Lefanu: Catena / String Quartet No. 2 / Clarinet Concertino

Featuring

Malcolm Layfield
Fiona Cross
Nicholas Clapton
Goldberg Ensemble
Nicola LeFanu

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Composer's Artistic Vision

Nicola LeFanu's String Quartet No. 2 is conceived as a concise poem, similar to a sonnet, unfolding as a single movement with distinct sections and using unisons as punctuation.

Composition History

The Concertino for clarinet and string orchestra is a recomposition of Nicola LeFanu's earlier clarinet quintet, Invisible Places, written in 1986.

Composer Biography

Nicola LeFanu, born in 1947, is the daughter of composer Elizabeth Maconchy and has composed some sixty works, including orchestral, chamber, solo, and six operas.

Performer Biography

Nicholas Clapton, a countertenor, made his professional debut at Wigmore Hall in 1984 and is known for performing contemporary music, with sixteen world premières to his credit, as well as 18th-century castrato repertoire.

Composition History

Catena for eleven solo strings was composed in the summer of 1999 at the Centre d'Art i Natura in Farrera, high in the Pyrenees, and was inspired by the mountain views and a painting.

Composer's Artistic Vision

Nicola LeFanu's Concertino is indebted to Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities, which provided a model for continuous narrative through discontinuous ideas and an important closing image.

Performer Biography

Fiona Cross is Professor of Clarinet at London's Trinity College of Music and Principal Clarinet with both the English Sinfonia and Manchester Camerata.