The Anglo-French composer Philip Cannon (b.1929) has reached his late-sixties without making a particularly strong impact on the musical scene – at least as represented by recordings. The three chamber works on this CD indicate why this should be so, with music of strong feelings in search of a style, and a form which offers something more than fairly predictable routines. When structures are so substantial, the need for distinctive content is all the greater.
With the String Quartet (1964) the name of Bartok comes inevitably to mind. This is tightly motivic music, yet the effect is more earnest than intense, of something too dour and over-insistent to lift the spirits in the way that quartets by Tippett or Simpson invariably do. The Clarinet Quintet (1977) and String Sextet (1985) are both a little more flexible in form and character, and the Sextet, in particular, contains much deeply-felt music, but the tendency is always towards a rather overemphatic kind of expression and foursquare formal design, reiterating things that have already become familiar, even obvious.
The performances are well conceived, presuming that the rather hard tone adopted by David Campbell in the Clarinet Quintet conforms to the composer’s wishes. The recordings strike me as too tightly focused. Like the music itself the sound never opens out, but it is certainly crystal-clear: nothing is vague or imprecise.'