This recent release from the British-Australian Jonathan Little is an extraordinarily varied collection of works that covers his Opuses 1 to 7. The composer, born in Australia, and now domiciled in the UK, is beginning to make a name for himself in America but is little-known here. This CD should make people sit up and take notice.
The booklet notes are a little scant on chronological detail so it's a case of piecing together the compositions' histories. The opening work is Kyrie, Op 5, which was sketched out in 1985 but only completed twenty years later. It's a short a cappella setting of the familiar first section of the Mass, with a haunting Tallis-like quality, that draws you into believing this will be an album of sacred works.
It's followed by an altogether different piece, despite continuing the religious theme: the Op 1 Sacred Prelude, a yearningly lovely single movement for string quintet, written in the composer's teens. Despite its prayer-like intentions, this could be a piece of pastoralism by an early-mid 20th Century British composer.
Fanfare (Op 3a) changes the mood again, with an aggressive and impressive 53-second outburst of brass and percussion. Terpsichore: “The Whirler” or Muse of Dance, the title work and the most recent of the compositions on the album (Op 7) takes us through nine varied episodes, forming the first of a series of works on the nine muses.
So much flitted through my mind while listening to this busy, whirling kaleidoscope of sounds – Aaron Copland, celtic music, the American minimalists, film scores. Peace breaks out in places (there's a section of real birdsong) but it's most memorable for its pacy, bouncy passages and weighty percussion solos, ending on something of the succulent grandeur of a Respighi tone poem. An extraordinary range of sensations.
The chunkiest work at 22 mintes is Duo Sonata on Elizabethan themes, a multi-instrument piece for two percussion soloists which explores different textures, beginning with and later returning to material from songs by Dowland and other Elizabethans. This is most obvious in the tinkling first movement (Intrada), with the poundingly insistent second (Toccata) resembling nothing more than the driving excitement of Birtwistle's For O, For O, the Hobby Horse or Panufnik's Concertino.
This is music that brings to mind so much else but at the same time isn't quite like anything you've heard before. It's not so much that Little hasn't found his own voice but he does take on many different voices in the expression of his vision. The music is never less than attractive (except maybe in the final work That Time of Year, an a cappella rendering of Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, which is hampered somewhat by heavily-accented vocalists from the Sofia National Opera).
The driving force behind the recordings, taken from a number of different sessions, is the American conductor Robert Ian Winstin, an outspoken advocate of Little's work. Musicians are gathered from various sources – the Thomas Tallis Chamber Choir, the Czech Philharmonic, Kiev Philharmonic and Cardiff Percussion Duo – and they by and large serve the composer very well, with excellent sound quality to boot.
This is certainly novel stuff and I suspect time will prove it to be a good deal more than that. Jonathan Little – it's a name worth looking out for.
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