The album Cloud and Mirrors, a musical portrait of British composer Alan Charlton (1970-2018), received a review in the November issue of Gramophone. Click here to read the review.
Hear and see below Edenwood Duo’s live performance in the Royal Academy London during the CD presentation October 2019, where they played the Suite for cello & guitar by Alan Charlton:
The Suite for Cello and Guitar by Alan Charlton was commissioned in 2005 by Russian cellist Leonid Gorokhov and English guitarist Richard Hand. Unfortunately, Richard Hand died before they were able to premier the work. It was in 2017 that the work was finally given a premiere by the Edenwood Duo, during a concert in Charlton’s Art Nouveau home, as part of the Brussels Art Nouveau and Art Deco Festival. The suite consists of five contrasting movements or dances. For this piece, Charlton was inspired by mime, imagining a clownish, tragicomic character, only able to communicate through this medium. Each movement of the suite conveys different episodes in the character’s life, rating in mood from comic to dramatic. Charlton uses the piece to explore the rich range of sonorities and sound effects available to both guitar and cello, and creates expressive dialogues between the instruments, in which they imitate and mirror each other. He also develops surprising new textures and harmonic colours through the use of wholetone and pentatonic scales, while his sudden changes in dynamics and tempo offer great dramatic effect. Intrada and Intermezzo have a stylised quality, while Tarantella and Burlesque are more vehicles for the respective instrumentalists’ virtuosity. The outer sections of Cantilena are lyrical solos for cello, with the guitar taking over the melodic material in the central section.
To learn more about Alan Charlton’s music and performances please see www.alancharlton.com.