Bryars: Epilogue from Wonderlawn & other works, Mr McFall's Chamber

“The inexorable ebb and flow in Bryars’s music distils the sense of musical portraiture represented in The Church Closest to the Sea… There are moments of distilled beauty, too, in the earlier, Ave Maria-esque Epilogue from Wonderlawn. The work’s calm veneer exposes at times a deeper restlessness, effectively communicated by Mr McFall’s Chamber in a recording which brings out the very essence of Bryars’s expressive voice.”

Gramophone, January 2010

About the works

The double bass has always been close to Gavin Bryars’s own musical life, it was his instrument before he turned fully to composition, and it recurs throughout his output for other players. The Church Closest to the Sea (2007), the latest of the three works gathered here, was written specifically for Mr McFall’s Chamber and their bassist Rick Standley. Alongside it sit two earlier pieces: Epilogue from Wonderlawn (1994), an Ave Maria-like meditation the Gramophone review singled out for its “distilled beauty,” and Eight Irish Madrigals (2004), the longest work on the disc at nearly 27 minutes. Across all three, Bryars’s music moves between classical composition and jazz-inflected improvisation, meditating on what the label’s own description called “geographical and emotional borderlands”, music that sits comfortably in more than one idiom at once.

Bryars himself came to composition relatively late and by an unusual route: he began as a jazz double bassist in the 1960s, working alongside improvisers including Derek Bailey, before turning to composition and experimental music in the early 1970s. He remains best known outside specialist circles for Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, built around a looped recording of an elderly homeless man singing a hymn fragment, but his catalogue since then has ranged across opera, orchestral writing and a substantial body of chamber and vocal music, much of it, as on this disc, still marked by the instrumental sensibility of a working bass player rather than a composer arriving at the instrument from the outside.

About the performers

Mr McFall’s Chamber began in 1996 as a string quartet drawn from the ranks of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, who took to playing in nightclubs in a deliberate attempt to draw in a younger audience than the concert hall usually reaches. Over the years that followed the group grew well beyond a conventional string quartet, adding piano and bass players alongside a rotating cast of drummers, percussionists, singers and guest instrumentalists, a lineup built to move freely between tango, jazz, rock and contemporary classical music rather than stay inside any single tradition. That range made them a natural fit for Bryars’s own genre-crossing writing. The novelist Michael Ondaatje, writing about Bryars’s music more broadly, put it this way:

“He allows you to witness new wonders in the sounds around you by approaching them from a completely new angle.”

Michael Ondaatje, on Gavin Bryars

The Herald’s own assessment of the ensemble was similarly direct about their standing on the Scottish music scene:

“I believe the group, in what it does, and in what it represents, is potentially the most important single development on the Scottish musical scene in a long time.”

The Herald, on Mr McFall’s Chamber