NOW COMES BEAUTY

Commissions from The English Music Festival: Curtis, D Matthews, Carr, P Lewis, Pickard, Blackford, Lane, Wright & Owen Norris Roderick Williams (baritone), Rupert Marshall-luck (violin), David Owen Norris (piano); BBC Concert Orchestra/ Gavin Sutherland, Owain Arwel Hughes

EM Records EMR CD 037-8 115:05 mins (2 discs)

It wasn’t that long ago that Grayson Perry described beauty as ‘the elephant in the room’ in modern art. Now here are nine British composers who, in their very different ways, are determined to give that elephant a hearty embrace. We can easily forget how much courage such a stance would have taken until almost the end of the last century. It certainly did when David Matthews wrote his sumptuous and subtle White Nights

in 1980, for me the stand-out piece in this collection. If you didn’t know the date though, you’d probably guess it was one of the newest works in the collection – along, perhaps, with John Pickard’s grittily eloquent Binyon Songs and Christopher Wright’s darkly brooding Legend.

Some of this music could easily originate from a world in which Vaughan Williams, Malcolm Arnold, Eric Coates and even Richard Addinsell were still contemporaries. Is that a problem? Only if you want it to be, and presumably for ideological rather than musical reasons. A great deal of it is very enjoyable, and perhaps most encouraging of all is the sense that something genuinely new and fresh – rather than just superficially novel – could emerge from this kind of musical ‘back to basics’ attitude. The performances have warmth, polish and conviction, and the recordings are very good too.