Landfall In Unknown Seas / Diversions For String Orchestra

Diversions was selected out of hundreds of submissions by Australian and New Zealand composers in response to a call for a work to be played during the Boyd Neel String Orchestra's tour of the region in 1947. This good-natured, five-movement suite has become, as the liner notes claim, a work "at the heart of the New Zealand chamber-music repertoire." The third movement makes humorous allusions to the William Tell Overture, and the spirited final movement is reminiscent of Larsson's and Wirén's best string works. Lilburn's Landfall in Unknown Seas commemorates the 300th anniversary of Abel Tasman's 1642 discovery of New Zealand-"where lofty mountains crowd down on a dramatic coast." In 1941 the New Zealand poet Allen Curnow wrote a poem for the tercentenary and showed it to Lilburn, who the next year completed a string work broken in three places for the reading of each of the three "movements" of Curnow's poem; the music is noble, respectful, and evocative. No less an appropriate celebrity than Sir Edmund Hillary, the great New Zealand-born conqueror of Mt. Everest, is the (rather passionless) narrator. The Allegro for Strings, written in the same year, is inspired by the landscapes of New Zealand's South Island and "their overtones of vibrant air."

Anthony Watson (1933-73) wrote his Introduction and Allegro for Strings in 1960, and it is a contrapuntal, engagingly dissonant short work. It's quite good, and New Zealand music circles are right to mourn his early death.

The first version of Soliloquy for Strings by Larry Pruden (1925-82) was completed when the composer was only nineteen. He revised it twice, completing it in 1952. The music is sincere, even dreamy, though its "considerable depth of feeling" (liner notes) is rather characterless and unaf-fecting.

The conductorless New Zealand group is more than adequate. Koch's sound is warm and natural. Though not anything like an essential CD, this disc is winning in ways that any good pastoral collection is-by being a haven of relaxed tone painting.

-- Stephen Ellis, FANFARE [7/1995]