THE SUNDAY TIMES:
This disc by the ensemble Double Image remembers the South African-English composer Priaulx Rainier (1903-86) and brings forward the work of the Australian-born (1965) Sadie Harrison. Rainier's 1943 Suite for Clarinet and Piano is played with esprit by Andrew Sparling and David Carhart; the latter ably despatches her succinct Five Keyboard Pieces (1951-55), and accompanies Bridget Carey in a feeling account of the Hindemithian Viola Sonata (1945). The two movements of the title piece are a response to a Polish poet by Harrison, whose sonata-like After Colonna for cello (Miriam Lowbury) and piano is a fine and passionate statement.
Paul Driver

SHROPSHIRE STAR:
The first question: what is it? Well, No Title is twentieth-century chamber music composed by South African Priaulx Rainier and Australian Sadie Harrison.And the second: is it any good? To that, a very definite yes. Suites, sonatas and expositions whizz past in a flurry of virtuosic playing that is fast, lyrical and deeply passionate.
Andy Richardson

MUSICAL OPINION:
Metier's reputation as a supporter of little-known composers is estimable, and in their different ways the next three discs fall into this category. Priaulx Rainier and Sadie Harrison are separated by several generations, but they settled in Britain from South Africa and Australia respectively, combining composition with teaching activities. Chamber music has featured prominently in their work. This year we are celebrating the Centenary of Priaulx Rainier's birth and it is to be hoped that her most successful piece, Quanta, for Oboe and String Trio, will be made available of CD, perhaps a transfer of the excellent LP version made by Janet Craxton and the London String Trio. The emphasis in this fine METIER disc is on her work from the 1940s and 1950s, with the Suite for Clarinet and Piano evincing a distinct neoclassical tendency. The Viola Sonata was written at a time when the viola was only occasionally featured as a solo instrument, while the Five Pieces for Piano show her gradually adopting a species of serial technique. Her publisher is Schott, who will know more of the Centenary performances.

Sadie Harrison has clearly absorbed more recent developments, but there is a similar tendency to find an individual response to the most radical forms of expression. No Title Required, for five players, is probably the most demanding, and consequently the most interesting piece on the disc. Three Expositions is more abstract, but sustains the solo Flute line very successfully. After Colonna, for Cello and Piano, was inspired by a 15th-century romance. It has the form of a three-movement sonata, but is based on a strong narrative outline.
Denby Richards

LA FOLIA:
Sadie Harrison's No Title Required is the showstopper here. It uses the same instrumental combination as Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire (flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano) but bears no resemblance to that groundbreaking work. Harrison's quintet is in two movements, a form that invites contrasts and surprises. The musical content unfolds as a set of variations. Harrison writes detailed passages where two instruments play as one, particularly in the first movement where the winds and strings pair off momentarily to form a double duo, and in other places the high instruments play in unison against a paired cello and left-hand piano. In the second movement, we get some atmospheric sliding clarinet and flute sounds over a steady piano. Three Expositions are three well-crafted works for solo flute. Alternately dreamy and vigorous, After Colonna is a substantive single movement for cello and piano, based on an esoteric 15th-century mythological romance.

Born in South Africa, Priaulx Rainier spent her student and professional life in London except for a brief period of study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Rainier’s work is engaging and uncomplicated. These three works show a composer who may have been influenced by neo-Classicism, but moved on to an original, more modernist language. The 1943 Suite for Clarinet and Piano, in five short movements, suggests Bartók’s Contrasts, especially in its slowest movement. The clarinet part has a harlequin-like liveliness and is rarely lyrical. Rainier has a penchant for repeating small patterns or a handful of notes just once or twice, which is very evident in the Five Pieces for Keyboard. The last of the Five Pieces is from 1951 and is the most curious: Short and aggressive with repeated chords, jagged lines and a starkly repeating note pattern, it could be a discarded Stockhausen Klavierstück. The Viola Sonata is my favorite Rainier work here. Viola and piano play as equals with little concertizing bravado, and the viola has much to do in its lower range, a tessitura that seems to scare many composers.

Rainier died in 1986 (aged 83), but Harrison, born in Australia in 1965,is alive and active. Metier has released other first performances of Harrison's chamber music, and works for larger forces are to be premiered in 2002. The ensemble Double Image has forged a rewarding partnership with Harrison, and their hard work has paid off with exemplary performances of interesting music. I'm looking forward to hearing more.
Grant Chu Covell

