Recordings of music
by Nicola Lefanu have been scarce and
this is our loss. Not only that but
recently broadcasts of her music have
also dried up. Bearing all that in mind
it is a surprise and a joy to find this
fine disc of four pieces written between
1986 and 1999 issued on a budget price
label.
Chandos produced an
LP of three works in 1980 (one of their
first recordings) which included a magical
setting of oriental texts ‘The Same
Day Dawns’ (1974). This was performed
by Jane Manning. Smaller works have
sometimes emerged like Praeludio
II for Orchestra (on ATMA 2 2199
‘Women Write Music’). I have listened
to these pieces in the course of preparing
this review in an attempt to begin to
understand Lefanu’s language or sound-world.
The delicate textures
of ‘The Same Day Dawns’ and ‘Deva’ (1979)
for cello and seven players, also on
the Chandos LP, were the very things
that originally attracted me to Lefanu
twenty years ago. Unlike her mother,
Elizabeth Maconchy, whose voice is quite
distinctly her own, Nicola Lefanu does
not have such an easily discernible
and original voice. However she shares
with her mother a love of string instruments
and a real penchant in using them. This
thought remained strongly with me whilst
listening to her one movement, atonal,
twelve minute 2nd String
Quartet which opens this CD. It’s interesting
to compare it with Maconchy 2nd
of fifty years earlier but I leave that
to you. This work has several arresting
ideas and a clear form based upon that
of the Sonnet but overall it is an elusive
work - difficult to grasp.
The ‘Concertino for
Clarinet and String Orchestra’ is quite
different. It is a reworking of a chamber
work, ‘Invisible Places’ for Clarinet
and String Quartet. The composer says
in the accompanying booklet: "I
enjoyed the chance to re-interpret the
string quartet music for the larger
sonority of a string orchestra which
in turn releases the clarinet to create
a more wide-ranging persona".
I couldn’t help but
think of her remark, in the notes for
the Chandos LP, concerning ‘Deva’. There
she writes "perhaps I turn to the
metaphor of describing the landscape
through which the cello passes as like
steam ... becoming a river". As
Michael Hall wrote in a Musical Times
article on Lefanu in 1979 "…the
journey is not only physical; it is
spiritual too, it concerns the relationship
between the individual and relationship
of the whole". These comments about
being set on a journey when listening
to these works quite easily apply to
this ‘illusive clarinet work’ and it
pays dividends to listen wholly and
completely.
The Spanish poet Garcia
Lorca haunted Lefanu for some years.
Her opera ‘Blood Wedding’ is based on
his writings and this work is an ‘off-shoot’
of it. I first heard it circa 1994 on
a BBC broadcast at the same time that
Lefanu was appointed to her present
position as Head of Faculty at York
University. She was interviewed before
the performance and explained that she
wanted to "write a tribute to Lorca".
She also said that the poem set here
is the only "straight poem found
in the play ‘Blood Wedding’ and it this
point the story becomes, for the only
time, a Romance". Lefanu also commented
on Nicholas Clapton, the wonderful counter-tenor
that premièred the work and who
records it here. On hearing him sing
in the opera she said that she "had
to write a piece especially for him".
Some of these points she reiterates
in her brief booklet notes for the Naxos
disc. ‘Cancion’ plays for twelve intense
minutes and in its lyrical passion and
dense dissonance stands apart from the
other works.
The longest and last
work on the CD is ‘Catena’ for eleven
solo strings in which the word ‘Catena’
is interpreted as a "chain of hills"
inspired by a view the composer has
from her studio. It has in common with
‘Cancion’ and with the Quartet the use
of microtonal intervals. In my view
she uses these better than any other
composer I know. They seem logical,
musically placed and emotionally at
the right points in the melodic lines
and phrases. They do not ‘offend and
baffle the ear’ as with some composers
(for example John Foulds) but seem to
flow naturally in and out of the music;
not that ‘Cantena’ is littered with
them but they are significant in this
crepuscular atmosphere.
Another modern technique
Lefanu resorts to controlled improvisation.
In earlier works like ‘The Little Valleys’
for female voices (1975) the whole work
is notated with actual pitches but the
performers sing them at their own speed.
In her 1979 orchestral work ‘Farne’,
written for the Cambridgeshire Youth
Orchestra, there is a central passage
using this technique. Here ‘Catena’
uses it but also in a limited and discrete
manner which simply communicates the
emotional range of the passage and is
musically logical. It is a delicate
work, complete with its aleatoric passages
and sums up completely Nicola Lefanu’s
highly original sound-world.
This music needs and
has received an excellent recording.
The venue furnishes one of the best
acoustics I have heard for contemporary
music for some considerable time. It
should be used more often.
Gary Higginson
see also review
by Hubert Culot
Fiona Cross
(clarinet); Nicholas Clapton (counter-tenor) 
