Philip Cashian’s music is full of juxtapositions – dizzying yet logical, blended together with artful skill and always teeming with passion: driving Stravinskyan rhythms, then delicate Chopinesque frills and then, maybe, a hard and unsettling funk - it is a music that refuses to be defined, its influences wide-reaching and invocations multifarious. Ultimately though, it is an always recognisable and utterly personal tone. With unnerving simplicity, total technical control and economy of means, Cashian’s music expresses the power and scope of the imagination.

His Chamber Concerto, the opening work on the NMC portrait CD Dark Inventions, is perhaps a good illustration of his many strengths. What is perhaps most striking on a first hearing is a kaleidoscopic variety of texture and colour as the work spins through 17 distinct sections in 16 minutes. What becomes more apparent on repeated listenings is the energy implicit in the melodic lines, the organic, often reiterative development of those lines, a strongly directional sense of harmony and, with that, an original approach to form. The colours too are characteristically Cashian: fundamentally dark, even elgaic, but on ocassion shot through with brighter, more evanescent hues.

First and foremost, Cashian’s work is musicianly, written without need of grand accompanying statements for musicians, at whatever level, to play. It is also, as players and listeners will discover, the emanation of a vivid imagination. Possessed of a narrative strength that can sweep the listener along on journeys to unanticipated destinations.

Darren Bloom, February 2009