Richard Baker

The Tyranny of Fun; Crank; Motet II; Angelus; Learning to Fly; To Keep a True Lent: Hommagesquisse; Hwyl fawr ffrindiau

CHROMA Ensemble/richard Baker; Birmingham Contemporary Music Group/finnegan Downie Dear et al NMC Recordings NMCD275 60:37 mins This taut, adventurous disc offers a welcome showcase of British composer Richard Baker. These eight works demonstrate his gifts as a composer of music that fizzes with a piercing, complex wit.

The opening track, Crank, scored for diatonic music box across multiple pulses, sets the tone for the album as a whole in its blend of the playful and unsettling. Such discomforting mischief continues in the disc’s title work. The Tyranny of Fun takes flight from George Balanchine’s ballet La valse and Ravel’s particular attraction to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Masque of the Red Death. While Ravel’s source material for La valse was the Viennese waltz, Baker here looks to the dance music of New York’s super-clubs of the 1970s and early ‘80s, transposing Poe’s ‘red death’ to the cultural moment just before the AIDS epidemic. The result is a mercurial and electrifying piece of music, given a particularly poised performance from the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group.

Baker continues his deft political commentary in Motet II. Composed in response to the murder of George Floyd, the work was created amid the composer’s pandemic isolation in rural Wales and draws astutely on Welsh folksong and the speech patterns of a BBC Cymru news item about racist graffiti in a small village in North Wales. Other highlights include Angelus, a magical piece for two percussionists that explores panic and calm, and a splendid concertante for basset clarinet and ensemble, Learning to Fly, which features a terrific performance from soloist Oliver Janes.

This is an invigorating and imaginative disc, expertly performed and recorded, which showcases the work of a major talent. Kate Wakeling PERFORMANCE ★★★★

RECORDING ★★★★