For a composer with James Dillon’s avant­garde credentials‚ the title Vernal Showers might lead you to expect a send­up of English pastoralism. In fact‚ there’s nothing the least frivolous or forbidding about this response to Coleridge’s The Nightingale. The music invokes the glittering cascades of sudden downpours while the sun still shines‚ and even the nocturnal song of the nightingale‚ without compromising Dillon’s very personal blend of spontaneous inventiveness and carefully weighted structuring. Parjanya­vata is an appropriate partner for Vernal Showers‚ its title involving two Sanskrit words for rain and wind. This exhilarating essay for solo cello is executed with charismatic brilliance by Rohan de Saram‚ and it’s prophetic of much of Dillon’s later work in its juxapositions of lyrical‚ dance­like and turbulently dramatic materials. That there is far more to his music than mere sound­effects is confirmed by the Second String Quartet‚ a fizzing firework display which is as exuberant as it is poetic‚ and a supremely imaginative rethinking of the traditional quartet principle of dialogue between degrees of unanimity and diversity. In Traumwerk‚ 12 miniatures for two violins‚ Dillon seizes the opportunity to devise a sequence of sharply drawn character pieces whose variety of mood ranges from sly comedy to unbridled ferocity. As always with this composer‚ nothing about the medium – like the contrast between playing vibrato and non vibrato – is taken for granted. The persuasive technical and interpretative virtuosity of all the performers on this CD should not be taken for granted either‚ and the various recordings (that of the Second Quartet made as long ago as 1993) are all superb.