Reviews

Written in memory of the great clarinettist Alan Hacker, George Nicholson’s Darkness Visible takes its play of tonal shades from an image of John Milton’s. … Warmly recommended. 

Nottingham Post

The idea of flames without light derives from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Nicholson translates it into correspondingly lugubrious patterns, alleviating the gloom through wind multiphonics and keyboard harmonics – smoke and fire, as it were.

Tempo

Nicholson’s music is most certainly in the modernist camp, and like Bartok’s music, there is a concern with maintaining a sense of line, alongside more gestural textures. I found this work (String Quartet No.4) psychologically and structurally complex, each movement building on the last without being straightforwardly linear or sequential. My own preference was for the third movement: a dance-like scherzo which kept one guessing with its rhythmic shifts and frenetic dialogues between the instruments.

Classical Sheffield

He has a delicious range of textures at his fingertips, uses the orchestra to its full extent, and understands how to keep the ear alive by modulating his thematic material alongside the scoring.

The Times (review of Cello Concerto)

Muybridge Frames was an intricately constructed dialogue, alternately bringing the instruments together in urgently rhythmic passages, and sending them off on separate but connected paths.

The Scotsman

From the first bars, where the calm induced by sustained four-part violas is abruptly broken by woodwind interjections, it is clear that George Nicholson has the feel of his orchestra and a sense of the drama that can grow out of orchestral opposition. The work is rich in striking and well-defined themes and sound complexes. The impression left by this inventive and energetic work did not fade.

The Guardian (review of The Convergence of the Twain)

…a Tippett-like gift for ideas and encounters of a vivid human character.

The Times

Spindrift, a substantial piece for solo violin in seven interrelated, but stylistically diverse movements…. The music suited admirably the violinist’s impressively broad expressive range, from intimate musing to bold, sweeping gestures…. In the closing bars, the solo line faded away with an illimitable, ever ascending glissando, the last of several inventive effects in the score, imaginatively interpreted by Madeleine Mitchell. It is a tribute to the refinement and subtlety of her artistry that this often demanding and intricate music was able to unfold with a feeling of exploration and interpretative freedom within the context of a cogent,
carefully planned framework.

Musical Opinion