Anthony Payne - The Stones and Lonely Places Sing - NMC: NMCD130 - CD or download

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The performances are excellent: Jane Manning and her ensemble plainly had no difficulty here in connecting with the pulse and expressive breadth of the music, and the recording quality serves... — BBC Music Magazine, March 2007, 5 out of 5 stars More…

Release Date: 12th Feb 2007
Catalogue No: NMCD130
Label: NMC
Length: 77 minutes

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Payne: Empty Landscape – Heart's Ease

Work length14:42

$2.05

$3.85

Jane's Minstrels
Roger Montgomery

Payne: Scenes from The Woodlanders

Work length17:46

Album only

$5.15

Jane Manning
Jane's Minstrels
Roger Montgomery

Payne: Of Knots and Skeins

Work length11:08

$2.05

$3.85

Fenella Barton, Dominic Saunders

Payne: Poems of Edward Thomas

Work length28:28

Album only

$3.90

Jane Manning
Jane's Minstrels
Roger Montgomery

No. 1, Words

Track length18:25

Album only

$1.30

No. 2, Lights Out

Track length4:39

$1.00

$1.30

No. 3, Adlestrop

Track length5:24

$1.00

$1.30

Payne: The Stones and Lonely Places Sing

Work length5:40

$1.00

$5.15

Jane's Minstrels
Roger Montgomery

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A second disc of Anthony Payne's evocative vocal and chamber works, written for and featuring acclaimed soprano Jane Manning. She is accompanied by the pioneering ensemble she founded, Jane's Minstrels, in these settings of passages from Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders, and Edward Thomas's well-loved poems Lights Out and Adelstrop.

Reviews

March 2007

The performances are excellent: Jane Manning and her ensemble plainly had no difficulty here in connecting with the pulse and expressive breadth of the music, and the recording quality serves the music perfectly throughout.

2010

Anthony Payne's musical response to English pastoral is wide-ranging, welcoming challenges and shunning easy options. This programme, with two vocal and three instrumental works composed over a period of nearly a quarter of a century, gives a good sense of his scope, and also of his strengths.
The three Poems of Edward Thomas for soprano and piano quartet respond imaginatively to some fine poetry, as Payne matches the rhythmic economy and energy of 'Words' as effectively as the juxtaposition of images normally kept separate – steam trains and birdsong – in 'Adlestrop'. Thomas Hardy's prose in his novel The Woodlanders is no less evocative, but setting prose is always more difficult. Payne's solution is to invest particular poetic force in the instrumental representations of seasonal flux, underlining the obvious analogies between nature and humanity, and leading to a strong climax with the memorable final sentence 'the funereal trees rocked and chanted their dirges unceasingly'.
Of the three purely instrumental works, it's good to be reminded of the sustained expressive power and inventiveness of Payne's relatively early tone-poem for mixed sextet The Stones and Lonely Places Sing. The raw intensity which is so striking here is more muted in the later pieces, though comparable issues are at stake. EmptyLandscape – Heart's Ease just manages to keep moves into bleakness at bay, while Of Knots andSkeins offers a more abstract interpretation of comparable concerns in its poised interactions of harmonic and melodic forces. With accomplished performances and spacious recording, this disc does Payne proud.

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