GRAMOPHONE:
Now in her early thirties, Alwynne Pritchard has been a presence on the British new music scene for more than a decade. As this disc amply demonstrates, her take on post-war European Modernism owes little to any prescribed school or system, drawing on a range of compositional approaches in music which is often punchy and uncompromising but always engaging.

After the jagged intricacy of Spring (a brief tribute to Michael Finnissy on his 50th birthday), the Piano Quintet deploys elements of the folksong Barbara Allen in sparse, pointillist context. Nostos Ou Topos explores the concept of 'returning to no place in particular,' following two compositional paths through three continuous sections of microtonally-inflected guitar writing.

Matrix employs a similar strategy - working methodically through eight related groups of ideas, with a wide range of playing techniques and a powerfully evocative use of silence. The brooding, expressionistic pianism of Der Zwerg is a little too unrelieved, but Kit attains its theatrical immediacy through simple yet telling performance instructions and a couple of distinctive 'found' texts. Deer Glücklose Engel pointedly contrasts dualities of movement, time and sound in music which sets the instrumental trio in continual though productive opposition. Finally, Invisible Cities draws on the lst sentence of Italo Calvino's book to create a maze as diverse interpretatively as it is musically intriguing.

With formidably well-realised performances from the members of Topologies (Darragh Morgan fearlessly mining the potential of the electric violin in Matrix), and sound which finds clarity and impact in a variety of recording locations, this is an important disc, helping to ensure that Alwynne Pritchard's music can be heard and well discussed.
Richard Whitehouse

CLASSICAL NET:
These pieces are very different from each other, as Alwynne Pritchard (b.1968) discusses in an illuminating taped interview with Ian Pace, which introduces her own commentaries on the works. Her prevailing mood and sound vocabulary is astringent, never music to 'wallow' in for old-style sensual satisfaction. Pritchard has worked as a singer and dancer too, and she questions all received wisdoms and modernist orthodoxies. She confesses to have become more tolerant of diversity in recent years, and indeed relishes the fact that the Western musicians she finds most interesting 'enter a dialogue with what's around them' and express themselves in vastly diverse ways.

Spring is a one-minute pianistic flourish and also an introduction to Ian Pace's virtuosity. His other solo contributions are Der Zwerg (after Schubert's dwarf), drawing upon Pritchard's earlier compositions, and to finish, the CD's title work Invisible Cities, the most substantial work in this programme. The piano quintet is rather bare (brittle, says Pritchard), developed from a piece for children to play in the Schubert Ensemble's Chamber Music 2000 project. Matrix has some thoroughly alarming sounds for electric violin, and can be played in any of 'a vast number of manifestations - through - eight spokes of a maze'. Nostos Ou Topos for guitar has optional routes and is given in two versions, dry, but they hold attention - you want to know what will come next, and when; there is plenty of 'air', i.e. pregnant pauses, in Pritchard's uncluttered music.

The Luckless Angel is quite scary, as is Kit, (possibly) for children, in which Alan Thomas makes eerie sounds with electric guitar and Alwynne Pritchard's own voice erupts with 'cruel humour' in whispers and dramatic, though 'anti-expressive', recitation of 'mathematical, scientific or instructive texts' as if in a schoolroom.

Pritchard seems fascinated by games and mazes; you can be assured that you are purchasing a unique performance of Invisible Cities, which offer several possible routes between the first and last words of a sentence by Italo Calvino. The pianist has to juggle the intermediate pages at choice but according to set rules; this exemplifies the role of performer as co-collaborator. One is not expected to understand why notes and gestures occur as and when they do; Pritchard composes from moment to moment, never filling a preconceived mould, seeking an open approach to listening, raising more questions than providing answers.

These will quickly give you a better idea of this composer, who has a mind and voice of her own, than my words can assist. The performances, recorded in vivid sound, presumably in association with the composer, are persuasive and this is an intriguing release.
Peter Grahame Woolf

THE WIRE:
Alwynne Pritchard is an energetic and provocative presence on the British New Music scene. As she tells pianist Ian Pace, her compositional outlook was formed during her late teens by an interest in Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, but she frankly admits that "I dragged many of their ideas unquestionably into the 1990s". Now that we're in the new millennium, Pritchard is questioning everything about her own musical assumptions and here are some of the answers, brilliantly performed by members of Pace's Topologies ensemble. most striking are the muddy and scratchy tones of the electric violin work Matrix (2001), while the juxtaposition of tonal slabs against pointallistic fuzz heard in her Piano Quintet presents and intriguing collision of opposites. Pace performs the highly virtuosic semi-improvised solo piece Invisible Cities with his customary élan.
Philip Clark

MUSIC AND VISION:
There is no doubt that Alwynne Pritchard is an original inventor in the soundscaping business. Her work is a series of sound installations relying as much on the vividly inventive imaginations and interpretations of her performers as upon her own visually diverting but esoteric scores. She places sounds in a broad landscape of silence inviting her listeners to wait for events and find their own associations with which to make sense of their apparently unrelated sequence. Her soundscapes communicate an impression of one searching but never finding, improvising endlessly without discovering any satisfying and usable material; her work feels like the quiet frustrations of one wanting to compose.

She was born in Glasgow in 1968 and moved from London's Guildhall School of Music to the Royal Academy and on into the 90s to work with an impressive list of performers and ensembles, not least of which Ian Pace and Topologies whose excellent playing makes this CD. The accompanying booklet is an extended interview between the composer and Ian Pace, self-consciously resisting lucidity.

The two longest pieces in the recital are Matrix, an exploration for electric violin, performed by Darragh Morgan and the title piece Invisible Cities played by the redoubtable Ian Pace. There is a Piano Quintet called Barbara Allen, a lament stimulated by a Yorkshire mining accident a century and a half ago in which eleven young child workers were drowned.

Alan Thomas plays two versions of a solo guitar piece, Nostos ou Topos, the performance of which is open to various interpretations, and he accompanies on electric guitar Pritchard herself, reading the Spanish instructions for her food processor. Is it taking us back eighty years to Russolo, L'arte dei rumori? Well, it can be gentle, like the trio for clarinet, violin and cello stimulated by a poem written in 1958 by Heiner Müller, Der glücklose Engel. It all adds up to a very clear Alwynne Pritchard picture.
Patric Standford