David Lumsdaine's Aria for Edward John Eyre is a work of major status. Costly and difficult to perform live, it has had few revivals since its 1973 premiere, so this recording is especially welcome. Astonishingly, the original team of soloists has been reassembled for this performance: Jane Manning, no less versatile and dazzling a singer than when the work was new; Barry Guy, wizard of the doublebass; Peter Manning, who helped Lumsdaine with the electronic components of the work, and here is responsible for the sound diffusion; and Gemini, virtuosic and thrilling as ever under the direction of Elgar Howarth.
If any musical work evokes the spirit of Australia, this must surely be it. Aria grows out of the diaries of explorer Edward John Eyre, whose precarious crossing of the Nullarbor contributed to the opening-up of Australia. Two speakers read from these diaries, and their narrative provides a structure for the work. But Lumsdaine is not centrally concerned with humans, let alone with heroes. Instead his score is a celebration of landscape. Shimmering textures, long sustained tones, a loosely-connected sequence of expressive gestures conceived within an essentially spiky, atonal style, above all the strangely disembodied wordless singing of the soprano: these are the components from which Lumsdaine constructs his 'landscape of the mind'. If the piece has any weak moments, they are precisely those points at which conventionally dramatic incidents cut into the music's epic flow.
Lasting close on an hour, Aria could well have been allowed to fill the whole record. Instead it is partnered with a most unlikely filler: What shall I sing?, a set of nonsense-songs for soprano and two clarinets. Though fun enough in their own right, in the wake of Aria they seem trivial, and I suggest you listen to the two works separately rather than in sequence.'