Royal Scottish National Orchestra / Stéphane Denève GUILLAUME CONNESSON Cosmic Trilogy - The Shining One

There’s a new generation of French composers we know little about on this side of the channel, names like Bacri, Beffa, Escaich, Zavaro, and Connesson, now around 40 (see Philip Clark, 1/10, for details of the French context). Thanks to this CD and Connesson’s association with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra we can start to discover more about him.

Aleph, the first part of Connesson’s Cosmic Trilogy, was commissioned by the RSNO and dedicated to its French conductor. The whole cycle is involved with ideas deriving from Stephen Hawking and Kandinsky but Aleph makes an orchestral showpiece on its own – a kind of supercharged version of Ravel’s Daphnis with more than a hint of John Adams.

Connesson admits that his style is eclectic but the much longer second section, also an RSNO commission, lacks the rhythmic impetus that sustains the first one and it wanders in a kind of Debussian reverie. The third section, Supernova, actually written first, inhabits the limitless vistas of outer space. Influences stream past – Messiaen, Milhaud, Bartók, Stravinsky, film music – in an efficiently scored panoply. The CD ends oddly with The Shining One, described as a piano concerto although it lasts only nine minutes. There’s a central section that starts by recalling John Ireland – that must be a coincidence – before the piece whips up to a hyperactive finish. Committed performances vividly recorded. (Peter Dickinson / Gramophone)