Gramophone
Métier continues its welcome coverage of Nicola LeFanu with this volume of four works spanning some 46 years of her creativity, all heard in performances from one of the UK’s most prominent contemporary music groups, which will celebrate its half-century this year.
Seasoned readers may have encountered LeFanu’s music via a recording of The Same Day Dawns (1974) by Jane Manning with the Nash Ensemble (Chandos 4/81), never reissued but to which this new account is a worthy successor. Soprano Clara Barbier Serrano is a searching exponent of these 17 ‘Fragments from a Book of Songs’, the oriental texts arranged as a spiralular sequence whose textual repetition runs parallel to its overall evolution – with a tensile instrumental then ethereal vocalise (tracks 9 and 10) its formal and emotional apex. Strategic repetition is also evident in The Moth-Ghost (2020) to a specially written poem by James Harpur, but its expression feels more visceral as befits the mourning of an immortal mother for her heroic if ultimately human son in music of sustained plangency.
The instrumental pieces seem, if anything, even more engrossing. Inspired by wild places off the Connemara coast, the Sextet (1996) unfolds as a series of solos and sub-groupings made possible by the ensemble’s timbral contrasts and motivic clarity.
This is no less apparent in the Piano Trio (2003), but here the medium’s closeness to earlier precedent likely informs its expressive rhetoric and three-part continuity, whose moving from agitation via confrontation to stability makes for an intriguing vantage upon the ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis’ archetype.
Gemini’s playing is admirable individually and collectively throughout, abetted by sound of unsparing focus, with detailed notes by the composer and Ian Mitchell. Those who acquired NMC’s release of LeFanu’s orchestral works (11/20) should make this their next port of call.
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