No 31: NONcerto for Trumpet.
No 36: NONcerto for Horn.
No 37b for Orchestra

Wim Timmermans hn Marco Blaauw tpt
Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra; musikFabrik;
ASKO Ensemble / Roland Kluttig

NMC F NMCD162 (64’• DDD)

Provocative postmodernism and unlikely journeys in the music of Richard Ayres

Resident in the Netherlands for two decades, Richard Ayres has amassed a notable catalogue, the inscrutability of whose numbering belies its range of approach and sheer diversity of expression, of which these works afford a good overview. Whether or not No 37b (2006) aspires to symphonic pretensions, its formal symmetry and cumulative momentum suggest a singular attempt to reinvent the genre – reinforced by the sense that the composer’s often fanciful movement headings are but a means of detracting attention from musical processes "serious" in spite of themselves. The other pieces are among the "NONcertos" in which Ayres more directly (though no less quirkily) tackles the thorny issue of the concerto: No 36 (2002) sends the horn on an unlikely journey that culminates in the theme-and-variations evocation of Anna Filipiova and her disappearance, while No 31 (1998) draws the trumpet into an eventful dialogue taking in an affecting – and unaffected – "Elegy for Alfred Schnittke" en route to an uproariously "rhapsodic" finale.

This latter work is heard here in a formidable performance that is also available on a Donemus release (4/04) which surveys the composer’s earlier output. Few who possess this disc, however, will begrudge having it once more in a different and no less enlightening context. The other performances are hardly less inside the Ayres idiom and there is a detailed contextual article by Christopher Fox to complement the composer’s own observations. Would that all musical postmodernism were as intriguing and provocative as this!

Richard Whitehouse