Were Henry Purcell alive today, the team from Argo would surely be watching his every pen-stroke and negotiating the rights to record as soon as the ink was dry. This company's attitude to new British music, the trendy end of it in particular, is hearty and inviting. ''Try it now,'' they seem to be saying, ''who cares if it stands the test of time?''
There is no shortage of notes coming from Nyman's pen at the moment, and time will indeed tell just how many of them endure beyond their first performances. Here are four very new pieces, the oldest of them given its premiere in June last year, the youngest completed on the day John Cage died (August 12th, 1992). For what it's worth, my own view is that London Brass have come away with the best of the bunch, that James Bowman and Fretwork have the freakiest, the Trio of London the dullest—and that harpsichordist Virginia Black has probably got very sore hands from playing hers.
Nyman is clearly developing a taste for multisectioned single-movement works. All four of these take between 14 and 21 minutes to play. Into that span of time a Schoenberg or a Berg could have compressed an entire chamber symphony. Nyman prefers a stream of self-contained miniatures, drawn together perhaps by a common thread but less obviously developmental or end-oriented. Cheeky and tender in turns, they make for easy listening. How many of them sustain more than a couple of playings will be a question of personal taste.
Certainly I'd come back to London Brass's ebulliant performance of For John Cage, if only because its crossed-wires of cabaret and swing, Stravinsky and Weill, colliery band and Salvation Army are such fun. The Self-Laudatory Hymn of Inanna and her Omnipotence, for countertenor and viols, is so preposterous and improbable that you need to play it more than once just to be sure you didn't dream it. Harpschordists will probably love tackling the dense, maze-like piece called The Convertibility of Lute Strings (the title is irrelevant to the music); I should have enjoyed it more had all that thrashing been kept within five minutes rather than 15. As for Time Will Pronounce, scored for piano trio and composed with the current Bosnian atrocities in mind, its not inconsiderable length might easily have been more densely packed with ideas, more fiery and emotive.'