PRESS
(it looks like someone lived there)
“But the star for me was Naomi Pinnock‘s (it looks like someone lived there), a setting – more a solution, really – of a line from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Listening, I could only think: this is what a Woolf setting should sound like. I wrote in my programme note –working just from the score – that the work’s opening alterations of notes and chords were ‘like the Woolfean swell of a wave’, but the piece captured much more than that: the surge and taper of Mrs Ramsay’s stream of consciousness; the distributed perspectives (achieved by the simplest of means, just one note for the voice and then the same one for the flute)’ the way that, in Woolf, the small things are big and the big things small, the slow things happen quickly and the quick things happen slowly. But then there was also a stilling, a farewell, that absolutely captured the atmosphere of the Ramsay’s decaying holiday home in Lighthouse‘s central section. Aaron Holloway-Nahum’s conducting, to sustain the momentum of this slow disintegration, was superbly controlled, but really the piece is a gift. “
Tim Rutherford-Johnson
vestige
“The two most striking pieces were, in fact, far removed from the programme’s theme. Naomi Pinnock’s Vestige…was confident in its simplicity, relying on spare, repeated patterns of notes sung by a solo soprano, Sarah Dacey. The words were drawn-out fragments of poetry, so drawn-out as to become free-floating sounds, and the effect was haunting and memorable.”
Rebecca Franks, The Times
I am, I am
★ ★ ★ ★
“The Sonar Quartett’s early evening concert in St Paul’s Hall…brought a premiere from the Yorkshire-born Naomi Pinnock. I Am, I Am (a world premiere) reduced a poem by Rachael Boast to the title’s words, which were further fractured into syllables and dispatched with agile acrobatics by the soprano Juliet Fraser, embedded among oscillating patterns from the quartet’s four strings. Delicate and curious, it cast a spell.”
Geoff Brown, The Times
“what lingered most in the memory was the concert that launched the festival, which was one that could have graced any Huddersfield programme in the last 40 years. It was given by the Sonar Quartett and the soprano Juliet Fraser, and featured premieres of two works for voice and string quartet – an HCMF commission from Naomi Pinnock and the first UK performance of Heinz Holliger’s Increschantüm…Both in their different ways were hauntingly beautiful pieces. Pinnock’s I Am I Am, built around a two-line poem by Rachael Boast, has Fraser’s limpid soprano delicately embroidering rocking, Feldman-like string textures in which small gestures mean a lot…both are exquisitely crafted, lasting achievements.”
Andrew Clements, The Guardian
The field is woven
“The orchestra teased out exquisite articulations of the intersecting lines and tense swells within Naomi Pinnock’s The Field is Woven”
Peter Margasak, National Sawdust
“fragile, ethereal and often teetering on the edge of silence,…(****) “
The Scotsman
Lines and Spaces
“It fell to the wonderful young pianist Richard Uttley to prove that new music can be aurally refined without being precious. Every piece in his hour-long recital was rewarding, but it was Naomi Pinnock’s delicately reticent Lines and Spaces, its tracery of chords and repeated notes placed in perfect balance, that stole the show.”
Ivan Hewett, The Telegraph
String Quartet no. 2
“Pinnocks zweites Streichquartett klingt, als hätten „Cages String Quartet in Four Parts“, Morton Feldman und die urwüchsige Gestik eines Birtwistle aufs Schönste zusammengefunden: Ausdruck als ein angestrengtes Herauswollen, das im Moment des Erscheinens die Mühen des Sagens, Machens, Spielens (Komponierens?) hörbar macht…
…die Nähe zu Samuel Beckett ist mit Händen zu greifen”
Words
“Furrer also conducted the premiere of Naomi Pinnock's Words...It's a short three-movement setting of a gnomic, Gertrude Stein-like text by Pinnock herself, the atomised words delivered by the baritone Omar Ebrahim like a biblical text from a revivalist preacher. It works itself to a ferocious climax, and then turns more reflective, surrounding the voice with shadowy, evanescent textures. Strangely compelling.”
Andrew Clements, The Guardian
“It’s easy to put convention to one side, but to do it in a way that avoids mere novelty yet also stands on its own as a coherent, prepossessing entity is not at all easy. Words exhibits precisely these characteristics, & in so doing feels fundamentally different from much of what’s passed off as ‘new music’ today.”
Simon Cummings, 5against4
The writings of Jakob Br.
“Mit wenigen klanglichen Mitteln schafft es Pinnock, eine tief verinnerlichte Atmosphäre entstehen zu lassen, in der Vokale und Laute sanfte Verbindungen eingehen und nur der Konsonant in "lucere" hervorsticht”
Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung