Oliver Davis: Liberty

Composer Oliver Davis’ music teems with energy and joy, the flavours of jazz, folk and film music colouring his elegantly crafted scores. The ravishing opening suite, Spiral, is a voyage through his influences, its final movement a riotous, Copland-esque hoedown. “Bacchus” is a delightful, mischievous work for pizzicato strings while Liberty takes us from the salons of 18th-century Vienna to the rustic outdoors. The haunting, driving “Lost Lake”, featuring a fiendish, arpeggiated violin part, precedes Chillingham, a setting of poems by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge that uses gorgeous, multi-layered vocal effects.