Album: Tansy Davies, Troubairitz (Nonclassical)

The full range of Tansy Davies's varied modernist interests is displayed on Troubairitz, from the title suite itself, a song-cycle based on 19th-century poems by women troubadours, sung here either a cappella or with minimal accompaniment by Anna Snow, to the more animated pieces such as "Inside Out 2", a brittle bricolage of pizzicato and percussion sounds, and "Grind Show", a musical evocation of a typically bleak, disturbing Goya painting, Pilgrimage of St Isadore, picked out in stalking piano, pizzicato and woodwind.

Particularly impressive are "Neon", whose industrious staccato strings, woodwind, keyboard and percussion dart hyperactively hither and thither, like winking city lights

DOWNLOAD THIS Neon; Salt Box; Grind Show; Inside Out 2