Earthcycle

This third ‘mixtape album’ from Orchestra of the Swan continues the classical ensemble’s adventures into bending and breaking genre boundaries. Earthcycle’s predecessors nudged the top of the US Billboard chart and quickly gained traction on streaming services. Spliced together here are traditional folk songs, jazz influences and one of classical music’s most familiar masterpieces, Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. Despite its antiquity – it was composed in 1723 – it provides an apt spine for a programme preoccupied by current environmental issues. In David Gordon’s lithe, gently jazz-laced arrangement, the Baroque juggernaut is a thing of wonder and vitality, the orchestra’s David Le Page a fizzing violin lead, with Gordon shifting between piano and harpsichord dextrously. Ensemble strings and percussion also rise to the occasion, flexing their muscle to produce images alive with onomatopoeic sounds of nature. It’s impossible not to shiver during Gordon’s duet with Le Page on his own ‘Feeling the Chill’. Former BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards-winner Jackie Oates adds English pastoralism to the equation, rustic and robust on ‘Bright Phoebus’, buoyant and spry on ‘The Lark in the Morning’, exquisitely poetic on the affecting ‘The Robin’s Petition’. Disparate though the various elements are, they are perfectly integrated. Superb recorded sound repays listening on headphones with ravishing detail. The curious won’t be disappointed.