The Elephant In The Room: 3 Commissions

One of the several tragedies of the late Mira Calix’s career is that, though she kept evolving, people rarely held her recorded output together as a body of work. Partly, though, that’s because most of her 21st century music wasn’t originally made for records, but for art installations or performances. This collection brings together extracts from her opera Elephant And Castle with a libretto by noted author Blake Morrison, the installation piece for cello memoryofamoment, and Dead Wedding from the Manchester International Festival. It mixes musique concrète sound manipulation (scraping, water sounds etc) with abstract vocalisation and classical instrumentation. What’s really remarkable here is that though the pieces from three very different contexts are interspersed, it truly feels like an album. It’s clear how each would have its own effect in situ, but together they’re greater than the sum of the parts. It shows her as not just a great manipulator of sounds and space but one of the great modern composers: we live in hope of more from her artworks getting archived.