Concordia/BCMG/Azalea/Austin (NMC) The nine pieces here, songs, ensemble works and solo instrumentals, encompass a decade in Tansy Davies 's career as a composer, from the solo-violin Loure of 2000 to Static and This Love, two settings of poems by Nick Drake she completed two years ago. It's hard to think of another British composer whose rise through the hierarchy of British music has been so rapid, fuelled by high-profile commissions. As this disc shows, her music is at its most compelling when it creates vivid textures, drawing on rock and pop idioms to give it edge and pungency; when it's pared down, as in the three songs here, or in the solo works for piano, violin and percussion, it loses a dimension. Davies is at her best in the three ensemble pieces: the Turnage-esque Iris for saxophone and ensemble from 2004; Falling Angel, inspired by an Anselm Keifer painting, which she composed for BCMG in 2007, and the brilliantly stage-managed Spine, which the London Sinfonietta prem...
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