The American-born composer Nancy van de Vate is nothing if not well travelled. She now lives in Vienna, but the compositions on this disc were worked on in locations so diverse as Warsaw and Hawaii, Jakarta and Bratislava. She numbers among her distinctions the founding of the International League of Women Composers, and has won a variety of fellowships and other awards. Her orchestral music undoubtedly makes its presence felt, especially by means of densely dissonant climaxes whose weight and seriousness are appropriate to works with such grandly evocative titles. But on the whole her music lacks that distinctiveness and magnetism that leaves first-time listeners in no doubt that they will want to hear it over and over again. These sound-portraits of journeyings and outer space, for all their intermittent boldness, are curiously flavourless.
It may be significant that the work I'd judge the best of the four, the Concertpiece for cello and small orchestra, is the earliest—assuming that the date given in the notes (1976) is correct, and that on the cover (1985) wrong. It's less ambitious than its successors, less diverse in content, but more purposeful in its formal progress, ending effectively on a comma. Even here, however, there are signs of a rather loose, anonymous lyricism that gains greater prominence in the later works, and contributes most to a general impression of rootlessness.
The three later compositions all seem to be striving to relate, if not to synthesize, a host of opposing forces: modal and atonal, dissonant and consonant, lyric and dramatic are just some of the contenders that come to mind. If so, however, they do not convince this listener either through the actual quality of their ideas or by their formal design. What does convince is the high quality of these performances and recordings.'