NAMBÉ - Albany Records 2025)

Who said that contemporary music must necessarily feed on dissonances and sinister sounds, follow astruse and unintelligible formulas, produce dark and destabilizing atmospheres? Someone, in truth, did it, and continues to support it. Fortunately, there are composers like Peter Lieuwen who deny, with their work, this peregrinate equation. His orchestral compositions, which you can listen to in this beautiful CD produced by the historic American label Albany Records, keep their feet firmly in the tone, are rich in recognizable and enjoyable themes, and above all present a tireless rhythmic energy, the real strength of the writing of the musician born in 1953 native of Utrecht. The Pannon Philarmonic conducted by Franz Anton Krager performs here three of his orchestral pieces, in which, in addition to the aforementioned characteristics, the sparkling orchestration and timbre richness are striking; to note the conspicuous use of percussion instruments, especially in the concluding "Nambè". The melodic and rhythmic qualities do not fail in the two chamber works also present, for clarinet-piano duo and for the quintet with clarinet and string quartet: on the contrary, the clarity of writing and the genuine and fresh lyricism of Lieuwen emerge here in a particular way, together with the contrapuntal dialogue between the parties. A style, that of Peter Lieuwen, which has some assonance with another author I particularly love, the American Michael Torke, to whom he is in particular shared by rhythmic motorism of post-minimalist matrix, although in Lieuwen the compositional process is less linear than that of the youngest colleague. However, the feeling of immediacy and positivity that Lieuwen's compositions give off must not be deceiving: they are songs rich in inventiveness, which solicit a concentrated listening, attentive to formal details, the variety of timbre solutions, and the melodic and harmonic developments that innervate these inspired and extremely enjoyable pages.

- Filippo Focosi