Likely to be a particularly fine disc - Finnissy playing Newman. The former seems to move onto the wavelength of Newman's work with quite uncanny empathy, never at all 'playing it for laughs' or otherwise rendering it affectionate but trivial. Actually it has a somewhat hallucinatory quality in MF's hands, not least down to his ability to successfully render the utterly uncompromising objectivist elements of the work (what Newman calls 'making it substantial'), much better than I've as yet managed. It's taken a lot of time for me to see just how Finnissy's own work relates on a deep level to Newman - through its defamiliarising use of structure somehow imposed upon material which does not quite 'fit' it, together with the rather acerbically childilike aspects and the bizarre combination of fatalism and optimism rendered as one. I can see why he feels closer to this than to much 'complex' work with which he can be too easily grouped.