One of Britain’s most accomplished ensembles specialising in new music, Gemini, return to the studio in July to record a new album of music by Nicola LeFanu for Métier.  The album is tentatively titled ‘A Wild Garden’ – it contains vocal and chamber works and will be scheduled for release in the late autumn.

Nicola LeFanu has had a long association with Gemini stretching back to the 1970s when the ensemble recorded The Same Day Dawns with the composer conducting (released by Chandos on LP).  These ‘Fragments from a book of songs’ are scored for soprano and five instruments with words from poems in Tamil, Chinese, Japanese, Kannada and Akkadian. The work was written in 1974.

Along with this new recording of the work there are three other substantial compositions, all premiere recordings. The composer says of the Sextet Fasach – A Wild Garden, written in 1996: ‘I had in my mind images of some of my favourite wild places in Ireland: Roundstone bog and the Connemara coast, for example. To the outsider they must seem bare and empty, but if you explore them, they are teeming with luxuriant growth. In particular, the wild flowers on the cliffs at Kilbaha in Co. Clare were in my thoughts: my cousin Rachel Burrows spoke of her ‘’wild garden’’ there, and it became the subtitle of the piece’.

The Piano Trio (2003) ‘…is a lyric work written in a single movement. … The music is created through transformations—of melodic and rhythmic shapes, textures, characteristic harmonies. … These transformations are sometimes close, sometimes remote, but the harmonies underlying the piece create a unifying resonance so that the disparate ideas cohere’.

The Moth-Ghost (2020) is a dramatic scena for soprano and piano, setting a poem by James Harpur. It tells the story of Thetis, ‘…a sea-goddess of Greek mythology, who knew that her son Achilles must die. In the poem, she is a grief-stricken mother, mourning his death in the Trojan war. The imagery of the poem and the music is of the sea: the sonority of its turbulence, the rhythm of its tides’.

Nicola LeFanu was born in England in 1947, the daughter of Irish parents: her father William LeFanu was from an Irish literary family, and her mother was the composer Elizabeth Maconchy. LeFanu studied at Oxford, Royal College of Music and, as a Harkness Fellow, at Harvard. She has honorary doctorates from the universities of Durham, Aberdeen, and The Open University, is an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda’s College Oxford, and is FRCM and FTCL. She has composed around one hundred works which have been played and broadcast all over the world; her music is published by Novello and by Edition Peters. She has been commissioned by the BBC, by festivals in UK and beyond, and by leading orchestras, ensembles and soloists.

Since its formation in 1974 Gemini has presented a richly varied repertoire, incorporating standard eighteenth and nineteenth century chamber music, twentieth century music, new music, music theatre, music and dance and improvisation, plus much music by women and other neglected composers, and works inspired by, or influenced by, music outside the Western European tradition. Community and school concerts feature music from the eleventh to the twenty-first century; folk music from around the world, music by children and young people as well as more standard fare. An ongoing series of commissions is developing the use of the bass clarinet in small chamber ensembles. The ensemble is directed by clarinettist Ian Mitchell.

A Wild Garden (Métier MEX 7712)

Artists

• Clara Barbier Serrano (soprano)
• Gemini (Director : Ian Mitchell)
• Composer (all works) : Nicola LeFanu

Works

• The Same day Dawns
• Sextet: Fasach – A Wild Garden
• Piano Trio
• The Moth-Ghost

Gemini on Métier