Born in Port Talbot, Jeffrey Lewis was awarded an Arts
Council bursary on Tippett’s recommendation and has studied with Stockhausen
and Ligeti. He performs as pianist and has taught composition at the
Leeds College of Music and the University of Wales, Bangor. Since 1992
he has been a full-time composer. Threnody, for piano,
is music of stasis with wide-spaced chords, rocking back and forth whereas
Cantus, a two movement work for clarinet and piano, hints
at eastern influences – chimes, gongs – in the piano writing. Lewis
exploits the clarinet’s limpid qualities, contrasting them with the
spaced piano chords and either the dripping right hand piano textures
or the rather monumental repeated bass chords. In the second movement
we can feel the increased animation reflected in greater use of dynamics
and intervals and the clarinet’s brooding and almost obsessive quest
for an independent line. Teneritas, for flute and piano,
is ethereal without becoming fey, grounded by increasingly insistent
piano chords and Sonante, the earliest work on this disc
and first performed in 1986, is a choppy, fragmentary and tense piece
for clarinet and piano. Trilogy, for piano, is the longest
piece on the disc. First performed in a BBC Radio 3 broadcast in 1994
it is written in three movements, two slow framing a central animated
panel. It has something of the furious simplicity of a Rothko, especially
in the opening movement, precisely noted as Lentissimo, intenso e
molto expressivo (poco flessibile). The central movement, as sleeve
note writer and pianist on the disc, David Jones, reminds us, is an
energetic, telescoping of the thematic material of the outer movements.
The sound is of necessary clarity and performances are good.
Jonathan Woolf
Karen Turner, clarinet