Are we really living through a golden age of accessible new music? The present issue provides fresh evidence that the flight from modernism can meld with the imperatives of the market to produce some pretty thin gruel. There’s not much here you won’t find better done in, say, a Morricone film score, which is not to say that Kamran Ince (born in 1960) lacks distinctive compositional tricks. His Turkish origins suggest themselves in his use of unusual doublings (in terms of both pitch and colour); he likes to dress up simple melodic ideas in quasi-Middle Eastern tone clusters; his handling of instrumental sonority (and there is a good deal of percussion) can be deft. In America, his distinguished teachers have included Christopher Rouse. And yet where is the long-range thinking without which Western concert music becomes just another (longer) backing track? Arches is not without a certain virginal freshness and works well enough on the level of a mood music suite, even if the opening suggests a speeded-up reminiscence of Stravinsky’s Orpheus.
While the booklet-notes hail all three works with rabid enthusiasm, I was not much taken with the larger pieces. Too often, one is soft-soaped with near-quotations from established classics: everything from Rachmaninov’s piano figuration to Andriessen’s hocketing and Part’s seminal Tabula Rasa is pressed into service – it is not clear why. Nor am I sure whether the crude monolithic chords that launch the Symphony No. 2 are meant to sound as non-Western as they do here – isn’t the first trombone simply playing flat? The second movement of the symphony opens with a rapt passage of Finzi-like string writing, but the orchestra sounds half-hearted at the (Glassy) start of the marine battle that constitutes the fourth. Generally speaking however, Ince’s formulaic simplicities are well served by the performers and flattered by clear, close, wide-ranging recording in the best traditions of the house. The music seems well heard but then there’s not a great deal to it. Or am I missing something? Over to you.'