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BBC Music Magazine

Composer Christopher Fox describes himself as ‘often working at a tangent to the musical mainstream’. This marvellous collection of works for clarinet, performed by the excellent Heather Roche, certainly exemplifies the composer’s intense, playful and endlessly exploratory musical voice. Indeed, Fox describes in the sleeve notes how his music for the clarinet, ‘more that my works for any other instrument… represent a complete musical bibliography’.

The eight works featured here span almost the length of Fox’s composing career, from his semi-improvisatory, often virtuosic Divisions (1980) for bass clarinet, to the more recent Unlocking the Grid (2015) for clarinet and playback, a luminously meditative piece inspired by the huge, exquisitely-restrained canvases of American artist Agnes Martin.

Another highlight is the ferocious Straight Lines in Broken Times (1994) scored for two bass clarinets and tape, which conjures raging, roaring engines through a polyrhythmic soundtrack of sampled tones, across which two ‘live’ bass clarinets slide and spar.

The disc’s title work, Headlong (2007) offers another splendidly original sound-world, combining E flat clarinet and square-waves, a ‘deliberately simple’ electronic sound that Fox deploys to evoke something of a ‘scientific experiment’. The effect, like so much of Fox’s music here, is utterly intriguing, and brought to life by Roche’s controlled but expressive performance.
Performance ***** Recording *****