This is the fourth CD of Michael Finnissy’s music to be released on NMC and the first to be devoted to the works for ensemble that the composer has written since 1990. It makes a fascinating comparison with Etcetera’s similarly groundbreaking release of ensemble music from the previous decade (2/92). Whereas Catana and Contratanze from the previous collection were extrovert and even celebratory in tone, the new disc is predominately reflective and elegiac.
Finnissy still plunders Eastern European music for its gestural and intervallic vocabulary as before. Even so, only the wistful Enek for solo violin adopts it as an explicit foreground feature and, interestingly enough, this is the oldest piece on the CD. The other three pieces take their inspiration instead from the Western European cultural mainstream. The titles of Traum des Sangers and Mars + Venus are drawn from paintings by Caspar David Friedrich and Rubens, while the gleeful WAM seizes upon fragments from Mozart’s early symphonies, piano concertos and divertimentos, with subversive intent. The Mozart fragments are scattered liberally between three totally unsynchronized parts for piano, flute and clarinet, perhaps taking its example from Finnissy’s 1984 String Quartet in which all four parts are played independently of each other. The NMC recording manages wonderfully well to dramatize the successive departures of the flautist and clarinettist off-stage without compromising the overall balance of the ensemble.
The idea of separate musical elements co-existing alongside each other is explored in Traum des Sangers, too, but in a less explosive way. Lines from two ensembles gradually meld together to create a dream-like atmosphere in which the foreground focus of attention is always left open to question, only for this reverie to be broken at the end by a number of pauses. The most haunting music, however, is to be heard in Enek and in the title-piece, Mars + Venus, which concludes the CD. Both pieces feature extended string solos. Charles Mutter gives a truly authoritative performance of Enek, bringing considerable lyrical feeling to a work that was originally commissioned for the 1990 Carl Flesch International Violin Competition; and Bridget Carey plays her long obbligato viola solo in Mars + Venus with harrowing intensity against the shell-shocked, sustained backdrop of the rest of the ensemble.
Indeed, all the performances here from Ixion could be said to be definitive, with the composer himself conducting Mars + Venus and Traum des Sangers (dedicated to Ixion’s director, Andrew Toovey). To sum up, a CD that is a vital addition to the catalogue and perhaps the best possible introduction to the music of one of Britain’s most distinctive compositional talents.'