International praise for new album of chamber works

A new album of selected chamber works by Dr Pedro Faria Gomes has received international praise.

Chamber Works, released by Naxos, features a selection of chamber music written between 2007 and 2018. The works encompass themes of memory, change and waiting, with the concept of time being a central preoccupation.

Dr Faria, a composition lecturer at the School of Music, has drawn on music from his home country of Portugal’s folk traditions in the pieces. The album features “introspective, nostalgic chamber works, not lacking in drama or contrast but with a pervasive sense of melancholy throughout,” as described by Records International.

The album has received international praise, with Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review writing “the works all show a high calibre of imagination and workmanship. […] Pedro Faria Gomes shows us a fine and original new voice on Chamber Works. The album maps out a series of brilliances that anyone serious about Modern Chamber Music will want to experience.”

Kathodik, based in Italy, wrote that the album “manages to immediately capture the listener, with minimal but impactful gestures: suspended melodic fragments, sudden rhythmic figures, apparently separate chords, isolated from silences that actually act as a bridge, as the guiding thread of an invisible plot along which fragments of memory emerge and then dissolve into a background of metaphysics waiting for something that perhaps will never come.”

A piece on the album, Sonata, written for violin and piano, is one of only three compositions that has been nominated by the Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores for their annual Prémio Autores in the category of classical music.

The album brings together for the first time Sarah Thurlow (clarinet), Carla Santos (violin), Nancy Johnson (viola), Miguel Fernandes (cello) and Saul Picado (piano). The performers all worked closely with Dr Faria on the recording.

The album is out now and available to stream, download and buy.