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OUT NOW: Radius: ep-one

Radius: ep-one
£ 7.00 - Buy Now

Radius specialise in the performance of new music from around the world written by living composers, together with works by 20th-century masters. Radius is made up of six outstanding young international concert artists, and aims to showcase their individual talent both as soloists and together, performing new music to the highest possible standard.

Radius website: www.radiusmusic.org

ep-one is Radius's debut CD, and features two works by Tim Benjamin alongside Ian Vine's work underpaintings. ep-one is available now through the Radius website.

Tim Benjamin: Five Bagatelles

In Tim Benjamin's Five Bagatelles, the listener is taken on a journey through the composer's personal musical memory. Dramatic, terse, and often amusing, the five movements provide an acerbic commentary on music as diverse as folk idioms - Bartók and Dvorak here, not Vaughan Williams and Henry Wood - and mid-20th century modernism, 1930s swing and Romantic elegy. These idioms, however, are not encountered with a straight face. The music is twisted, turned, and the composition subversive, tongue-in-cheek; unlikely combinations are found side-by-side or even on top of each other. The music is dissected and questioned, half-remembered and re-heard.

Nothing is quite as it seems in this music: during the fourth movement, for example, after an extended, "serious", and agitated flute solo the listener is launched into a wheezy, imaginary Wesleyan or Anglican hymn-tune. Is this a memory of hours spent as a boarding-school chorister? During rehearsals, Benjamin compared this movement to an impassioned and pious sermon given by an earnest preacher - but then exhorted the performers to imagine that the irreverent Reverend was "wearing ladies' underwear".

• I. Animato, ritmico - Rustico - Com primo
• II. Adagio, con spirito - Grazioso, non troppo allegro - Tempo I
• III. Allegro, capricioso - Presto, agitato - Più presto
• IV. Agitato, scherzando - Solenne, religioso
• V. Largo

Tim Benjamin: Prelude I for solo piano

Tim Benjamin's Prelude I is the first of a series of works for solo piano, which examine the nature of form, self-representation, and self-reference. These works are strongly influenced by Hofstadter's seminal work Gödel, Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which debates the question of consciousness, and attempts to discover what "self" really means. The book uses the drawings of Escher and the music of Bach to illustrate problems in mathematics and logic, alongside numerous amusing and highly illustrative dialogues between Achilles, a Tortoise, and others, based on Lewis Carroll's What the Tortoise Said to Achilles.

In Prelude I, Benjamin portrays such a conversation through the classical "Rondo" form, which is the subject of investigation in this music. In classical music, the word Rondo refers to both a form, in which a principal theme (or "refrain") alternates with one or more contrasting themes (or "episodes"), and also to a character-type: music that is fast, and vivacious. In the imagined conversation of Benjamin's Prelude I, strangers meet on the road to a common destination. Benjamin has suggested that the road (the refrain, in this work) is the road to Rome, and the strangers (i.e. the episodes) might be as diverse as Achilles with the Tortoise, Julius Caesar, Zeno, or St Paul. The refrain is easily identified as grand, imperial, and overbearing music, and although the episodes are initially readily identifiable - frenetic, breathless, schizophrenic, and perhaps paranoid - they soon begin to conflict, to interrupt each other: the strangers are each concerned with their own agenda, and only want to tell the others, and not to listen. In this aspect of the Rondo, in which themes "tell" but do not "listen", Benjamin finds fertile ground and offers a fresh perspective on the classical form and character-type.

This Prelude was commissioned in 2005 by the internationally acclaimed pianist Berenika, who also performs on this recording.

COMING SOON: Rivoli String Quartet - Tim Benjamin: String Quartet No. 1

Tim Benjamin:
String Quartet No. 1

Tim Benjamin composed his first String Quartet in 1997 (his second Quartet was composed in 2006). This Quartet was intended as a purely musical exploration, to offer music simply "about" music, and without a linear narrative. The work is comprised of Benjamin's responses to several major 20th century works for the string quartet and also, perhaps somewhat incongruously, a technique used by David Bowie for writing lyrics. That is not to say that the Quartet is a straightforward scrapbook collection of quotations and obscure references; rather, it takes up the themes of these works - most importantly, Bartók's fifth quartet and Berg's Lyric Suite - and takes off in a variety of directions, here evoking the atmosphere of the early 20th century and there responding in the composer's own language. Three lively movements (I, III and V) act as pillars around the second and fourth movements, which are contemplative in character. Interestingly, the fourth movement is built directly from the second movement, adding the whole second movement again - backwards, and upside down - over the top, resulting in some rich and stirring harmonies. The very centre of the work is a fast and playful scherzo, perhaps reflecting the sometimes tongue-in-cheek evocation of other works in this Quartet.

David Bowie's lyric technique appears most obviously in the final, fifth movement of the Quartet. For his album Outside, Bowie used a method for devising lyrics in which he took many disparate sources, cut them up into small sections, then rearranged them almost at random, selecting and reselecting assemblages that offered the most potential. Bowie's collaborator Brian Eno compares Bowie's strategy to evolution: "Natural selection, you know, throws out all these mutations, and a few of them get saved. The lyrics that got saved here, they would get fed back into the computer. So the brew kept getting enriched. It was the most amazing thing to see." In Tim Benjamin's fifth movement, he takes as his sources all the music from the first four movements, which itself is consciously assembled and re-assembled from many sources. This music is cut up and woven together again around and through the one section of new music in the fifth movement, a fugue. The subject of this fugue, which opens the movement, is a 12-note row, upon which the whole work is based. Both stylistically and technically, this is not the strict serialism of Schoenberg or Webern, but the more liberal, permissive serialism of Berg, or perhaps late-period Stravinsky.