Bernard Rands: Chains like the Sea

Albumbeschreibung

The British-American composer Bernard Rands studied in Bangor, Wales, and even learned to speak Welsh -- something not claimed even by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who provided the programmatic inspiration for the title work here. The Cello Concerto weaves a Welsh folk tune into its craggy thematic material, with the cello coming in at a lower register than the main orchestral material as if in murmured rejoinder to it (sample the opening movement). The album offers a good introduction to the later music of this composer; all the pieces were composed in the late 1990s or 2000s, and Rands has remained active into great old age. They give you an idea of why Rands has remained popular, albeit more so in the U.S., where he has continued to receive major orchestral commissions, than in Britain. His style remains marked by his early avant-garde training with Luigi Dallapiccola and others, but he has merged such models with an accessible, lyrical streak. The Cello Concerto, originally written for none less than Mstislav Rostropovich, is a consistently absorbing work played here by Johannes Moser, who has concertized with it, and Chains Like the Sea fits nicely into the long tradition of pictorial representations of Britain's more remote spaces, stretching back to Frank Bridge and beyond. The Danza Petrificada is an angular but infectious Latin-flavored curtain-raiser. The BBC Philharmonic is also at home in repertory of this kind, and the total result is a highly listenable album of contemporary music.

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