MUSICWEB:
Priaulx Rainier "was known as a composer of scrupulous judgement and discriminating taste"; so wrote The Times' music editor in October 1986 for the composer's obituary. He went on "her standards were unflinchingly high" not only on her pupils, as Nicola Lefanu points out in her fascinating essay in the CD booklet, but on herself. Perhaps that is why, if Grove is correct, less than thirty works are all she allowed to outlive her. Schott, her principal publisher, in their catalogue of her work list only twenty-four. Since her death her music seems of course to have become completely forgotten in concert halls. The BBC naturally have forgotten her and, with a few rare exceptions, so have the record companies. Redcliffe Edition (RR007) brought out in 1992 a recording (another had appeared four years earlier) of the 1939 String Quartet, coupled the Oboe Quartet Quanta (1962), the austere String Trio (1966) and Ploermel, an amazing piece not unlike Varèse, for winds and percussion. Also on Redcliffe (RR 011) The National Youth Choir recorded Rainier's beautiful Requiem of 1956. In the LP era some works like the String Trio did occasionally appear, but there has been little or no chance to reassess her output in the last decade.

I first saw Rainier at the Wigmore Hall at the Alan Rawsthorne memorial concert in the autumn of 1971 alongside figures like Elizabeth Lutyens and Richard Rodney Bennett. I next saw her at the same venue when Peter Pears sang her unaccompanied Cycle for Declamation. Works would appear on the Radio and William Glock commissioned from her the stunning Aequera Luna (1967) and the Cello Concerto (1964). Not only that but when I did come to speak to her she had such a beautifully honed colonial accent that it all added up to Rainier being a respected, established, even establishment figure. But when I came to discover the music (not always easy to do) I realized how wrong I was. She was highly individual, an outsider from a backwater in rural Natal, South Africa. Her sound world could be harsh and totally lacking in sentimentality, purged of any romantic notions of the natural world. These elements are fundamental to the three works recorded here. They are each early works and relatively easy to assimilate but they, in many ways, encapsulate the nature of her compositional activity up to that point.

The Viola Sonata of 1946 has been broadcast by the BBC and broadcast a few times. It was never commercially available. It shows to a certain extent Rainier's admiration for Bartók who had just died. This admiration is particularly strong in her Barbaric Dance suite for piano, which was first performed in 1950. Its antecedents are African whereas Bartók's are Eastern European; nevertheless the inspiration is ethnic.

It must be remembered that when you listen to Rainier you are listening to African music (as indeed you are with John Joubert also South African but less radical). The last movement of the Viola Sonata encapsulates a quality that Nicola Lefanu refers to in the aforementioned essay as having "boldly, direct rhythmic patterning, spare textures and deceptively simple melodic shapes" such as one finds in the music of her native Natal.

The Five Keyboard Pieces were written between 1951-1955. Schott have produced a faded lithographic score, a reproduction of the composer's rather poor hand. The music though is highly original. I have attempted to play them myself and can vouch for the unusual hand formations needed and widely spaced harmonies; at no point however are they unpianistic. The Clarinet Suite is in five movements, each casting its own individuality and not linked, except stylistically, with the next. This piece has many technical challenges for both players especially in the last movement but, and this is what I most admire, the music has its own integrity; an integrity you can trust.

I must not forget the other interesting female composer represented here who almost gets half the disc's playing time, the Australian, Sadie Harrison. In fact it is her piece No title required written in 1994, (the title taken from the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska) which gives the CD its curious nomenclature. It is the only work here for all five members of Double Image. It is a two movement investigation of the "poems’ images of revolutions, tyrannies and political conspiracies in relation to skimming shadows, fluttering white butterflies and wind-blown clouds" to quote the composer in the CD booklet. This is a good example of how a listener should best listen to the music first and then possibly read the composer's notes. It is a dramatic piece, which draws one in effectively. Its ideas are arresting and thoughtfully developed. The first movement gives a chance for the group to show their virtuosity in its speed and technical demands.

Three Expositions is for unaccompanied flute and in duration, at just over eight minutes the composer seeks to develop three short ideas stated at the start. Expert flautists could do worse than add this beautifully constructed and fascinating work to their repertoire; it should rank alongside Debussy and Varèse.

Finally After Colonnaâ is an impassioned 12-minute exploration of a 15th Century myth - effectively a Romance for cello and piano. The composer's notes make its complex antecedents fairly clear so I will say no more except that I have come to admire it greatly. This, in addition to Harrison's other two works recorded here, points to a composer of considerable potential and power, although I find the comment by Nicola Lefanu that she defies categorisation unhelpful and inaccurate. Lefanu says that Boulez is an influence (I'm not so sure). Peter Sculthorpe's name came to mind more naturally while listening to Harrison's music.

The recording is immediate and yet spacious. The performances seem me to be exemplary, often brilliant, lyrical when needed and dedicated. Double Image state in the CD that they were established in 1989 and that they specialise "in performances of music by women."

The presentation of this disc is first class with excellent notes by Lefanu and pianist David Carhart who contributes some personal reminiscences of Priaulx Rainier.

This music will probably have limited appeal but I find it strong and brilliant, perhaps you will.
Garry Higginson