condition (record/cover): NM / NM | Gatefold sleeve.

The major work and the most celebrated achievement of Gerard Schurmann (1924-2020), and a Chandos recording that brought these extraordinary pieces to the attention they had long deserved. The Six Studies of Francis Bacon (1968) had been commissioned by the painter himself - one of the most productive encounters between visual and musical art in twentieth-century British culture - and Schurmann responded with a work that attempted to translate not Bacon's imagery but his method: the distorted figure, the smeared and screaming form against its plain ground, the violence done to the human body and face in the service of a truth that conventional representation could not access.

The six movements - each corresponding to a different aspect or period of Bacon's practice - form a cycle that can be heard as absolute music and as a sustained meditation on what it means to look at the world without the protection of beauty. Schurmann's harmonic language, post-serial but never doctrinaire, brings to each movement the expressive weight the subject demands. Variants, paired here on the Chandos recording, extends the same compositional intelligence into a freer, less programmatic territory. A genuinely outstanding work that belongs in the company of the finest British orchestral music of its decade. Chandos, ABR 1011.