Sally Beamish is the very model of a modern, well-trained composer. Her music is not exactly atonal, nor is it melodic. It isn’t ferociously dissonant, nor is it distinctively consonant. Her scoring is clean, lucid, and takes advantage of all the usual sound effects (massed string glissandos, extreme juxtapositions of timbre, extensive writing for mallet instruments, and sudden eruptions for roto-toms and woodblocks). Each of the three works here has a literary inspiration, giving listeners a peg on which to hang their auditory hats, but the sum total, as one literary wit put it, is music that runs the expressive gamut from A to B.
The most interesting work here is Whitescape, a hallucinatory exercise in texture inspired by an opera on the life of Mary Shelley. It rises to a harrowing climax before drifting away in uneasy silence. The Second Viola Concerto sounds well-written for the instrument, and Tabea Zimmermann plays it beautifully, but it cries out for a good, strong tune or two–and the same holds true for Sangsters. Beamish knows how to make some evocative sounds, but her style seems entirely hemmed in by what it is not rather than revealing clearly positive or charateristic qualities.
There is something cowardly and tentative in so much modern music today–in the refusal of so many competent composers to commit to a style that allows their personality to emerge clearly through their music, combined with their reliance on cute titles or extra-musical cues to explain what it’s all about. Beamish is neither better nor worse than average. Hers is “safe” music, enjoyable perhaps on one or two listens, superbly played and very well recorded in this particular case by performers with whom she has worked closely. It’s all thoroughly professional. What it’s not is memorable.
