Ed Hughes (b.1968)
Music for the South Downs
Flint (2019)
Nonet (2020)
Lunar (2021)
The Woods so Wild (2020-21)
New Music Players
Primrose Piano Quartet
rec. 2021, London and Sussex
MÉTIER MSV28623 [69]
The Métier label has been the recorded home of the music of British composer Ed Hughes. To be found there are discs of his When the Flame Dies, Time, Space and Change and Symphonic Visions, the latter including ‘Brighton - Symphony of a City’. Brighton, arguably capital of the South Downs, yields a link with this CD, which hymns the South Downs National Park; the newest of the national parks.
This disc of chamber music, most skilfully played, includes a quarter of an hour, three-movement piece called Flint which, in its pell-mell, plunging, troublous power and centred peacefulness, takes a lesson or two from Michael Tippett, notably his Corelli Fantasia. Closely recorded, it achieves something not that far from massed string orchestral impact.
The Nonet - also in three movements and similar in duration to Flint - is similarly impelled; just more diversely and dangerously varied in its tumbling multiple instrumental detailing. Its central ‘Tranquil’ is peaceful and forms a satisfying contrast with the increasingly tense and Nyman-like ‘Flowing’. This and the other pieces carry some of the nature and birdsong impress implied by the composer’s own words: “a hilly walk in the South Downs. Our perceptions constantly change and re-energise as we encounter familiar objects while colours, shadings and vegetation are in a constant flow of development.”
Lunar is a somewhat longer piece (24 minutes), again in three movements (‘Lunar 1’, ‘Lunar 2’ and ‘Chroma’). The first two pursue their course in meditative, mysterious and threatening paragraphs. The work’s final buzzing ‘Chroma’, while impressively complex, includes what feels like a folk dance in the ‘weave’.
The Woods so Wild is again in three movements and these melt forwards in lyricism and ecstasy. There’s that Tippett melos mediated with a touch of early Howells and the instrumental writing of Warlock in his The Curlew.
The booklet is most beautifully composed and executed with colour photographs of the South Downs and extended insights by the composer into the witchery of his music.
Rob Barnett
