Roger Redgate(conductor) Ensemble Expose
James Dillon – Decente/Désir
Ian Moore – La Mort des Artistes
Roger Redgate – Celan Songs
James Erber – The Ray and its Shadow
Pierre Boulez – Dérive
This programme presents a vivid cross-section of late modernist musical thought, bridging the British New Complexity tradition with the crystalline formalism of post-war European modernism. Each composer featured here confronts, in his own way, the tension between abstraction and expression, offering a deeply personal response to poetic, philosophical, and sonic material.
James Dillon’s Decente/Désir typifies the sensual, layered character of his work. A central figure in the New Complexity school, Dillon’s music is known for its ability to weave fragile lyricism into knotty textures and splintered forms. The title—French for "descent/desire"—evokes a duality central to Dillon’s aesthetic: movement and stillness, density and fragility, rigor and impulse. His work consistently resists simple formal closure, instead opening a field in which expressive gesture flickers through the strictest musical systems.
In contrast, Ian Moore’s La Mort des Artistes directly references Baudelaire’s poem of the same name—a meditation on the artist's death as both release and judgement. Moore’s music, like Baudelaire’s verse, engages with decay, silence, and the limits of beauty. Where Dillon’s music blurs the boundaries of sensual and structural, Moore leans into tension, creating soundworlds where poise and collapse coexist. The Baudelairean symbolism invites an aesthetic that is less about narrative and more about confrontation—a still life in sound, shadowed by mortality.
Roger Redgate’s Celan Songs continues this poetic thread, but with a shift in tone and language. Setting texts by Paul Celan—a poet marked by linguistic trauma and Holocaust memory—Redgate creates a music of rupture. Celan’s syntax, compressed and unstable, finds its analogue in Redgate’s musical vocabulary: fragmented lines, unstable metre, and intensely expressive vocal lines. His music does not merely accompany text but actively interrogates it, embodying the very fractures that Celan’s poems enact. Among the British complexity composers, Redgate is arguably the most politically charged—his works a confrontation with ideology as much as aesthetics.
James Erber’s The Ray and its Shadow offers a more introspective take on duality. Erber’s music is noted for its precision and refinement, working within tight formal parameters to explore gradations of texture and gesture. The title itself suggests the coexistence of clarity and obscurity—a fitting metaphor for Erber’s approach to complexity, in which sonic surfaces gleam while their structural underpinnings remain elusive. His music, unlike Redgate’s dramatic tension or Dillon’s sensual turbulence, thrives on balance, on the edges between illumination and concealment.
The programme concludes with Dérive by Pierre Boulez, whose towering presence in post-war European music casts a long shadow across this repertoire. Composed in 1984 and revised in 1988, Dérive reflects Boulez’s mature style: harmonically fluid, rhythmically elastic, and meticulously constructed. While Boulez’s serialism is softened here by spectral influence and a greater sense of flow, his concern with control and refinement is undiminished. Compared to the rawer textures of Redgate or the gestural intensity of Dillon, Boulez offers an alternative model of complexity—less rhetorical, more architectural.
Taken together, these works chart different pathways through modernist thought. Where Dillon and Erber search for new modes of lyricism within fragmented forms, Moore and Redgate mine poetic and political texts for expressive depth, and Boulez sets forth a compositional logic grounded in structural elegance. This is not a programme of contrasts alone, but of affinities: an exploration of how contemporary music—despite its density and intellectual force—remains urgently, even painfully, human.
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