The Girl in My Alphabet is a 2002 CD of music by Errollyn Wallen; the Belize born composer recently appointed Master of the King’s Music.  It contains six works for various instruments and small ensembles; some with vocals, and it’s very varied.

It starts with Dervish, a 2001 piece for piano and cello, played by Dominic Harlan and Matthew Sharp.  It starts slowly with doom laden piano and scoopy cello but, like a Sufi dance, speeds up and becomes very fast and busy.  An impressive beginning.

Next, the 1994 work Are You Worried about the Rising Cost of Funerals sets five of the composers own poems for soprano and string quartet.  The text has a distinctly Caribbean flavour to it with lots of irony.  The soprano part is difficult and often very high and it’s sung really well by Patrizia Rosario.  The instrumentals are pretty varied combining some elements of minimalism with both tonal and atonal passages in a rather playful manner.  It’s very enjoyable.

Louis’ Loops is a 1999 work for toy piano riffing off Couperin.  It’s fast and intricate and played here skilfully by Margaret Leng Tan.  It’s followed by the four movement piece for thirteen players, Horseplay.  The first movement; “Dark and mysterious” is exactly that; heavy on bass clarinet with lots of the piano’s lower register.  The third movement “Larghetto” is in the same vein but they sandwich “Lively”, which is just that, with more contributions from the strings and the higher woodwinds.  Then there’s a sort of reprise; “Dark and mysterious – presto!” to conclude.  The speeding up and some lightening of texture makes it completely unlike the first movement despite the obvious affinities.  It’s all very well executed by the Continuum Ensemble conducted by Philip Headlam.

In Our Lifetime may be my favourite track.  It’s scored for baritone (Mike Henry) and tape.  There are quotations from Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika and texts in Xhosa and English about Nelson Mandela.  It’s very heavy and very moving.  At least if you are one of those people who thought “not in our lifetime…”

The CD finishes up with the 1990 title track The Girl in My Alphabet for two pianos (Douglas Finch and the composer).  It’s complex and largely atonal to begin but lightens up and gets jazzier over the course of its eleven minutes, finishing up as a kind of riff on Girl from Ipanema.  It’s really quite clever.

It’s a perfectly decent recording; clean, detailed and qui spacious, especially for the period and it’s available as a physical CD, as MP3 and as standard resolution WAV/FLAC/ALAC.  All in all an interesting 70 minutes or so of music and a good introduction to this composer.

Catalogue information: Avie Records AV 0006