Mad, magical and mesmerising: Tom Coult’s Pieces that Disappear, his debut disc from NMC Records

Tom Coult: Three Pieces that Disappear, Beautiful Caged Thing, Pleasure Garden, After Lassus; Anna Dennis, Daniel Pioro, BBC Philharmonic, Martyn Brabbins, Andrew Gourlay and Elena Schwarz; NMC Records

Music that is misremembered or did not exist in the first place, music that layers Lassus with evocative reminiscences merging Britten and Ravel. Throughout, Coult’s command of his orchestral palate is devastating and his writing for soloists Anna Dennis and Daniel Pioro highly seductive

Tom Coult is currently composer in association with the BBC Philharmonic and this new disc, Pieces that Disappear from NMC Recordings features a selection of Coult’s orchestral music all performed by the BBC Philharmonic conducted by Martyn Brabbins, Andrew Gourlay and Elena Schwarz, including Three Pieces that Disappear, Beautiful Caged Thing and After Lassus with soprano Anna Dennis (who sang the title role in the premiere of Coult’s opera Violet), and Pleasure Garden with violinist Daniel Pioro.

Three Pieces that Disappear was written in 2023 for the BBC Philharmonic and is heard here conducted by Martyn Brabbins. Inspired by personal events including writers block during lockdown, illness and the birth of a child, the pieces represent ideas about music misremembered; Coult describes them thus, ‘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’. They are for orchestra and fixed audio, with a 1951 recording of Schoenberg’s Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra threading its way through the final movement.

All three demonstrate a dazzling but not showy use of the orchestral palate, and each in a different way suggests music that is half-there so the first movement seems to be constantly on the verge of something coming together but never doing so (imagine a Sibelius movement without the climax), the second has fragments wandering through it that never manage to coalesce, whilst the third uses distinctly clear reminiscences but overlaid with more nebulous sounds, until it becomes difficult to tell what is real and what is imagined. But the quotations do not matter, it is the way Coult effortlessly welds everything into a magically engaging whole, one that makes the whole orchestra his music box.

Beautiful Caged Thing, is an older work, from 2015, for soprano and orchestra. Coult intended to set Oscar Wilde but found his words ‘too restrictive and tight in rhyme and rhythm’ so we have poetic fragments from The Picture of Dorian Grey, creating an entirely new world from the old. I have known everything promises at first to be evocative and dreamy, but then we get an almost patter song of random facts, brilliantly sung by Dennis though neither she nor Coult seem to be able to solve the problem that a soprano high in her range finds words tricky. Coult’s orchestration surrounds and supports the voice with evocative motifs and phrases. The second movement, Monstrous Marionettes is a scene between and woman and a man, though any drama is approached sideways and it is the colours in the orchestra that make the piece striking. I am tired of myself tonight is about world weariness and Dennis gives us a lovely seductive and sinuous line that is both laid back and profoundly expressive.

Pleasure Garden is Coult’s 2020 concerto for violin and orchestra, written for Daniel Pioro, the soloist here. The piece was co-commissioned by Salford University in partnership with the Royal Horticultural Society, to mark the opening of Salford’s new RHS Bridgewater Gardens with its premiere was originally scheduled to be summer 2020 (rescheduled to October 2021). The work was Coult’s first big piece as composer in association with the BBC Philharmonic.

It is structured around the idea of constructed spaces. ‘Dyeing the lake blue for Queen Victoria’ about dying the Bridgewater Canal blue for a visit of Queen Victoria in 1851, ‘Francesco Landini serenades the birds’ a 14th century musician who serenaded birds with his organetto, and ‘The art of setting stones’ about Japanese rock gardens.

The first movement creates an orchestral backdrop that mixes evocatively sustained material with strong punctuation points, with Pioro’s wandering and at times dramatic violin threading its way through and over. The orchestra is full of ideas, but Pioro’s violin seems to carry on regardless. The second movement features Pioro’s singing line against colourful noises and clusters, the orchestra evoking a magical backdrop to Pioro’s seduction. As with the first movement, there is the feeling of the soloist moving through the orchestra, ever onward. The final movement does has movements that feel Eastern if not explicitly Japanese, but Pioro plays high in his register, almost eerie at times. The whole has a hypnotic feel to it, and this is nothing like a conventional concerto finale.

After Lassus sees Coult reworking existing material, but this time more explicitly as he created a series of five movements for soprano and orchestra based on Lassus duets (!) The work was written in 2023 for the BBC Philharmonic. The first movement is wordless and Dennis evokes Villa Lobos in the vocal line but Coult remains resolutely himself, evocative and mysterious. The next three movements all have words, but again it is the combination of Dennis’ seductive line and the colours and timbres of Coult’s orchestra that register most. Perhaps there is Lassus here, but there is a lot else besides from Villa Lobos to RVW to jazz, Coult seems to find his imagination freed by having a structure to hang things from. When we get to the fifth movement, words disappear again and the orchestra seems to be drinking in Tippett’s A Midsummer Marriage to devastating effect. The final movement ‘Sancti Mei’ is magical, with Britten’s Prince of the Pagodas vying with Ravel’s Laideronnette, impératrice des pagodes along with Dennis hauntingly intoning plain chant. Mad, magical and mesmerising

Tom Coult (born 1988) – Three Pieces that Disappear
Tom Coult – Beautiful Caged Thing
Tom Coult – Pleasure Garden
Tom Coult – After Lassus
Anna Dennis (soprano)
Daniel Pioro (violin)
BBC Philharmonic
Martyn Brabbins (conductor – Three Pieces that Disappear) 
Andrew Gourlay (conductor – Beautiful Caged Thing, After Lassus)
Elena Schwarz (conductor – Pleasure Garden)
Recorded 5 April, 28 April 2024, BBC Media City, Salford; 6 November 2021, Bridgewater Hall
NMC NMCD261 1CD [70.50]