Page 206 - Alison Balsom Quiet City FULL BOOK

ballpark as Adrienne Lenker of Big Thief, at times touched with the
vulnerability of a Velvet Underground ballad.

CLASSICAL

Alison Balsom: Quiet City (Warner Classics) *****

For the first release in her new five-album contract with Warner Classics,
trumpeter Alison Balsom finds inspiration in a programme of almost

exclusively 20th century American music that either features the trumpet or

is arranged for it. She opens with Aaron Copland’s Quiet City, its plaintive
solo strains sumptuously echoed by the supporting Britten Sinfonia under

Scott Stroman. The mood lingers via lowish-key Bernstein to a sudden

awakening by Gershwin’s racy Rhapsody in Blue in a suave arrangement by
Simon Wright. Ives’ timeless, mystical Unanswered Question provides the

bridge to Gil Evans’ smoky reimagining (for Miles Davis) of Rodrigo’s

Adagio from his Concerto de Aranjeuz. Balsom ends with more Evans magic,
a dreamy, thick-scented take on Kurt Weill’s My Ship. Listen out for guest

appearances by Nicholas Daniel on cor anglais (Quiet City) and pianist Tom
Poster (Rhapsody in Blue). Fascinated to see where this series goes

next. Ken Walton

FOLK

Fara: Energy Islands (Fara Music) *****

Their native Orkney’s importance as a centre for renewable energy
development inspired this new album from the quartet Fara. But never mind

wind or wave power; fiddlers Jeana Leslie, Catriona Price and Kristan Harvey
and pianist Rory Matheson generate a potent energy all of their own. The

album beguiles right from the pizzicato strings and dancing piano that

herald the first track, Solar, before full fiddle force is unleashed. Wind
Dancers, inspired by a George Mackay Brown poem, opens almost like a

movement from Vivaldi, with stealthy fiddle strokes behind beautiful solo