Fiona O'loughlin

Fiona Apple defied categorization or any easy career path, almost running the pattern in reverse, opening her career as a highly touted and popular alternative singer/songwriter, then transitioning into a cult artist. Apple certainly benefited from the open-door policy of modern rock in the mid-’90s, following the path of crossover alt-rock piano-based songwriters like Tori Amos, but Apple was hardly an Amos copycat: she had a strong jazz undertow in her vocal phrasing and melodies, she had richer arrangements, she had a poppier bent to her songs. All these things helped her 1996 debut, Tidal, find a wide audience, one that increased considerably in the wake of the controversial video for the single “Criminal,” but Apple made it abundantly clear that she wasn’t an amateur provocateur with her sophomore album, When the Pawn Meets the King, an album that increased her critical reputation and cult, which would be pillars of support during her intense battles while making her third album, Extraordinary Machine. Collection includes: 'Tidal' (1996); 'When The Pawn…' (1999); 'Extraordinary Machine' (2005), and 'The Idler Wheel…' (2012).

Voice, guitar and alto saxophone in intimate, sensitive interplay. And music full of warmth, depth and with surprising twists.

Clarinettist Barnaby Robson performs a rich programme of 20th-century and contemporary music for clarinet and piano, including world-premiere recordings. The release opens with Barnaby Robson’s collaboration with BAFTA-winning sound designer Martin Cantwell: a recording of Steve Reich’s intricate New York Counterpoint, which involves eleven pre-recorded clarinet lines. Herbert Howells is celebrated for his choral music but his instrumental works are less famous; with pianist Fiona Harris, Robson performs the 1946 version of Howells’s Clarinet Sonata, never recorded before.

The unhurried artist’s first studio album in eight years is astonishing, intimate and demonstrates a refusal to be silenced. The Apple of 2020 is astonishing; as if she has returned to reinvent sound – the rhythms pleasing, but counter, and unusual. On the title track she half-sings over a makeshift orchestra of kitchen implements, dog bark and cat yowl. The beat on Kick Me Under the Table has a seething back-and-forth pace; the extraordinary For Her beds double Dutch skipping rope rhythms beneath a chorus of female voices.