Red Note Ensemble

Lyell Cresswell Music for String Quartet

Delphian

Lyell Cresswell

The Art of Black & White

Rattle

FEW composers can boast recent releases on both sides of the globe, but Scots-domiciled New Zealander Lyell Cresswell has achieved that with this Delphian disc and the Rattle label The Art of Black and White in his homeland. Both albums combine the composer’s sense of fun with work of sometimes daunting intensity.

Red Note’s string quartet – founding cellist Robert Irvine with violinists Jacqueline Shave and Tom Hankey and Paul Cassidy on viola – is equal to both the complexity of his Koteteteto (Maori for “chattering”) and the String Quartet that precedes it, and the more playful global sequence of dance-inspired pieces that make up the opening Capricci. In between, the nine movement Ricercari is a virtuoso work-out for the duo of Shave and Irvine that is an attempt to render visual art in sound.

The aim also lies behind the piano pieces that give the title to the Rattle album, with titles like Impasto and Chiaroscuro. Played by Stephen De Pledge, they are followed by songs on which he accompanies tenor Christopher Bowen and soprano Jennifer Maybee.

From settings of the poems of Emily Dickinson to verse Cresswell composed himself while working as a postman in Dunedin, their lyrical variety is vast, and the range required to perform then equally wide. The brief Das Lied Von Der Fisch, with words by his sister-in-law Mary Cresswell, are as witty a response to the whole genre of art song as you might wish to hear.

Keith Bruce