Congleton Review

If the CD of songs reviewed above demands repeat plays and may well benefit from listener recommendations, this CD is a little more complex.

It’s not quite as easy on the ear and needs several plays before any appreciation develops, although it’s not fearsomely deterring. (And Finnissy took his dog to the album cover photoshoot, to which we warmed and gave him a couple of extra plays).

That expert on all things, Wikipedia, says that Finnissy is prolific, and “notable for (his) dramatic urgency and expressive immediacy” — there is indeed a sense of urgency in all this — and an exponent of New Complexity, “a label principally applied to composers seeking a complex, multi-layered interplay of evolutionary processes occurring simultaneously within every dimension of the musical material… often atonal, highly abstract, and dissonant,” which this kind of is, and kind of ain’t.

If you want some easy Mozart, it’s not for you, but if you want to be challenged but also fairly quickly get on top of it, this is worth a listen.

“Alternative Readings” opens and it is all the above things at first. It’s flute, cello and piano all

going their own way, following Bruckner’s First Symphony. It’s a little unsmoothed, as the sleeve notes have it, but far from unpalatable, with some rather nice moments.

“Oxford in 1817” is next, Finnissy’s oldest surviving song and some solid ground after the going your own way, Lotte Betts- Dean (mezzo soprano) delivering most conventional songs, though number two (there are three) is idiosyncratic.

“Botany Bay” is where it starts to make sense, the slightly edgy and discordant flute overlain by Betts-Dean’s slightly plosive singing settling down to some kind of Eastern world music drone.

This is out now on Metier, MEX 77102.

—Jem Condliffe