Release date: 22 November 2024
Tom Coult’s playful and seductive music has been championed by many of the UK’s major orchestras and ensembles, and he was made Composer-in-Association with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in 2021. Coult has been commissioned by BBC Proms (including St John’s Dance for the First Night of the 2017 Proms), Aldeburgh Festival (including pieces for Mahler Chamber Orchestra and for Marian Consort), and Lucerne Festival. His first opera, Violet, with text by Alice Birch, was premiered in 2022 at the Aldeburgh Festival and on tour, and was described by The Telegraph as ‘the best new British opera in years’. It has already been staged in second and third productions in Paris and Ulm, Germany, in 2022 and 2023. It has won or been nominated for: an International Opera Award, a South Bank Sky Arts Award, a Critics Circle Award, an IVORS Composer Award and a UK Theatre Award.
This debut album features Coult’s violin concerto Pleasure Garden conducted by Elena Schwarz with soloist Daniel Pioro and is the product of a fruitful relationship Coult enjoys with the violinist. In After Lassus, Coult takes a number of the duets from Orlando Lassus’s Novae aliquot and reworks them for Orchestra and soprano solo, performed here by Anna Dennis and conductor Andrew Gourlay. Dennis and Gourlay return in Beautiful Caged Thing – a work that demonstrates the expressive idiom for which Coult is renowned.
The title track, Three Pieces That Disappear, for orchestra and fixed audio, is one of several works written for the BBC Philharmonic. Coult says: ‘The three movements of this piece are linked by a vague, loosely connected set of ideas about music being remembered, forgotten, misremembered, imagined or deteriorating’. As well as music disappearing, those ideas include the birth of Coult’s child (resulting in a turn towards sounds that signify childhood), his own health problems (making words and sounds indistinct), and a dictaphone which misremembers sounds. The work is conducted by Martyn Brabbins.
NMC’s Debut Discs are crucial calling cards, valuable for showcasing composers to a wider public, giving them the opportunity to present a first full portrait album of their work.
BBC Philharmonic
Anna Dennis soprano
Daniel Pioro violin
Elena Swartz conductor
Martyn Brabbins conductor
FUNDERS
This recording was made possible with support from Vaughan Williams Foundation and Richard Baker is supported by PRS Foundation’s Composers’ Fund. Thank you to the trusts, foundations and individuals who are investing in NMC’s Debut Discs series.
RECORDING CREDITS
Three Pieces that Disappear was recorded at BBC MediaCity, Salford on 5 January 2024.
STEPHEN RINKER Recording Engineer
MATTHEW BENNETT Producer
Beautiful Caged Thing and After Lassus were recorded at BBC MediaCity, Salford on 28 April 2023. Both works were broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on the same date. Pleasure Garden was recorded at Bridgewater Hall, Manchester on 6 November 2021 and broadcast on BBC Radio 3, 10 November 2021.
STEPHEN RINKER Recording Engineer
MIKE GEORGE Producer
THOM ASHWORTH Cover Art
All works were commissioned and performed by the BBC Philharmonic for Radio 3.
NMC Recordings is a charitable company (reg. no. 328052) established for the recording of contemporary music by the Holst Foundation; it is grateful for funding from Arts Council England and The Delius Trust.
Catalogue no: NMCD261