This important issue gives record collectors a long-delayed opportunity to catch up with concertgoers and radio listeners in exploring the music of one of England's most successful younger composers. Robert Saxton was born in 1953, and belongs to a generation whose tendency to be sceptical about the rewards of being avant garde must have been strengthened in his case by a wealth of stimuli emanating from teachers and mentors as diverse as Britten and Berio, Elisabeth Lutyens and Robin Holloway. The four works on this disc demonstrate how consistently Saxton can work within his own clearly defined territory. While musical echos of teachers, mentors and others can occasionally be heard, they in no way compromise the distinctiveness of the result.
The works included—all admirably recorded—are close contemporaries and represent four facets of a single impulse, exploring various aspects of the transcendent, from the metaphysical poetry of Henry Vaughan (The Ring of Eternity) through the mystic imagery of the Kabbala (Concerto for Orchestra) to the mythic figure who guards Valhalla (The Sentinel of the Rainbow) and Dante's vision of 'the light of God' (Circles of Light). It is in keeping with the other-wordly concerns of these subjects that the music should explore the multiple spatial perspectives of harmony rather than the human individuality of melody, and the pre-dominant aural impression is of well-differentiated harmonic fields animated from within by characteristic patterns of interval, rhythm and tone-colour. It is music in which the strings are generally subordinate to glittering woodwind, portentous brass and corruscating percussion. Saxton himself refers to ''a constant state of flux'', but this flux serves a strong sense of shape. There is never any doubt as to how the music's volatile figuration relates to centres of harmonic gravity, or how these centres function to support well-balanced formal frameworks. The music's engaging, urgent continuity is never so fierce that it fragments from the force of its own energy. Above all, there is nothing abstract or remote about this exploration of transcendence, but a consistently strong sense of human aspiration. It is the notable achievement of Oliver Knussen, the BBC SO and the London Sinfonietta, to realize this quality with abundant virtuosity.'