing, and though the influences of his European studies in the 1950s, when his teachers included Maderna, Berio and Dallapiccola, have been superseded by a more gestural style, his ear for striking instrumental effects is as assured as ever.
The 2010 concert opener Danza Petrificada is the most recent work here, constantly changing direction under its halo of Latin American percussion, while the Cello Concerto, composed for Mstislav Rostropovich in 1996, is the earliest, its outer movements based upon a Welsh folk song, the centrepiece a rapt, hymn-like cello line. Rands was an undergraduate in Bangor, and there are further Welsh connections in the wonderfully supple, two-movement Chains Like the Sea, which borrows its titles from Dylan Thomas, but never becomes merely programmatic.
Among the latest issues in NMC’s debut series is The Air, Turning, a striking collection of works by Edmund Finnis, born in 1984 and a former pupil of Julian Anderson. There is orchestral music played the BBC Scottish Symphony under Ilan Volkov, ensemble pieces for BCMG and the Britten Sinfonia and solo pieces here, all showing not only how fastidiously Finnis constructs his music, and how cannily he selects and adapts his musical models, but also revealing his precious ability to transform the most straightforward musical objects, sometimes even a single chord, into something richly mysterious and compelling.
