Mark Bowden was resident composer with BBC National Orchestra of Wales from 2011 to 2015. Two concertos composed during that time are the most substantial on this first disc of his works. It also contains the score with which Bowden first attracted attention, Sudden Light, which the BBC Symphony Orchestra introduced in 2005. Like the two concertos, that work comes with a package of extra-musical connnections – to Liebniz, prime numbers and a poem by Dante Gabriel Rosetti that provides the title – but its impact is a physical one: the systems Bowden sets up generate climaxes of great power, and his confidence in handling such large orchestral forces is unmistakable.
Similarly, Lyra contains allusions to the protagonist of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, the constellation of the same name, as well as a 17th-century viol tune, for a concerto in which cellist Oliver Coates’ solo line is sometimes almost overwhelmed by the busy orchestral textures around it. But the solo percussion writing in Heartland (Julian Warburton the soloist) shows how subtle and inventive Bowden’s textural imagination can be, especially in its use of tuned percussion, which includes the newly created aluphone, an array of tuned bells that sounds close to Indonesian gamelan at times.
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