Appearing soon after the success of his elaboration of the sketches for Elgar’s Symphony No. 3 (NMC, 3/98), this disc is a timely reminder of Anthony Payne’s strengths as a composer in his own right.
Like most British composers who emerged during the 1960s, Payne was acutely aware of disparities between local and continental, conservative and radical predispositions. The earliest work here, Paraphrases and Cadenzas for clarinet, viola and piano (1969, rev. 1979) has clear points of contact with post-Schoenbergian expressionism, and there is engaging interplay between the rhythmic and harmonic bite which derives from that source, and the expansiveness and warmth of expression that flourish nearer home. The most recent work, Symphonies of Wind and Rain for wind sextet, string quintet and percussion (1991), has less in the way of overt intensity and concentration – this combination of wind and rain never blows up a storm, and the music tends more to the reflective than the assertive – but its ideas are attractive and its design well shaped, avoiding those still-familiar English vices of flabby harmony and ill-defined form.
Evening Land, a cycle for voice and piano setting Auden’s translations of Per Lagerkvist (1981), is no less effective as a cumulative structure, even if one questions Payne’s decision to alternate speech and song quite so determinedly in the early stages. But there are no reservations about the two other purely instrumental works included here. A Day in the Life of a Mayfly (1981) easily transcends the merely whimsical with its vivid ideas and brilliantly resourceful instrumentation, while The Song Streams in the Firmament (1986) confirms the special strengths of Payne’s distinctive personal synthesis of the hard-edged and the lyrical. Performances are uniformly first-class, and recordings likewise, save for a slightly over-resonant piano sound.'