This second volume of orchestral music by the English composer Steve Elcock (b. 1957), long since resident in France, brings three powerful works all with their origins in earlier pieces. Incubus examines the terrors of nightmare-riven sleep in a vigorous symphonic essay based on a movement from Elcock’s string quartet Night after Night. The impulse behind Haven, an expansive and surprisingly muscular fantasy, is the Sarabanda theme from Bach’s First Partita for solo violin. And Elcock’s Fifth Symphony takes its cue from the most famous of all Fifth Symphonies, re-examining Beethoven’s structural logic in Elcock’s own musical language to produce a volcanic new Fifth, its charge of wild energy husbanded to maximum dramatic effect.

Steve Elcock’s music first drew attention after the release of his Third Symphony and the triptych Choses renversées par le temps ou la destruction on Toccata Classics (TOCC0400), a Radio 3 recording of the week in October 2017. He has written six symphonies and other orchestral and chamber works, and another Toccata Classics album, a first volume of chamber pieces, released in December 2018 (TOCC0506), was described in Gramophone as ‘terrific music’.

captured by the RLPO. … A triumphant debut recording.” – The Guardian *****, September 2017