Priaulx Rainier (1903-86) isn't so much a 'neglected' composer as one who didn't have much luck. She was a late developer, for a start. So were her close contemporaries Michael Tippett and Elisabeth Lutyens, but she had neither the former's deep rootedness in the past to ease a path to moderately frequent performance, nor the latter's adherence to what eventually became an orthodox 'ism'. Her style is highly individual, at the outset owing a little (but only a little) to Bartok and to her brief period of study with Nadia Boulanger, but adhering to no school and with roots in a culture that few of her early listeners would have recognized (she was born and spent her childhood on the borders of Natal and Zululand). The presence of Africa in her music is mysterious. Never a simple matter of quoting from ethnic sources, it seems to have been concerned with memories of light and colour as well as of sounds (Rainier said she felt more at home with visual artists than with musicians), but it was as much her background, and her language needed as much to come to terms with it, as the musical experiences of those brought up with Europe and European music all around them. Her musical maturity, the culmination of that difficult process, coincided with the outbreak of war and an imperative need to make a living from an occupation (teaching) which for a long while made it hard for her to expand a very short catalogue of works. A vicious circle of unfamiliarity of style breeding infrequent performance and vice versa built up (and those performances her music did receive were sometimes uncomprehending, even barely competent) which was only partially broken during the last two decades of her life.
What she could achieve despite all that is triumphantly demonstrated by the biggest work in this collection, Ploermel, for an ensemble of wind and percussion. It is an exuberantly vivid, passionate evocation of the bells and stained glass windows of a church in Brittany, its pealing clangour infused with a chorale element which crystallizes in a series of solemn interludes of refrains. As pointers to its sound-world my notes have ''Varese'' written rather hesitantly in the margin near the top of the page, ''late Tippett'' more confidently near the centre, even towards the end a query ''Maxwell Davies?''. There's no question of influence, more of affinity, and besides, Rainier's preoccupation with quite complex rhythms (which is where the Tippett kinship comes in) is combined with an absorbed exploration of often very basic tonal pulls, the tensions set up by semitonal and other clashes. Here and in the String Trio and Quanta such harmonic tensions are used with remarkable skill as a propulsive and unifying force.
Her music doesn't lack lyricism. Indeed a strong, sometimes angular lyricism is at its centre (all the more strong, all the more central for being stripped to the bone), most obviously in the very early (for a late developer) String Quartet. For an Op. 2 and a first major work this is astonishing in its assurance, in its precise imagining of what are often highly original textures. For example one of the first movement's two main ideas is a sequence of slow chords (the other is a wreathing pattern of unison or canonic quavers). Why does that sequence sound so grippingly strange each time it recurs? They are the very commonest chords you can think of, yet by their ordering and juxtaposition (in fact by a subtle process of building expectation and contradiction) Rainier seems almost to have re-invented them. A composer who can do that (and she does things no less striking in each of these works, the generation of energy from the interplay of very short fragments in the Trio, the eloquently spare lines of Quanta) is a creator of real consequence; this collection is a major re-discovery.
The performances are excellent, likewise the recording (though you will have to turn up the volume control for Ploermel). Imperatively needed next are recordings of some of Rainier's major orchestral and vocal works from the 1960s and 1970s, but the present disc has been shrewdly devised, while concentrating on chamber music, to give that synoptic view of her style which is so necessary to appreciate her stature, but which was so grievously lacking during her lifetime.'