“

Craven designs his music to incorporate chance, optional phrasing, improvisation and open interpretation. While the music is experimental, this game between composer and performer gives it a very human quality, which makes it more approachable than all this sounds. It’s tuneful enough that people who like more conventional music will appreciate it, while its changes in time and discordance mean that it should appeal to lovers of the more avant garde, too. We like interesting music, so it’s gone down well.

” —Jeremy Condliffe

“

For those new to Eric Craven’s music, as many will be, I would recommend listening to his very fine Sonata No.9 first. There are moments in [sonata no. 7] that some listeners might find challenging, but overall this is an enormously interesting work, full of fine moments, played brilliantly by Mary Dullea realising Craven’s ideas to remarkable effect. The recording is excellent. Scott McLaughlin’s booklet notes are an essential addition to this release giving, as they do, detailed information concerning the music and its construction, interspersed with comments by the composer. All of these performances are a very fine achievement by Mary Dullea, realising these fascinating and often captivating works that have moments of real beauty.

” —Bruce Reader

“

[Craven’s] kind of wide-ranging technique allows for considerable diversity in the music itself. Much of the material is quite sparse, although it is not Minimalist in the motoric, repetitive style of pioneering American practitioners such as Terry Riley and Steve Reich. Elsewhere the music is dense, even lush, especially in the Sonata No. 9, a three-movement work that has the most traditional profile of the three here. He is a very interesting musical thinker, and there are intriguing ideas here.

” —Peter Burwasser

“

Craven’s collaborator for these first-rate performances is pianist Mary Dullea. The overall result of all three sonatas is an engaging listening experience that repays revisiting. There is nothing at all off-putting about Craven’s material, and while at times the forms are elusive on a first hearing of such large-scale music, subsequent listens begin to reveal further connections. Significantly more so than in most recordings of contemporary music, the performer’s creative contribution to the result is enor­mous; Mary Dullea inhabits and conveys Craven’s musical landscape with both sensitivity and vir­tuosity.

” —Carson Cooman

“

The sound is totally clear on this recording and the piano sounds as though it was in a small concert hall for a recital. This is not music for casual listening, but it is fascinating for the serious music lover.

” —Maria Nockin

“

Eric Craven is a composer who has imagination, a principled compositional technique and last but not least, a sense of continual development. I enjoyed listening to these three sonatas. They are full of interest and certainly do not sound forbidding. I cannot fault the sound quality of the recording: it is clear, balanced and dynamic … this CD presents detailed, nuanced playing/realisation from Mary Dullea who explores a wide range of dynamics, invention and pianistic technique. This is a worthy recording that is not quite as formidable as it may first appear.

” —John France

“

Though I’m only beginning to get a handle on [Craven’s] music,  and perhaps never will, I’m glad to have made his acquaintance, and hope to hear more. You might describe the sonatas as – and I mean this as a compliment – modernism-lite.  Yes, they’re abstract, angular and dissonant.  But unlike in more severe modernism (e.g., Carter, Boulez), you can actually hear what the hell is going on.  There’s no way to predict what will happen next, but when it happens, you understand why it did. [Sonata no. 7] is a cogent, concise and worthy addition to the latter-day piano sonatas of Prokofiev, Copland, Tippett and Carter. I recommend you give Eric Craven’s Sonatas a try, starting with No. 7.  Happy discovery!

” —John Montanari

“

[Mary Dullea’s] is just one realisation of Craven’s ideas. The result is intriguing.

” —Robert Matthew-Walker

“

Dullea has obviously commit­ted a lot of time to this project, and it shows in the quality of her performances.

” —George Adams

“

What we hear on these two discs is fluid, cogent, pianistically idiomatic, alternately energetic and lyrical, and just plain beautiful. The sureness of touch, variety of nuance, and impressive flexibility that Dullea brings to her gorgeously engineered performances reveal a deep level of commitment and care to Craven’s aesthetic

” —Jed Distler

“

The surface lushness of Eric Craven’s harmonic language is offset by the discreet volatility of his structures. The challenge: to divine an overarching structural logic from out of those free-floating modules. Craven’s hall of mirrors is hallucinogenic.

” —Philip Clark