Shadowtime - a thought-opera

"Wonderful sounds,musical moves that tell, technical exigence turned to eloquence: I listened spellbound."
Andrew Porter, Times Literary Supplement

"Bernstein's text makes oblique manoeuvres round the themes of Benjamin's work, and Ferneyhough sets them to complex yet frequently beautiful music, a mixture of tough and tender modernism."
The Observer

"A major release of a major work, but be prepared to face something quite unusual."
(MusicWeb May 2006)

"An echo inside a shadow wrapped in cellophane says the text: an apt description of this amazing, fascinating and complex masterpiece that repays repeated listening."
(MusicWeb Juen 2006)

Andrew Porter writes in TLS: "Ferneyhough creat[es] music from thoughts of Benjamin (and much else) with exuberance, generosity, mastery. Wonderful sounds, musical moves that tell, technical exigence turned to eloquence: I listened spellbound." David Patrick Stearns calls the opera "a monument to the constructive poweres of the mind" in the Philadelpia Inquirer. Fred Kirchit, in the NY Sun calls Shadowtime "one of the brightest presentations of contemporary music this season."

Wolfgang Schreiber, in Süddeutsche Zeitung, calls Shadowtime "darkly hypnotic." Brian Ferneyhough is " ... an outstanding musician of his generation ... a modern stylist on the tracks of Schoenberg-Webern-Boulez, who, despite beginnings in postmodernism, is a composer and musical thinker who pursues great density of expression and a blazing constructivism. ... There is pure artistic fervor here, and it is gripping. ... a musical adventure of the most artful complexity, freed from all expectation. ... Brian Ferneyhough's opera is an apex of modern operatic artistry, and the greatest co-production of the Biennial to date.

Tess Crebbin, in Music and Vision, says "Bernstein's libretto, plain and simple, is the finest contemporary libretto that I know of."

Andrew Clements, in The Guardian, writes that Shadowtime has "music of wonderful detail, with sometimes an extraordinarily powerful charge. Beneath his tangled modernist rigour Ferneyhough hides a passionate commitment to expression."

John Warnaby, in Sight & Sound, declares that "Shadowtime is Ferneyhough's unique contribution to music-theatre: essentially his magnum opus, incorporating most of the fundamental elements of his creative imagination."Keith Potter in The Indpendent (London), prasises onductor Jurjen Hempel; "the singing and the playing of an 18-piece ensemble appeared of a uncommonly high standard."

Von Claus Spahn, in Die Zeit, says, "Ferneyhough takes on the absolute challenge (and extraordinary demand) of music as an intellectual force. He take up the inheritance of Anton Webern and the serialists. He insists on material progress for the medium."