Eleanor Alberga: Works for Chamber Orchestra

"Eleanor Alberga (1949) has developed a compositional voice that combines formal rigor and gestural intensity, with a sense of rhythm that responds both to her classical training and to an almost choreographic physical drive. In the album Works for Chamber Ensemble, the composer brings together a series of works that explore the timbral space of chamber music from duet to sextet... The Ensemble Arcadiana, conducted by Thomas Kemp – a British conductor with a special focus on contemporary music – offers, with its ability for sound contrasts and rhythmic precision, an ideal vehicle for this writing: precise, physical and capable of revealing the harmonic colour that, in Alberga, is always also a form of movement."  Marçal Borotau, Sonogram Magazine 

"The piece was written to be danced to – Alberga has worked with dancers throughout her career, both as composer and pianist – and there is a balletic litheness to the music that makes it very danceable, and an emotional range that ranges from the skittish third movement to the nocturnal stillness and Debussyan flute lines of the fourth. The liner note focuses on the allusion to the Jungian “shadow self” in the title, and the darkness this implies, but I hear it as a more sparkly and bright piece, exemplified in the percussion-led exuberance of the finale. It is invidious to pick out individual instrumentalists here, but Karen Jones’s flute playing is vivacious and spicy. On a Bat’s Back I do Fly, from 2000, takes as its starting point one of Ariel’s songs from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The music evokes the magical world of Prospero’s island with Alberga’s usual deftness, the fleet-footed Ariel is heard in the writing for vibraphone, the more dangerous magic of the island always in the background. Cut from very different cloth is Langvad (2006), named for a tiny Danish hamlet, host of an arts festival that Alberga frequented at the time of its composition. The music takes a line for a (very long) walk, from the languid, improvisatory clarinet solo (Jon Carnac) at the beginning through a winding route that offers solo spots to the other players, right up to the driving repetitions of the final panel, in a way that is thoroughly engrossing" Bernard Hughes, The Arts Desk  

"Eleanor Alberga is always a rewarding composer to hear, and is typically assertive and mercurial in this collection of three chamber works, sympathetically played by Ensemble Arcadiana. The pieces are all old, but heard in recent revisions that were premiered in Ensemble Arcadiana’s festival in 2022, and recorded shortly after. First up is Dancing with the Shadow (1990), a 25-minute work whose five movements progress from duet, to trio and so on to the sextet final movement. The piece was written to be danced to – Alberga has worked with dancers throughout her career, both as composer and pianist – and there is a balletic litheness to the music that makes it very danceable, and an emotional range that ranges from the skittish third movement to the nocturnal stillness and Debussyan flute lines of the fourth. The liner note focuses on the allusion to the Jungian “shadow self” in the title, and the darkness this implies, but I hear it as a more sparkly and bright piece, exemplified in the percussion-led exuberance of the finale. It is invidious to pick out individual instrumentalists here, but Karen Jones’s flute playing is vivacious and spicy." Graham Rickson, The Arts Desk, 2026