Home listening - a summer round-up

The Guardian 0

New contemporary British music releases, from the Hilliard Ensemble to the Elysian Singers, John Casken to Erika Fox

•This week’s column is a summer roundup of the best of contemporary British music drawn from the large pile on my desk. In The Dream of the Rood (NMC), the Northumberland-based composer John Casken (b1949), whose music is steeped in the literature and landscape of the north, has turned to earlier traditions, notably the 12/13th-century Notre Dame school of Paris. He has ideal collaborators in the Hilliard Ensemble, Asko/Schönberg Ensemble and conductor Clark Rundell.

Also on NMC, performed by the Goldfield Ensemble, Paths is an intriguing introduction to the vivid soundworld of Erika Fox, with faint musical echoes of her Hasidic upbringing. Born in Vienna in 1936, she arrived in England at the age of two, and her moment, overdue, has at last come.