Diana Burrell’s compositions are eventful and brightly coloured. It’s not difficult to trace their stylistic provenance: birdsong-like fanfares suggest the debt owed by both Messiaen and Tippett to Stravinsky, and various other sources as diverse as Britten, Birtwistle and the minimalists also hail into hearing from time to time. In general Burrell’s musical imagination is sufficiently robust to take such associations in its stride, and this survey of her orchestral music is a well-deserved tribute to a composer who celebrates her fiftieth birthday in 1998.
The best of the four works is the one billed here as Das Meer, whose full title is a verse from Luther’s translation of the Bible about the “creatures innumerable” to be found in the sea. Burrell’s musical response, in a score which uses a string orchestra with considerable skill, is much more than merely picturesque, generating an impassioned eloquence out of its dancing ostinatos. Das Meer dates from 1992, Landscape from four years earlier, and here I found parts of the piece too static and repetitive to sustain their length. There’s an abundance of striking sonorities, even so, and a relish for sheer sound which is a distinctive Burrell trademark.
Resurrection (1993) unfolds like a series of ritual dances, and Burrell’s allocation of a prominent solo to the cor anglais suggests an affectingly vulnerable victim in a rite of sacrifice and rebirth. A not dissimilar scenario might be applied to the Viola Concerto (1994), whose orchestral writing makes no concessions to the veiled tone-quality of the solo instrument. Yet the solo part, strongly projected by Jane Atkins, is well able to make its presence felt, even though the music seems to fall back too readily on rather splashily rhapsodic writing in its concern to generate a suitably extended form. It was in the concerto that I was particularly aware of the rather dry, close quality of the recording itself, admirably clear though all the details are in these first-rate performances.'