Three recent works by the English composer Arnold Griller (b. 1937) are joined here by the earliest music he still acknowledges, the gentle and touching Concerto Grosso for string orchestra (1955), which is informed by a serenity and wisdom uncommon in such a young composer. Like Berg’s Violin Concerto, Griller’s (2017) was born of his response to the loss of a young life, and shares Berg’s elegiac awareness of dying beauty; the Trumpet Concerto (2018), by way of deliberate contrast, accumulates energy and vivacity as it proceeds. Dances under an Autumn Sky (2017), subtitled ‘Orchestral Music in Six Scenes’, is a balletic blend of joie de vivre and intense instrumental drama, which shares Stravinsky’s fondness for rhythmic surprises and Tippett’s for angular, primal energy.
