The name Corpus cum figuris (“body with figurations”) comes from Thomas Mann’s novel about a fictional German composer, Dr Faustus. There’s no programmatic significance, says Poul Ruders; it was the title itself that set his imagination working. At times the piece does sound like a grotesque, terrifying break-dance, full of jagged, joint-dismembering syncopations. But something of Mann’s apocalyptic conception seems to have got into Ruders’s music too – the smell of sulphur, the sense of prevailing desolation. It comes over well in this moody but very precise performance. So too does Dramaphonia, a one-movement piano concerto with an ‘orchestra’ of 11 instruments. This is more sombre still than Corpus cum figuris, the pace prevailingly slow and brooding. But Ruders knows how to hold the attention, even when very little seems to be happening.
Four Dances in One Movement makes an excellent contrast. Now we’re nearer to the ‘lighter’ Ruders – the composer who could win over a Last Night of the Proms audience with his brilliant and entertaining Concerto in Pieces. The darkness of the other two works isn’t entirely absent from Four Dances, but the sweetly parodistic waltz tune of the second dance is delicious, while the markings for the third and fourth sections – “Ecstatic” and “Extravagant” – say just about all that needs to be said. Perhaps the performance could be a little more satirically stylish. The thinking is clear enough though, and the recording is lucidity itself. An excellent introduction to one of modern Scandinavia’s most consistently interesting composers.'