Hebrides Ensemble

Sensations of Travel: Chamber Music of Nigel Osborne

Delphian

AT ONCE homogeneous and remarkably eclectic, the chief thing to say about the third album that cellist Will Conway’s Hebrides Ensemble has recorded for Delphian is that it is a beguilingly lovely listen. The full sextet (completed by pianist Philip Moore, violinist Zoe Byers, Catherine Marwood on viola and Rachael Clegg and Maximiliano Martin on oboe and clarinet) is assembled on none of the 20 tracks, although all bar Clegg play on the most recent music, written especially for the group. Preludio y cancion is derived from an opera-in-progress Osborne is writing with Ariel Dorfman and if all the music is as beautiful as this we are in for a treat.

The oboist has her moment on the oldest piece here, Zone, dedicated to filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, whose sci-fi classic Stalker influenced Osborne’s opera The Electrification of the Soviet Union. In fact the Scottish composer’s opera work underscores almost everything, with the “three miniature sonatas” of Espionage being drawn from another ongoing project about art historian and Cambridge spy Anthony Blunt, and the opening preludes and fugues from Osborne’s opera adaptation of Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner.

Elsewhere we are, of course, in the Balkans, where Osborne created his music-therapy practice in Sarajevo and Mostar, which has found application in war-zones around our troubled world. The wonderful thing is that the composer’s political commitment, diverse interests and internationalism has produce such a coherent collection of highly listenable chamber music, superbly recorded in Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Kirk.

Keith Bruce