Charlotte Bray (born 1982)
Charlotte Bray (born 1982) was born in Oxford and grew up in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. She studied cello and composition and earned a Masters in Composition from the Royal College of Music. She has written music for orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo instruments, and the voice, and currently lives in Berlin.
Caught in Treetop (2010) is a violin concerto for chamber ensemble:
Those Secret Eyes is a piano trio from 2014, performed here by the Merz Trio:
The composer describes the composition as
loosely inspired by Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and principally the play’s female characters: Lady Macbeth and the Witches. Set at night, it holds dark undercurrents of suspicion, sin, superstition, and mistrust. Governed by the principal themes of appearance and reality, and ambition and guilt, the piece is driven by a cruel, dry energy.
The scheming, tightly wound opening, strings playing single sul ponticello lines punctuated by the piano, seems as if they are conspiring together and daring each other. The plot thickens with the music becoming faster, more excitable and heavier. Even the melodic lines before the climax are unsettlingly cold and calculated. We wind up back to similar material seen at the opening, as if this short meeting has come to a close, the veiled agenda set.