sometimes less so. This is a piece that responds to repeated listening. It is a tribute to Goss’s skill and the Grange's first published pieces date from the late 1970s, and include Cimmerian Nocturne (1979), which was commissioned by The Fires of London, and included a performance under director Peter Maxwell Davies at the 1983 Proms [4] as well as performances in Britain and abroad. Other early works include The Kingdom of Bones for mezzo-soprano and chamber orchestra, (1983), Variations (1988) and Concerto for Orchestra: Labyrinthine Images (1988) [5] The Piano Trio (1995) is subtitled Homage to Chagall. The third movement, Quasi recit., is the only one to refer to specific pictures and these can be reached online. It’s not easy to identify aural connections with the painter but Grange talks of his analogy to Chagall’s ‘use of a large, but nonetheless limited number of images, one of which might provide the focus of a particular painting, while appearing peripheral in another. Five stars: Gemini is an outstanding ensemble and Sophie Harris is a wonderful cellist. Plenty of engaging textures… make a fascinating dialogue. Informative booklet and high-quality recording.

This is music whose creative instincts are undeniably personal. Finely prepared performances, heard in a commendably natural ambience and with Grange contributing the informative booklet note. Composer-portrait CDs provide important markers of a composer’s development. Furthermore, they do not promote single pieces, but, as is the case here, draw together works with a common thread, enabling an in-depth exploration of an aspect of a composer’s oeuvre. As recordings are realised carefully in a studio they are fully representative of a piece and thereby attract dissemination via platforms such as Spotify and YouTube and are often broadcast on radio stations. Indeed, a previous CD of Grange’s music recorded by Gemini has been broadcast in its entirety twice on Dutch radio and individual works have been broadcast elsewhere. A pupil of Maxwell Davies, Grange became a colleague of John Casken in Manchester. They both lived in the Peak District and have been profoundly affected by the landscape – ‘desolate gloomy moorlands and the breath-taking vistas often illuminated by powerful sunlight’, as Grange puts it. Tiers of Time, for piano quartet, was written to mark Casken’s retirement in 2007: it even quotes from his Piano Quartet. The general territory of both composers is a dialect of main¬stream modernism. If we compare Caskin’s Piano Quartet with Grange’s Tiers of Time, Grange has a more continuous line and is less frenetic. There is a certain preoccupation with shadowy textures and sombre, puzzling subject matter, and this is matched in music of great subtlety and sometimes ambiguity, ominously ebbing and flowing in layers and levels of sound and meaning that slip away as fast as one tries to grasp them. Sombre and disturbing in the sense of thought-provoking, these haunting works will repay amply the attention they demand of the listener. Contrasts between stream of consciousness episodes and stories told by the protagonist, reflected in the alternation between sections of linear writing making extensive use of klangfarbenmelodie and episodes that unfold in different ways;

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for string quartet and clarinet takes Italo Calvino’s beguiling Invisible Cities as its starting point, capturing the British composer...LeFanu’s Trio 2: Song for Peter (1983) for soprano, clarinet and cello is by turns fierce and

Over the past 15 years Grange has also completed Eclipsing (2004), a large-scale orchestral piece. Commissioned by the BBC for the BBC Philharmonic and premiered by them under Vassily Sinaisky; the work was also performed by the orchestra under Andris Nelsons in a BBC concert celebrating the composer’s fiftieth birthday. Also dating from this period are three string quartets; the first two were completed in 2003 for the Kreutzer and Lindsay Quartets while the third, Ghosts of Great Violence (2011/13), was written for the Quatuor Danel. More recently he has composed the large-scale chamber work Shifting Thresholds (2016) for the ensemble Gemini, Carved Forms (2017) for flute and accordion and a Violin Concerto (2019). The latter was commissioned by the BBC for Carolin Widmann and the BBC Philharmonic who premiered the work under Ben Gernon at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester in November 2019. Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Goss makes references to Messiaen’s harmonies and textures. It’s performed superbly here. What also distinguishes this DVD version of the work is that it actually consists Gemini. Indeed, listening to the disc iss omething like being party to an intimate, intelligent and far-ranging There will also be a showing of a short film exploring how language-learning enriches both individuals and communities and a presentation of an initiative to make Manchester Museum a model multilingual institution.

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Language, Community and Creativity will take place at the Martin Harris Centre tomorrow, Friday 31 January 2020, at 1:30pm. United Kingdom I am over sixty years old: the end of the run of baby boomers! I was born in Glasgow, moving south to York in the late ‘seventies. My main interest is British Music from the nineteenth century onwards. I love the ‘arch-typical’ English countryside – and have always wanted to ‘Go West, Boy’. A. E. Housman and the ‘Georgian’ poets are a huge influence on my aesthetic. I have spent much of my life looking for the ‘Land of Lost Content’ and only occasionally glimpsed it…somewhere in…???