SHIVA FESHAREKI (b.1987): Aetherworld, DAPHNE ORAM (1925-2003): Still Point.

Description: The bulk of this disc is devoted to a fascinating piece of music history embodied in a powerful and unique piece of music. Daphne Oram was a "radio programme engineer" at the BBC. At the age of 23, in 1948, she wrote Still Point for double orchestra and live and pre-recorded electronics. Which composer, let alone woman composer not yet a quarter-century old, was doing that at that time? - and moreover with the compositional aplomb and technical skill of this work. The BBC rejected the piece because their arbiters of taste didn’t understand it, and it was presumed lost until the score and the composer’s detailed technical notes were unearthed in 2016. Oram's experience with balancing orchestral recordings and working with 78rpm discs to be cued as required apparently inspired her compositional innovations, which included "pre- recordings to be mixed in at varying speeds, backwards & with filterings plus reverberation" as the score specifies. Oram went on to co-found the renowned BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a hotbed of invention and achievements in electronic music ever since. Oram's orchestral composition suggests that in her professional capacity she had been exposed to a good deal of Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky (especially the ballets), Elgar and probably some Bartók and Shostakovich - she was not shy of full-blooded orchestral textures - and overall the impression given by the music is of a large dramatic tone-poem in a thoroughly tonal idiom, with the unheard-of spatial and timbral effects adding a dimension of heightened, hallucinatory perception at key moments in the musical narrative. The otherwise excellent booklet notes are infuriatingly vague on some points of the reconstruction and realization of the pre-recorded material, and its use in performance, especially in the five-minute central "movement", attributed to Feshareki, which one surmises may be an elaboration of the recorded material as specified by Oram; it isn’t clear whether the composer envisioned such an electronic "cadenza" at this point in the piece, though it seems that great efforts have been made to follow her specifications in assembling the material. Electroacoustic composer/performer Feshareki's Aetherworld uses the technology of our time to sample live choral and organ material and transform it in real time, combined with a processed recording of extracts from Josquin’s Qui Habitat, and project the results around the auditorium, engulfing the audience in the immersive soundfield. The serene, glowing chords of the original material lend the work a sense of tonal harmony, and pulsation imposed by the looping of gestures provides clear rhythmic patterns, so the piece is far from abstract. The huge climax, underpinned by the organ pedals and with massive piled-up chords, discords, whoops and shrieks swirling around the space, must have been overwhelming at the premiere (as it is, the recording will rattle your loudspeakers and unsettle your neighbors).