Frank Denyer, Octandre Ensemble

British composer Frank Denyer (born London, 1943) presents an extraordinary collection of five works spanning nearly fifty years of creative activity, performed by the Octandre Ensemble conducted by Jon Hargreaves. This release, recorded at the Menuhin School in Surrey in September 2022, serves as a landmark document of one of the most original voices in contemporary music.

The album includes Broken Music (1990) featuring a bewildering array of instruments including flute, piccolo, crow call, melodica, beaked whistle, shepherd's whistle, contrabassoon, cello, banjo, harp and non-standard percussion; the two Unison pieces from 1973 for voice and chamber ensemble; the title work Screens (2017/18) with soprano Juliet Fraser and theatrical visual elements; and the monumental Five Views of the Path (2020/21), a 20-minute work for voice, three flutes, violin, mandolin and two percussionists.

Christian Mason writes in the liner notes: "Denyer's music is full of questions, but never pretends to easy answers. Rather, it offers us a fluid space for imaginative reflection on the nature of music and the fragile condition of human culture more generally... His whole concern with musical instruments, new, modified or nearly extinct, can perhaps be seen as a metaphor for the larger question of what can be salvaged, artistically, from the chaos of civilisation."

Boring Like A Drill observes: "Denyer's music is intimate and confronting; if it shocks, then it does so through a naked emotional frankness stripped of all rhetorical devices... A vast panoply of instruments and objects are used here to create sounds that seem at once natural yet unimaginable."

Denyer's extensive ethnomusicological fieldwork in India, Kenya and Japan profoundly informs his unique compositional voice, creating a sound-world that transcends cultural boundaries while maintaining an unmistakable personal identity.

Essential for admirers of Morton Feldman, Giacinto Scelsi, and experimental approaches to chamber music.