Daar Kom die Alibama, which Kevin Volans calls a symphony in the original meaning of “sounding together”, and which takes its title from a 19th-century Afrikaaner folk song, was first performed at the Edinburgh festival in 2010. Then, the bathroom acoustic of the Usher Hall made it hard to pin down, but this recording from the National Concert Hall in Dublin makes everything much clearer, and when preconceptions are put aside – the work has no symphonic aspirations in the conventional sense, nor does the folk song provide any of its musical material – it can be heard as a typical Volans study in musical patterning, as compelling in its own way as late Morton Feldman. The 1995 Piano Concerto has been recorded before, though Volans revised the score three years ago, but the real discovery here is the Trio Concerto from 2005, which sets violin, cello and piano (the Storioni Trio) against a full orchestra, sometimes immersing them in a torrent of competing swirling textures, sometimes giving them short passages alone. It’s both exhilarating and powerfully dramatic, one of the most impressive of Volans’ recent scores.
