Barry Guy has a knack of pitting harmony against relative dissonance and to great rhetorical effect. But it's no new formula: Berg did it in his Violin Concerto (summoning Bach from the midst of Mahlerian Angst), and when Tchaikovsky traced the image of Ophelia in his Hamlet Fantasy Overture, he too surrounded her in a cloud of rootless chromatic disharmony. More recently, Schnittke has courted similar techniques and now, in After the Rain, Guy reflects the surreal world of Max Ernst (the work is named after a specific Ernst painting) by combining intense musical meditation with angry refrains. Ernst's original portrays, in Guy's own words, ''four large masses of tortuous baroque-like remains as if left after some unfathomable catastrophe which are somehow held in a non-violent state of animation''.
After the Rain is scored for strings and is cast in ten sections of varying lengths. The first is all chaotic outrage, the second—a Chorale—grows from the chaos and then calms to a sullen confessional that recalls the emotive world of Barber's Adagio. The most striking passages occur in the three Antiphons (the third, seventh and ninth sections of the score), where initial affirmation suddenly flounders, giving way to a heavy, plummeting drone, rather like some huge, propeller-driven aircraft approaching its landing path. And, of course, spontaneous images crowd for attention: bombers on a sortie, supplies in transport, troops, casualties—and the countless victims of the ''furtively lurking beast in man'' that Guy refers to in his notes. After the Rain's most extended movement is a seven-minute Motet (section eight), pained, restless but steadfast in its rich harmonic base; and its brightest is an ecstatic, high-reaching Canon (section six).
Richard Hickox and his City of London Sinfonia appear to have taken all this very much to heart; their performance stints neither on rage nor song, and the recording—produced by Colin Mathews, with Tryggvi Tryggvason and Andrew Hallifax as engineers—is a veritable power-house of string sonority. After the Rain wears its heart on its sleeve which, given the urgency of its images and the freshness of its inspiration, is precisely where it should be.'