NICOLE LIZÉE (b.1973): Keep Driving, I’m Dreaming, ANDREW STANILAND (b.198?): Phi, Caelestis, KEVIN LAU (b.19??): Dark Angels.

Description: Three one-act ballet scores commissioned by the Canadian National Arts Foundation, all firmly based in tonality, very accessible and about half an hour long, but otherwise with little in common. Staniland's Phi is the golden ratio, that most satisfying of proportions, much beloved of artists, architects and numerologists. Its three movements - Rex, Styx and Eden - are based on "images of humanity, technology, nature, beauty, and violence". The first is frantically active, motoric, frenzied and post-minimalistic. The second suggests ancient ritual, with clearly distilled essences of Le sacre du printemps, and the third an increasingly ecstatic chorale. Lizée's Keep Driving, I'm Dreaming sounds exactly like what the title suggests. An homage to neo-noir cinema, it uses looped gestures that sound as they were borrowed from film scores and dated electronic and turntable effects in a kind of nightmarish cut-up. If you enjoyed David Lynch's Lost Highway you're pretty much guaranteed to get a kick out of this. Lau's Dark Angels is a big Neo-Romantic score with more than a little of the symphony about its structure and conflict between opposing elements, and of the film score in its technicolor imagery and orchestration. The title, according to the composer, is 'a metaphor for human nature' and the ballet portrays 'tension, strugle, resistance, [and] energy'. 2 CDs. Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra Orchestra; Alexander Shelley.