An Invaluable Addition Chamber music by Brian Ferneyhough - heard by PATRIC STANDFORD '... strong and committed performances ...'

Roger Redgate is the oboe soloist in two pieces in this collection of Ferneyhough works that date back as far as 1966 when Coloratura for oboe and piano was born -- a work that explores both instruments in close and highly sympathetic partnership, the occasional gymnastics of the oboe set against the sometimes sensitive poignancy of the piano.

Corrado Canonici is the solo bass player in Trittico per G S, a piece written as a parallel to a quotation from Gertrude Stein's Literature as Composition, and Bridget Carey is the viola soloist with Julian Warburton's percussion in Incipits, written in 1996 for the 90th birthday of Paul Sacher. Flurries was written the following year for Ensemble Contrechamps' twentieth year, both title and work deriving from a poem by the American poet Archie Randolph Ammons, and particularly a line in a 1976 poem '... but motion undermines meaning with meaning'. Scored for six instruments which Ferneyhough divides into pairs, violin and cello begin and surrender to clarinet and piano to continue the series, and they gradually give way to the entry of the final pair, piccolo and horn

before all complete the cycle together. The short piece In Nomine a 3 (2001) is for woodwind trio, based on material by Christopher Tye.

The most substantial piece in the recital is Allgebrah, a title taken from the inventive world of Adolf Wölfli. It was his term for 'the fundamental creative principle underlying his internal vision'. Wölfli was a Swiss writer, painter and composer who died in 1930 leaving a vast amount of work, and Ferneyhough created a series of 'landscapes' for solo oboe and nine strings in 1996 which is here given a remarkably fine and clear performance.

Covering almost forty years of work, the strong and committed performances on this new CD are an invaluable addition to the collection of this composer's recorded work.