Tom Coult’s debut portrait album of orchestral works Pieces That Disappear was released by NMC on 22 November. The album showcases three works commissioned and performed by the BBC Philharmonic for Radio 3, reflecting Coult’s tenure as Composer-in-Association. It features Daniel Pioro and Anna Dennis as soloists, with Martyn Brabbins, Elena Schwarz, and Andrew Gourlay conducting.
Coult’s distinctive voice comes through vividly… music that’s texturally rich yet strikingly translucent…[After Lassus] brings to mind the way Mahler used Austrian country dances in his music, creating rootedness and a benign melancholy...characteristically moving and never overwritten. These aren’t pieces that disappear, not at all.
The Guardian (Erica Jeal) 21 November 2024
The whole thing has a confident monumentality, and the brass band-style chorale in [Three Pieces that Disappear]…is extremely moving…[After Lassus] packs an emotional punch that makes it very rewarding listening.
The Arts Desk (Bernard Hughes) 23 November 2024
It opens with Three Pieces that Disappear, a 21-minute work premiered by Nicholas Collon in 2023, conducted on the album by Brabbins. The three movements of this piece are linked by music that is remembered, forgotten, imagined or deteriorating. It draws on different kinds of disappearance or forgetting, including the enforced silence early on during the pandemic; health conditions resulting in blackouts and the sense of familiar things becoming indistinct; and a dictaphone, whose record button had been pressed at the wrong time, ‘misremembering’ sounds. The final movement features a fixed audio element based on Schoenberg’s Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra (itself derived from Handel’s Concerto Grosso Op.6 No.7). The recording is by the Janssen Symphony of Los Angeles, with the Manuel Compinsky Quartet, conducted by Werner Janssen, and released in 1951.
Coult’s violin concerto Pleasure Garden is performed by Daniel Pioro and conducted by Elena Schwarz; the pair debuted the work at the Bridgewater Hall in 2021. It was written as a response to the Royal Horticultural Society Garden Bridgewater in Salford, Manchester, with the RHS amongst the piece’s co-commissioners. Each of the 25-minute work’s movements takes inspiration from images and stories of variously constructed ‘natural spaces’ in and around cities.
The first movement – ‘Dyeing the canal blue for Queen Victoria’ – is inspired by the titular monarch’s visit to Salford in 1851 and describes the mingling of blue dye with ferrous-stained water. ‘Francesco Landini serenades the birds’ follows, recalling the story of a 14th-century organetto player whose music-making first silences the attendant songbirds before raising a cacophony. The final movement – ‘The art of setting stones’ – evokes the artful asymmetry of the Japanese rock garden, whose goal is a prevailing sense of harmony and balance.
The BBC Philharmonic are joined by Andrew Gourlay and Anna Dennis – who created the title role in Coult’s acclaimed 2022 chamber opera Violet – for Beautiful Caged Thing. The 12-minute work for soprano and chamber orchestra sets text refashioned by Coult taken from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray; George Benjamin conducted the world premiere of the song cycle with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra at Aldeburgh in 2015.
The album concludes with After Lassus, also featuring Dennis and Gourlay and composed for the BBC Philharmonic in 2023. The 15½ -minute work takes six duets from Orlando de Lassus’ Novae aliquot (1577) and refashions the musical material “like plasticine – reshaping, stretching and compressing them, combining them, putting them in unfamiliar surroundings, and generally getting the coloured paint out”, as Coult puts it. Like Three Pieces that Disappear, After Lassus evokes musical objects that are half-remembered or only partially visible: the opening of the piece sees the soprano sing to themselves “absent-mindedly…as if recalling a tune”.