Joe Cutler’s debut portrait album Bartlebooth (NMCD134) was released on NMC in 2008 and was one of Gramophone Magazine’s Top 20 Releases of the Year. His music has been described as ‘propulsive’ (BBC Music Magazine), ‘alluring’ (Scotsman), ‘neurotic’ (Re-Diffusion) and ‘the best thing to come out of Neasden since Twiggy’ (Gramophone).

Released to mark Joe’s 50th birthday, this album features six works, all with typically wild and amusing titles that make you curious to find out more. Take Karembeu’s Guide to the Complete Defensive Midfielder, for example, a work that combines influences from jazz, contemporary classical, and post-minimalism, inspired by YouTube videos of the French footballer Christian Karembeu demonstrating the importance of short passing and the combination of movement and control. There’s also McNulty, a piece commissioned by the Fidelio Trio in 2016, that gets some inspiration from a deeply flawed character of that name in the American TV drama The Wire.

Elsewhereness, an ‘occasional’ piece, written for the opening of the newly built Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, is performed by the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Symphony Orchestra under conductor Mirga Grazinytè-Tyla (Music Director of City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra). It explores ‘the metaphysics of place, of moving from one building as it is dismantled to the new one as it rises from its foundations’.

In Akhmatova Fragments, written for soprano Sarah Leonard, and he captures the fleeting moods of the poems beautifully. The two remaining pieces For Frederic Lagnau and Sikorski B are named after two composers who have been a great influence on Cutler. They are performed by Workers Union Ensemble and Cutler’s collective Noszferatu respectively.