American Record Guide

Ed Hughes has come our way before, but this my first encounter with his music. I find it enthralling. His command of his craft is such that he is able to move between angular dissonance and smoother consonance with ease. Cuckmere: A Portrait is a substantial work for chamber orchestra, writ¬ten to accompany a film about the River Cuckmere and its ever-changing flood plain. He finds inspiration in the movement and tension of the natural landscape, along with the ever-changing seasons. Taken on its own, the music isn’t so much an illustrative portrait as a vibrant transformation of Cuckmere’s natural cycles into music. His early 1991 piano trio ‘Media Vita’ and the recent 2018 Sinfonia for chamber orchestra reflect his career-long interest in English Renaissance music. Sinfonia is of most interest; peel back the layers of chromatic decoration and crisp polytonality and you will find Renaissance melodies utterly transformed by his musical language. It is a masterpiece that satisfies the endless tension between tradition and modernity in classical music. This is truly exciting music—Ed Hughes has an uncommon skill.

—Nathan Faro