Prism

Prism

This is the English violinist Fenella Humphreys’ fourth album of unaccompanied pieces, and it mixes her own arrangements of familiar classics with works by contemporary composers. J.S. Bach’s towering Toccata and Fugue in D Minor acquires an air of intimate mystery in Humphreys’ insightful arrangement, while her version of Schumann’s “Träumerei” is sweetly poignant without being cloying. Sarah Frances Jenkins’ three-movement Tincture of the Skies reveals the full range of Humphreys’ tonal resources, from an ethereal gauze of high harmonics to fulsomely lyrical melodic phrasing. Welsh composer Cameron Biles-Liddell’s Contemplations showcase Humphreys the virtuoso, the scything multi-stopping and knife-edge rhythms of “Gigue” dispatched with unflappable confidence. But it’s perhaps Humphreys’ sense of poetry which lingers longest in the memory. It lends a spectral, Gothic flavoring to Caroline Shaw’s In Manus Tuas, and distills both piquancy and sadness from Peter Maxwell Davies’ A Last Postcard from Sanday, which closes this highly characterful recital.

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