MICHAEL NYMAN Acts of Beauty - Exit no Exit

Michael Nyman wrote his song cycle Acts of Beauty for Italian singer Cristina Zavalloni. Zavalloni, whose background is in jazz, but who branched into new music and early music, has an extraordinary instrument: powerfully primal, smoky, and supple. The texts, from sources ancient and modern, have at least some tenuous connection with the idea of beauty, but little else in common. Nyman, who frequently shows a real gift for lyrical vocal writing, is off his game here; the blocky text-setting doesn't give Zavalloni much opportunity to demonstrate the expressiveness at which she excels. The music for the accompanying instrumental ensemble is far more interesting than the vocal line (except that the first movement, with its quirkily contrasting sections, remains something of an enigma). The other movements, though, sound like four beautifully shaped minimalist pieces for chamber ensemble, with an added part for voice, whose text has little to do with the musical mood or structure and which had to be awkwardly squashed out of shape to accommodate itself to the accompaniment. Exit No Exit for bass clarinet and string quartet is far more successful. It is oddly proportioned, with 10 movements lasting from one to two minutes, with a penultimate 10-minute movement. The playful miniatures prove to be a good size for Nyman's whimsical ideas. The longer movement sounds like a string of brief contrasting movements played without pause, but some of its sections are gorgeously lyrical. The sound is clean and present, but weighted a little strongly toward the instruments. (Stephen Eddins)

London Sinfonietta / David Atherton LOUIS ANDRIESSEN Anaïs Nin - De Staat

Captured at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Anais Nin/De Staat is the first release in Signum's planned schedule of three live recordings by the London Sinfonietta per year.

Anais Nin, an intense sonic psychodrama for solo soprano and ensemble of eight musicians in which composer Louis Andriessen explores the life and especially loves of Nin, certainly puts Cristina Zavalloni's voice through its paces.

Snipped from Nin's diaries. The libretto concentrates on her (in)famous lovers: actor/playwright Antonin Artaud; his (and then her) psychiatrist René Allendy; writer Henry Miller, and, most controversially, her own father, the painter and composer Joaquin Nin. Backed by some suitably 1930s instrumentation, the mood is modernist with a jazz twist and makes scandalous whoopie with Hans Buhrs' taped voice (which takes the male roles). The piece finishes wistfully, with some relief from a ghostly onstage gramophone playing papa's arrangement of a Basque Christmas carol.

De Staat explores the relationship between composition and politics, taking Plato's The Republic as its text. The braying chorale builds like the most gleeful of hyperdramatic soundtracks. Here, though, the effect is not that of a Bruckheimer epic—all faux emotion—but more the lusty avant-grandeur of the likes of Werner Herzog making an elliptical examination of the state.

But as with most party political narratives, by the end the orchestra has divided, its polyphonies tussling bombastically for predominance—with none ultimately victorious. (MUSO)

'Lou Reed and Metallica aren't the only ones delving into pre-war bohemian perversity: the Dutch minimalist Louis Andriessen offers a monodrama based on the diaries of Anaïs Nin, with the soprano Cristina Zavalloni recounting Nin's sexual liaisons with Antonin Artaud, René Allendy, Henry Miller and her own father. With clarinet and sax used to evoke jazz-era Paris, a cabaret- flavoured, sometimes comical Kurt Weill ambience captures the amorality and loneliness in Nin's writing. It is paired with Andriessen's most famous composition, De Staat, in which the vocal group Synergy offer ruminations on music from Plato's Republic, set to the reedy, methodical cycles of Andriessen's early minimalist style' (The Independent)