CD: Tansy Davies - Troubairitz

Tansy Davies’s neon and inside out 2 can’t help but recall Stravinsky’s 1940s commission for Woody Herrmann’s orchestra, the Ebony Concerto. There’s an idiomatic use of rich, low-pitched sounds (plenty of bassoon and bass clarinet), and insidious, catchy dance rhythms bounce away in the bass. There’s a hint of Louis Andriessen-style Euro-Minimalism too; these are pieces which really move. But there’s a satisfying darkness to Davies’s imagination; for all the foot-tapping, this is music with unsettling power and immediacy.

The main work on the disc is the recent song cycle Troubairitz - eight songs setting English translations of texts by 12th-century female troubadours, given sparse, improvisatory percussion accompaniments and sung coolly by Anna Snow, whose vibrato-free voice suits the music’s restraint perfectly. For all that Davies’s angular melodies inform us that this is 21st-century music, these songs sound archaic and timeless, as if they’re being composed on the spot.

Elsewhere we have imaginative remixes of several pieces featured on the disc – Gabriel Prokofiev’s entertaining deconstruction of neon making one appreciate how strange the work sounds in its original form. Recorded with Christopher Austin and the Azalea Ensemble.

• Find Troubairitz (Nonclassical) on Amazon