Review of LNT118: The Music of Jeremy Dale Roberts
Paul Driver, The Sunday Times
Dale Roberts is well known as a composition teacher, but this disc, reflecting a concert for his 70th birthday given by Lontano (itself 30 years old), makes clear his own, distinctive creative voice. His studiously economical but intense style - minimising rhetoric but certainly not "minimalist" - has been compared to that of the painter Morandi, and the 25-minute collection of piano pieces, Ogetti (played by Hiroake Takenouchi), is indeed an omaggio a Morandi. Croquis (for string trio) lightens the modernist mood, with a quodlibet movement made from fragments of great music. Winter Music is a powerful, bleak sextet, climaxing on a searing trumpet outburst.
9 April 2006