Environments is a substantial portrait album of Northern Irish composer Greg Caffrey, featuring four orchestral works written between 2011 and 2021. It is his first solo album since 2010’s First Constructions in Nylon (Cactus Records), and by far the most ambitious. For the project, Caffrey has paired up with the Ulster Orchestra under Sinead Hayes, who is the conductor of the Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble (HRSE), which Caffrey set up in 2013 and of which he was the artistic director until stepping down last year.

Environments opens with a threnody. Aingeal II (2021) was composed in memory of someone close to Caffrey, and its opening gesture – an angry descending figure followed by an extended tremolo, accompanied by knells on the tubular bells – has a raw emotion that foreshadows the directness of much of the music on this album. (There is also an Aingeal I, or just Aingeal, dating to 2009 and scored for clarinet quintet.)

At twenty minutes, the most substantial work on the album is A Terrible Beauty. This comprises three movements that were written as self-standing works between 2013 and 2017–19 (Caffrey gives different final years). Originally written for HRSE, we hear them here in versions for sinfonietta orchestra. Each is a response to a poem by W.B. Yeats.

The first, ‘These are the clouds about the fallen sun’, homes in on the first line of ‘These Are the Clouds’. Although there is plenty of movement in this piece, it is movement that goes nowhere, taking place within a larger stasis. It is an atmospheric work; the atmosphere is desolation. The second, ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’, is less cataclysmic than Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’. It has a hellish opening, but soon settles down. It has unexpected moments of quietness and gentleness, and more generally takes a moderate tempo and contains no big surprises or sudden shifts. In the final piece, ‘…for peace comes dropping slow’, Caffrey also departs from the tenor of Yeats’ poem. Here, he switches the foreground and background: where Yeats dwells on his Innisfree lake isle, only in the last lines snapping out of his reverie to city roadways and pavements grey, what Caffrey gives us is angular and tense, only latterly approaching a bucolic tempo, and only at the very end giving us something like consonance.

Caffrey does not misunderstand Yeats’ poetry. A Terrible Beauty, rather than merely dramatising the poems, instead investigates and reframes moments in them. Nor did Caffrey choose his lines at random: as he writes in the liner notes, his selection ‘charts a trajectory expressing deep loss and sadness, then desolation and anarchy and, finally, an uneasy tranquillity.’ A Terrible Beauty is an interesting, detailed and expressive work. The orchestral arrangements are also convincing, although I preferred the timbral clarity of the chamber originals (which can be found, for example, on HRSE’s A Terrible Beauty (Diatribe, 2021)).

Soloists and contrasts
The two Environments that give the album its name are less bleak than Aingeal II and A Terrible Beauty. They are based on a contrast between a soloist and orchestra, but are not concerti: virtuosity is not a concern, and they are rather explorations of musical contrasts. In Environments I (2011), the solo instrument is piano (the pianist here is Daniel Browell). It is an abstract work but a compelling one. Harmonic movement is thematised, with one instrument (not always the piano) often seeming to dictate chord changes, and the overall harmonic structure of this work has a very well-judged arc and balance. The contrast of sustain and attack is explored nicely too: the piano sometimes echoes the glockenspiel, sometimes the string section’s long sustain.

In Environments II (2012), the solo instrument is guitar (here Craig Ogden, who was the performer on Caffrey’s First Constructions in Nylon). Caffrey, a guitarist himself, writes sensitively for the instrument, and fits it into the orchestral context well too: he uses its sharp attack and fast decay to great effect, and uses it effectively both as a foreground and a supporting instrument. The guitar can sound thin in an orchestral context, but Caffrey, instead of fighting against this, uses it to ‘complete’ (Caffrey’s apt word) the rich and sustained but less crisp sound of the string orchestra. Ogden’s orchestral awareness deserves credit here too.

The musical portrait Environments creates is of an expressive composer who is yet careful with details. Throughout the album, Caffrey combines big gestures with a sensitive attention to each instrument and how it is balanced in and contrasts with the larger ensembles. Sometimes these details are a bit puzzling (I was nonplussed by some of the seemingly random pizzicati in Aingeal II), but these missteps are rare.

Hayes and the Ulster Orchestra play with confidence and bite, giving good accounts of all the works. However, tuning issues in the strings are occasionally distracting and more seriously, the orchestra does not always have the litheness to do full justice to the music, which would have opened up more if performed with greater dynamism.

A final word must also be given to the booklet: it is beautifully produced and features some useful context by Caffrey, but what really sets it apart are the excellent acrylics by Paula Caffrey. Each (apart from the cover painting) corresponds to a work on the album. As standalone works they drew me in through their use of volume and framing.

Environments by Greg Caffrey is released on the Divine Art label. Visit https://divineartrecords.com.