|
Ultramarine/People and Places/One To
Another/Wherever Next/Monday’s Child
1999. Dur.c38’. Metier MSV CD92043. Mid-price through shops. Or £8 including p&p direct from composer.
TEMPO magazine ‘record reviews’ April 2001:
“If Zechlin’s music has a certain popular
appeal by virtue of its religious connexions, then so too
does that of the English composer Jane Wells in a secular
context. A former pupil of Lumsdaine and Harvey, Wells
has since the late 1980s been involved in a variety of youth
music projects and initiatives in Norfolk and Lincolnshire,
and several of the pieces on the ‘Occasional Music’ album
(at 38 minutes long and mid-price a species of extended CD
single) derive from these works, such as the engaging
saxophone solo Ultramarine (1991) and duo Wherever
Next (1988) from short dance pieces. Consequently,
there is a directness of utterance here that is disarming,
almost ingénue. Take the catch-as-catch-can of Wherever
Next, a three-and-a-half minute whizz round the tonal
spectrum from C to C, or the longest work, Monday’s Child
(1998, based on her 1988 setting of the famous
children’s rhyme): an atmosphere fantasia built from a tune
sounding now like a close cousin of Daniel Jones’s
incidental songs to ‘Under Milkwood’. Yet the shorter
One To Another (1992) is an entirely different
proposition, a splendid miniature cantata for voice, 2
clarinets, viola, cello and double-bass. Perhaps
Wells’s stature can best be summarized from the flute trio
People and Places (1995), written for the East of
England orchestra’s education programme: not great music,
perhaps, but well conceived and effective enough in its own
rather important context. Fine performances from the
Composers Ensemble and Mary Wiegold, as one would expect, in
a natural sounding acoustic
(Bell Studios, Acton).”
|
|
Prom otional CD
EAC-CD001 2005 (not for sale)
Includes 2 new recordings of music by Jane Wells: Choose Me for 2 soprano saxophones (7’21”) and Air Kissing Episode 2, The Party with words by George Szirtes (7’14”). Also included are the first two movements of People and Places (7’37”) from the Metier CD.
Three tracks of music by each of Elis Pehkonen and Christopher Wright make this a full length CD of 71’15”. Available on request from the composers.
|
|
Pied Pip er -
a celebration of the life and work of David Munrow
Recorded and released in 2009 on the Campion Cameo label - CAMEO 2082.
Available through good record shops, or direct from Jane Wells for £10 including p&p.
Includes a new recording of music by Jane Wells: Time Song for counter-tenor, recorder and ‘cello (8’15”). Part of a medieval and recent music compilation along with music by Dunstable, Fronciacio, Arnoldus de Lantins, Selesses, John Casken, Gordon Crosse, John Joubert, Elis Pehkonen and Christopher Wright. The performers are Lesley-Jane Rogers & Nicholas Clapton (voices), John Turner (recorders), Jonathan Price (‘cello), Ian Thompson (keyboards) and Michael Harper (percussion).
|
