Vic Hoyland on CD

In Transit; Vixen

Performed by BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Martyn Brabbins

NMC Recordings NMC D072 — their site includes an audio clip.

"...his ear for colour and his lyrical impulse create seductive images... Vixen, its title pointing up connections with an earlier ensemble piece called Fox, is more ambitious and even more remarkable. It was premiered at the Cheltenham Festival five years ago, and is the first part of a projected orchestral triptych. There are five movements, lasting 35 minutes and linked by tiny, almost subliminal motifs, which examine the ideas of musical continuity from different perspectives. But that's a very dry description of music bursting with life, which constantly presents brilliantly imagined events and gestures, yet can suddenly evaporate into nothingness. The fourth movement is the most telling of all, with its elegiac string lines, coloured with chiming percussion. It is followed by a finale reassessing much of what has gone before, yet never repeating itself. It's as fine an orchestral piece as produced by a British composer in recent years, and superbly played and recorded here.” Classical CD of the Week, The Guardian

"...Vixen can be read as a fruitful conflict between melodic and non-melodic material, culminating in a memorable paragraph which the booklet notes understandably calls 'Mahlerian'. But that adjective describes the feeling and the context rather than the melodic language... The sound is often hard-edged and metallic, with much use of percussion as part of the music's vigorous rhythmic language. The much longer Vixen expands on this, with a broader and very imaginative range of sonority and rhythmic process. Sharply differentiated rhythmic fragments seem to generate melody, most notably in the third movement where a fine, angular figure strides grandly through a harsh climax. The Mahlerian string melody its destination, but the non-melodic material is not quelled; it is not in conflict after all..." International Record Review — Michael Oliver

"Not the least appealing aspect of Vic Hoyland's music is the (word) play of his titles. One is immediately drawn to a composer whose youthful essays include a piece entitled Jeux-Thème. Vixen, for orchestra, likewise encapsulates a double aspect, being both 'Avicenna', the Italian name for medieval Persian scholar Ibn Sina, and reference to an earlier and related score, Fox. Aspects of Ibn Sina's rhythmic theories also turn out to be embedded in the work, along with the reflected spatial rhythms of a Mitterand grand project, Jean Nouvel's Centre for the Arab World. These are impressively conveyed in music of richly various invention. Echoes of other 20th century composers stand like bricks in the mortar of Hoyland's unrelenting narrative drive that sustains this five-movement structure for over half and hour. Joyous and ecstatic and searching and evanescent by turns, with a rapt meditation at is centre, Vixen concludes with a hushed peal of bell-sounds, capping the torrential flow of its finale." BBC Music Magazine — Nicholas Williams

"Vixen is a major score in every sense of the word, cast in five movements and spanning thirty-five minutes. Contemporary works on this kind of scale can often present problems, yet there are few recent major British scores that have impressed me as much as Vixen in their sense of cogency. It is not just Hoyland's use of melody that creates this cogency, but a whole range of gestural motifs, huge brass chords often reminiscent of Messiaen, explosive outbursts of flutter tonguing and a powerful feeling of inner drama, perhaps stemming from the composer's interest in the theatrical elements of music. There are also passages of luminous beauty in which Hoyland will magically float a melody through the textures, the slow fourth movement being a fine example, hauntingly memorable in its subtly colour washed orchestration. In this respect the closing paragraphs of the work, inspired by late afternoon bells tolling across Lake Como and the surrounding mountains and captured by harps and percussion over a peaceful string chord, are wonderfully evocative." Music Web — Christopher Thomas

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