Tune Surfing

James Jolly on NMC’s clever Music Map, version two of Chandos’s site and free Haydn from Rattle

Curved Ayres: NMC’s new Music Map

N

ew music is always likely to stir up different responses in different people. But before you can formulate such a

response you need to encounter the stuff! Concert-programmers are highly circumspect and rarely dare more than a little piece to open a concert, and never in the second half, heaven forbid. Of course, if contemporary music is your thing then you’ve dedicated concerts for sampling it. And that’s where the internet can play an important role – though the irony is that new music, which by its very nature needs

to be heard to start its journey towards broader exposure, is often bound up by copyright issues (which, of course, being new is unavoidable). So the opportunities to sample are often somewhat curtailed. One record label that has devoted itself

unswervingly to the dissemination of new music is NMC, which last year picked up another Gramophone Award for its splendid “NMC Songbook”. Newly unveiled on its website (nmcrec.co.uk), it’s a fine new initiative that allows you to place a composer

The essential download playlist No 33 10 mezzos

Cecilia Bartoli: “Sacrificium” (Decca) iTunes / Passionato Sarah Connolly: Schumann Songs (Chandos) classicalshop.net / iTunes Joyce DiDonato: “Furore” Handel arias (Virgin) iTunes / Passionato Bernarda Fink: Brahms Lieder (Harmonia Mundi) eMusic / iTunes

Susan Graham: “Un frisson français” (Onyx) eMusic / iTunes Sophie Koch: Schumann Myrthen (Cascavelle) iTunes Magdalena Kožená: “Songs my mother taught me” (DG) iTunes / Passionato

Petra Lang:Wagner Lohengrin (Ortrud) (Profil) iTunes / eMusic Sara Mingardo: Handel Duets (with Sandrine Piau) (Naïve) eMusic / iTunes

Anne Sofie von Otter: “Ombre de mon amant” (DG) iTunes / Passionato

20 GRAMOPHONE MAY 2010

in a kind of musical genealogy of influences, schools and styles. I recently stumbled across the music of Richard Ayres (b1965) – purely because the player on the NMC website loaded it and started playing it – and I must admit I was hooked. But how do you characterise music like this? Here is what NMC says: “This colourful disc showcases Richard Ayres’s melodic, eclectic and theatrical style, which owes as much to the exuberance of Janá∂ek as Kagel’s experiments. As Ayres explains, ‘I want to use consonance, dissonance, melody, texture, elephants, clouds, snowballs, anything, from any time and whenever it is needed’”. This at least steers you towards a certain expectation. But if you fire up NMC’s new Music Map (illustrated left), you are given a chart that explains Ayres’s musical “pedigree”, connects him to some of his influences and teachers, and places him in a solar system that contains three historical categories: Theatrical (“Composers who are largely preoccupied with dramatic texts and stage works or whose work contains a theatrical element, not necessarily related to the stage”), Postmodern (“Composers drawing upon, and mixing, elements from Tradition, Modernism and the Avant-garde, but in a playful, ironic, a-historical spirit”) and Post- Tonal (“Composers who retain roots in tonality without being either traditionally tonal or totally chromatic/atonal”), with Theatrical and Post-tonal being closer to the centre of this universe than Postmodern. I think I’d have liked the little category descriptions to list other composers who fit into these groups. The chart also links Ayres to his teachers

Morton Feldman and Louis Andriessen, as well as Mauricio Kagel – a roll-over descriptor, again, might have been nice. But I do like the idea and it certainly goes a long way towards demystifying what can be a very disconcerting art form. Actually the mention of Janá∂ek in the NMC thumbnail description of Ayres’s music intrigued me more than the mention of the living composers. Come the fourth movement,

“Exit”, of NONcerto No 37b for Orchestra there

truly is Janá∂ek, magnificently transmogrified in a spectacularly 21st-century way.

I

n April I mentioned that Chandos’s download store (classicalshop.net) was about to be unveiled in updated guise.

Well, that has happened and very handsome it looks! The site offers recordings in a variety of

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