REVIEWS

Recent review of Playing The Game:

“After 20 years Antoine Mitchell is moving on, and this was his final concert with the Essex Symphony Orchestra, whose standards he has done so much to raise. And what a swan song it was. Two Russian masters and a commissioned piece made up the programme………

Jane Wells wrote ‘Playing The Game’ for the ESO as part of the Breakout! composer-in-residence scheme. She was there to share the applause for what was a fascinating exploration of the games of children – and grown-ups – play. Sampled playground shouts and laughter were woven into the fabric and the children’s voices also inspired the rhythms and the intervals of the music. It began and ended with an empty space, the playground perhaps, invaded by the calling and the conversations, before the ghosts faded into the dusk at going home time. A challenge for the orchestra (lots of counting!) but one they met with confidence under Antoine’s inspired direction” Chelmsford Weekly News

CDs

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 (see CONTACTS for supply details).

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).”

Promotional 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 (see Contact Page for details).