Errollyn Wallen, Orchestral Works

 Errollyn Wallen, Orchestral Works, BBC Concert Orchestra/John Andrews (Resonus)

Whereas with some composers one can tell who it is immediately, there are almost no two Errollyn Wallen pieces alike. Her Photography album featured five entirely different pieces. There might be something a bit more generic about Orchestral Works but she remains an artist of immense variety, without barriers and thoroughly outgoing. However many operas it is now she's written, only a fraction of her output is available on CD but maybe that's the way things are going with the hard copy item not considered essential to a new geneation of consumers. Except I grew up wanting to own the thing and hold it in my hand and that's how I'll stay.

Dances for Orchestra I'd be guessing at Aaron Copland or somebody C20th and American with all their spaciousness - created by horns- and open air energy but they aren't all frentic. VII brings to mind Charles Ives's Central Park after Dark, perhaps, IX is a brief hornpipe and X a sombre reading of Handel. I'm not sure if my American comparisons are conscious imitation but the Handel is, bringing forward Errollyn's awareness of and reference back to music history as in her re-working of Purcell in In Earth.

Much deeper in ideas, This Frame Is Part of the Painting refers to paintings by Howard Hodgkin in which a highlight is a dramatic sunrise in Sunrise over Hopkins, Hopkins being a place in Belize and not Gerard Manley and it is essential to know that or a calamitous misreadings could come about.

Fondant is about cake and one bursting with more flavour than Errollyn's preferred Battenburg by the sounds of it; The World's Weather opens mistily, shafts of light appear and then come maybe swirling stormclouds with the outlook 'changeable'.

By Gis and by Saint Charity is from what at 'A' level we were somewhat callously told was the 'Ophelia mad' scene, desolate and distraught and full of misplaced sexual anxiety. Postcard for Magdalena, for solo cello and all too brief in two sections played by Miwa Rosso, slow then fast, only serves to make one want a more extended such piece and maybe, fingers crossed, we might one day get such a thing.

Errollyn followers will know Mighty River which is more certainly American with its citations of Amazing Grace and C20th 'spirituals'. It's become a feature since it first arrived in 2007 and might be Errollyn's best known piece. 

Any such new release is an essential buy because I'm very brand-loyal to a handful of artists and if she hadn't appeared it wouldn't have been possible to invent or predict such a composer, not for the cross-cultural contexts and all the positive 'woke' but for the inspiration, the vivacity and conviction. I'd still stick with Photography over this album but I increasingly find myself facing up to and necessarily enthusing about such things as passion, commitment and sensation while wanting to excuse myself by saying I'm more of a 'well-tempered klavier' man, an ironist, even a Satie devotee (see above) and by now would prefer not to dance.

The other man's grass is always greener.