Review

In 1993, two Canadians – pianist-conductor Philip Headlam and pianist Douglas Finch – co-founded Britain’s Continuum Ensemble specializing in contemporary music. Here they present first recordings of works by two prominent English composers, both in their 40s but very different stylistically.

Kenneth Hesketh’s A Land So Luminous for violin and piano and IMMH for solo cello feature fragmentary outbursts, prolonged pauses and directionless meandering. In IMMH, an “imagined shamanic ritual, marking the passage from life to death,” the cellist plucks, bows, vocalizes and knocks on the cello’s body, but with no discernible trajectory. Hesketh’s three-movement Cautionary Tales for clarinet, violin and piano was adapted from his five-movement Netsuke for large ensemble. Both works ostensibly depict literary “events and characters” but offer only more fragments, silences and meandering.

Five engrossing pieces by Richard Causton follow, providing welcome contrast. Threnody for soprano, two clarinets and piano is a moody setting of a Russian anti-war poem from 1915. His 13-minute Rituals of Hunting and Blooding, two movements for large ensemble, would make an effective ballet score, with its wildly syncopated rhythms of the chase followed by the solemn initiations of hunters being ceremonially marked with their prey’s blood. Sleep for solo flute is a dignified elegy, commissioned by a widower in memory of his wife. Finally, Douglas Finch plays two atmospheric piano pieces, Non Mi Comporto Male and Night Piece, contemplative homages, respectively, to Fats Waller and Mozart.

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