Press and Comment

"The 16-minute concerto has contrasting fast and slow movements. The first, and longest, movement includes an occasional nod to Schoenberg with the doubling of lines...In the second there is a focus on the rhythmic process and the layering of the chromatic and diatonic, but with the harmony being quite static. The third and fourth movements reflect Hughes's love of the motet with isorhythmic repeating cycles in different instrumental groups... The fourth movement also harks back to 'strange eches of 19th century salon music and sonatas'."

"A fascinating juxtaposition of sound worlds and cultures, as well as a new work that has a particular relevance for the fractured times in which we find ourselves."

"Hughes’s score is by far the highlight"

"A very effective score by Ed Hughes"

"In Hughes’s music...there is a perfect fit with the films, with incidental sounds such as the factory whistle in Strike skilfully incorporated into the musical line. Potemkin was first shown with Hughes’ music at an unforgettable performance in 2005 in the machine hall of the Brighton Engineerium, which provided a uniquely suitable site for it. A similarly happy match between film and music runs through these two superb scores"

"The dynamic editing and epic drama of Sergei Eisenstein's silent films have long proved enticing for composers. The latest to take on the challenge is British musician Ed Hughes, whose scores for 'Battleship Potemkin' and 'Strike' appear on the new 'Sergei Eisenstein Vol. 1' DVD set from Tartan Video. It was the high value the director gave to music that first attracted Hughes, as he explains: 'Eisenstein's theoretical writings on music and film are extraordinary. I was interested in trying to realise what he calls 'the syncopation of accents between music and picture': the idea of contrasting moments when the two come together powerfully, and also stages of gradual intensification when the music and picture are counterpoints. Eisenstein saw that music could give the spatial qualities of his images the illusion of more depth, and it was exciting to use modern technology like surround sound to attempt to put his ideas into practice.' Hughes will present his score for 'Strike' live at a number of UK screenings this autumn."

"Pure magic...A rip-roaring vital spectacle...a show of terrific vitality and verve"

"truly emotional...an atmosphere of deeper resonances"

"A fine example of the hidden gems the Brighton Festival can produce"

"The New Music Players’s stylish late-night Guildhall (Bath Festival) concert incorporated two showings of Joris Ivens’s poetic 1929 film Rain, first with Hanns Eisler’s music, then with a new and fetching score by Ed Hughes"

"In a rare joint airing of Eisler’s Fourteen Ways and Joris Ivens’s documentary film Regen (1929), Eisler’s clouded musical reflections on these watery images were atmospheric and ultimately moving. Ed Hughes’s no less artful new take Light Cuts Through Dark Skies accompanied the same black and white projections on our second outing to wet Amsterdam"

"This setting, for mezzo and mixed ensemble, of eight short monologues for the visionary priestess of Apollo, is big and bold, responding to the scholar and poet Tom Lowenstein’s gritty and economical text with music unafraid of a direct emotional response..."

"In Sextet, Hughes demonstrates a good ear for economical orchestration, drawing broad and dramatic textures from two strings, two woodwind, vibes and piano... Hughes’s Quartet is darker, more intense and episodic, for clarinet, piano, violin and cello."

"complex...and benefits from its boldness of utterance, deploying sometimes familiar materials to dramatically telling ends"

"Sun New Moon and Women Shouting by Ed Hughes ...is a moving, quite unusual, virtuoso celebration by the Inuits of the rising sun after its winter sleep."

"turbulent, scintillating lyricism"

"a vivid expose of effects of light amid a continuous network of polyphony"

"A richly sonorous music"

"The best work, like Ed Hughes's 'Orchid' ... gave the sense of progression through material, of deepening analysis as it progressed."

"[Aureola] has a rich, dense, polychromatic radiance"

"The three 'Orchids' are dense, feverish with explorations: 'sections' of petals really do fold into one another to create overlapping whorls of sound."

"Stephen Gutman also introduced a highly distinctive festival commission, Hughes's 'Third Orchid', in which each section of a single movement folds into the next, like waves or petals, disturbing the work's cunningly crafted surface polyphony."

"...many pieces stayed in the memory. Elise Lorraine's recital, for instance, included... Hughes's technically complex, but directly evocative, beautifully conceived new cycle 'The Desolate Field'"