Stuart MacRae - Ursa Minor: Chamber Music

Stuart MacRAE (b.1976)

Ursa Minor: Chamber Music

I am Prometheus

Hebrides Ensemble

Joshua Ellicott, Tenor

Dark Liquid

Hebrides Ensemble

Ixion

Hebrides Ensemble

cladonia bellidiflora

Hebrides Ensemble

Tol-Pedn

Hebrides Ensemble

Lento in memoriam Peter Maxwell Davies

Hebrides Ensemble

Ursa Minor

Hebrides Ensemble

fthinoporinos

Hebrides Ensemble

Diversion (The room behind the room)

Hebrides Ensemble

Parable

Hebrides Ensemble

Marcus Farnsworth, Baritone

This is an intelligently programmed album of intelligently constructed, sonically well-imagined music by one of Scotland’s most innovative composers, Stuart MacRae (b1976). Larger works for five or more players are separated by solos, duos and trios, providing maximum textural contrast and interest. The Hebrides Ensemble (with the composer himself playing percussion in the fifth track, Tol-Pedn) prove exemplary guides through MacRae’s at times gaunt musical landscapes, yet ones filled with much incidental beauty, as in the three solo piano pieces, Dark Liquid (2020), Diversion (2020) and Lento in memoriam Peter Maxwell Davies (2016), or his tribute to Xenakis, fthinoporinos (2001, a reduction of the slow movement of MacRae’s Violin Concerto).

The quintet Ursa Minor (2020) may be the title-track but it is the trio for clarinet, cello and piano Ixion (2013) that is the heart of the disc. The legend of the miscreant Ancient Greek, bound to a fiery wheel for eternity by Zeus, also inspired Rued Langgaard’s colourful, tiny Eleventh Symphony, with its baleful quartet of tubas, but MacRae finds wholly different perspectives, ‘rotating’ the musical elements in the first of the eight sections through the remaining seven. It amounts to a deconstruction of the myth, expressed through a mosaic of spare instrumental textures.

Two substantial vocal settings bookend the recording, opening out the picture of MacRae still further. First comes I Am Prometheus (2018), which sets a text of his own devising on the Prometheus myth. MacRae adds a tenor to the ensemble of Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro but there is little of the French composer’s ravishment of the ear. At the other end, Parable (2013) evokes a blasted musical landscape to set Wilfred Owen’s searing ‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young’, the words hanging in the air as if splayed on barbed wire. Forget Britten’s lyrical-tragic version in the War Requiem; MacRae’s setting is desolate, and powerfully so. Superb sound and excellent performances throughout.

Guy Rickards