Flux

Record and Artist Details

Composer or Director: Quinta, Mark Bowden, Kate Whitley, Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Gavin Higgins

Genre:

Orchestral

Label: NMC

Media Format: CD or Download

Media Runtime: 56

Mastering:

DDD

Catalogue Number: NMCD232

NMCD232. Flux

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
Airs No Oceans Keep Mark Bowden, Composer
Fidelio Trio
Mark Bowden, Composer
The Madness Industry Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Composer
Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Composer
Onyx Brass
Atomic Café Gavin Higgins, Composer
Gavin Higgins, Composer
Paul Hoskins, Conductor
Rambert Orchestra
Themistocles is Captured Quinta, Composer
Quinta, Composer
Duo Kate Whitley, Composer
Asher Zaccardelli, Viola
Eloise-Fleur Thom, Violin
Kate Whitley, Composer
Flux represents five recipients of Rambert Dance Company’s Music Fellowship scheme. Established by the company’s music director Paul Hoskins in 2009, the advantages of such a scheme are obvious: the year-long fellowship enables composers to engage and collaborate over a more prolonged period with dancers and directors, immersing themselves in the technical elements and principles of the form.

First up is Gavin Higgins’s Atomic Café, whose bright, pop-art-style title is in fact a reference to a satirical film from the 1980s on how to survive a nuclear attack. The idea of opening a piece on a single pitch has been turned into a modernist mannerism by many spectral composers but Higgins’s purposeful long-held opening D is poised for action. It soon shatters into a series of semitonal particles before finally exploding into a devilish doomsday dance.

Atomic Café’s connection with physical movement is obvious but Mark Bowden’s Airs No Oceans Keep is more difficult to intuit. Played with power and precision by the Fidelio Trio, it can’t seem to decide whether it wants to float on a sea of sweet consonance or plunge headlong into a dissonant vortex. Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s The Madness Industry, for brass quintet, takes its cue from a book that tries to define psychopathic tendencies. The result is a comically disturbing work full of dark one-liners, gags and punchlines.

On the other end of the scale is Kate Whitley’s delicately floating Duo for violin and viola, which brilliantly captures the dichotomy between stasis and movement in Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculpture Wrestlers. But the most original and distinctive voice is heard on Quinta’s Themistocles is Captured, whose post-minimal soundscape is held in flux by delicately pulsing rhythms on magnetic resonator piano and electronically manipulated violin. Another NMC treat.

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