Review
The first disc to be devoted to Tansy Davies's music is built around Troubairitz, her 2005 settings of Derek Mahon's translations of poems by women troubadours from 12th-century Provence. The cycle is an exercise in self-restraint as much as anything, because Davies's beautifully simple vocal lines are mostly unaccompanied, with added percussion in four of the seven songs. Their austerity and expressive flexibility seem far removed from the world of Davies's instrumental writing, in which influences from rock and jazz, as well as the usual canon of late 20th-century composers, is fused into a pungent musical language distinctly her own. Neon, from 2004, is the best known of the ensemble works here, its brittle sound-world bound by a mesh of riffs and ostinatos, while Inside Out 2, from 2003, is a more pared-down labyrinth of pulses and patterns, and in 2005's Salt Box an aura of electronic sound binds the sparer instrumental textures. A final group of remixes, by Mira Calix, Gabriel Prokofiev and Rolf Wallin and others, underlines Davies's wide-ranging roots.**** --Guardian,14/04/11
The full range of Tansy Davies's varied modernist interests is displayed on Troubairitz, from the title suite itself, a song-cycle based on 19th-century poems by women troubadours, sung here either a cappella or with minimal accompaniment by Anna Snow, to the more animated pieces such as "Inside Out 2", a brittle bricolage of pizzicato and percussion sounds, and "Grind Show", a musical evocation of a typically bleak, disturbing Goya painting, Pilgrimage of St Isadore, picked out in stalking piano, pizzicato and woodwind. Particularly impressive are "Neon", whose industrious staccato strings, woodwind, keyboard and percussion dart hyperactively hither and thither, like winking city lights --Independent,20/05/11
This disc, vividly recorded and succinctly annotated,can onlywin new admirers for Davies's music. --Gramophone,July'11
