Thea Musgrave - Turbulent Landscapes

Turbulent Landscapes
BBC Symphony Orchestra, Osmo Vänskä
Songs for a Winter’s Evening
Lisa Milne (soprano)
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Osmo Vänskä
Two’s Company
Evelyn Glennie (percussion) & Nicholas Daniel (oboe)
BBC Symphony Orchestra, Jirí Belohávek

NMC D153
Total Time: 69 mins

These BBC Proms composer portrait recordings [1998, 2005 & 2007] make the perfect disc to enjoy on your computer.

The main work is a sequence of powerful orchestral tone poems based upon dramatic sea pictures by Turner. Those are available on line, and so I provide links to them for viewing whilst listening.

The titles are 1. Sunrise with Sea Monsters
2. The Shipwreck 3. Snowstorm: Hannibas crossing the Alps 4. War. The Exile (Napoleon)
5. Burning of the Houses of Parliament
6. Sunrise with a boat between Headlands

Songs for a Winter's Evening, sets Robert Burns' poems of a young woman's life and loves, charming songs in a near-foreign language, which compounds the usual difficulty of getting the words of a soprano. But no problem, the texts are supplied with a useful glossary of Scot words to take you through the adolescent to old age life journey.

And the double concerto Two's Company, played by its dedicatees Evelyn Glennie and Nicholas Daniel is light and full of exuberance; the two soloists kept apart undil the last minute.

A thoroughly enjoyable disc from beginning to end by our senior ex-pat British composer (b. 1928) who has since the '70s lived in USA, but often comes back for performances from her large outputof notable compositions. She was more experimental in the '60s and latterly has focused on music with a dramatic element, including spatial management of ensembles on the concert platform.