One way in which the belated emphasis during recent years on promoting women composers (in the UK as well as in Europe and the United States) may be found wanting is that certain figures whose music is, according to currently favoured criteria, neither trendsetting nor easy listening are all too easily overlooked. Charlotte Bray immediately comes to mind as being among present-day composers who fall into this category. Her output, having emerged steadily across the past two decades, conveys a conceptual scope and an expressive variety surely comparable to that of any of her peers.

Born in Oxford, growing up in High Wycombe and since 2011 resident in Berlin, Bray began by studying the cello but later moved to composition. Her first acknowledged works date from the mid-2000s, beginning with the piano piece Off the Rails (2006), which takes its cue from (to quote the composer) ‘an oasis of tranquillity amid a harsh, explosive landscape’, bringing these starkly contrasted moods into purposeful accord prior to a climactic synthesis. No less arresting (as well as idiomatically conceived, this time for cello) is Portrait (2009, rev 2023), its five brief movements exploring various aspects of ‘touch’ through an intriguingly unpredictable tension and release; and, similarly, there’s the shimmering seascape conjured by All at Sea (2012), for solo piano. She has subsequently issued three books of piano miniatures, Chapter One (2009-11), Chapter Two (2013-15) and Chapter Three (2015-17), all suitable for performance by children and adults alike.

Bray has continued to compose frequently for solo instruments. Among the most immediately attractive pieces is Late Snow for oboe (2009; recorded by James Turnbull on Champs Hill Records), its trio of movements aptly mirroring in sound the lucid word-painting of the poem of the same name by MR Peacocke. Drawing on, yet without being stylistically beholden to, compositions by Henze and Knussen, the piano piece Oneiroi (2013) evokes those darked-winged spirits of Greek mythology in music whose sustained poise can feel out of all proportion to its fleeting gestures. Bray’s identity with solo media is no less evident in works such as Beyond (also 2013), in which the violin intones a mood of keen regret, or On the Other Shore (2014), in which the cello evokes the sense of distant observation as metaphor for beings in direct communication while remaining apart. Yet maybe the most impressive of these solo works is Passing Shadows (2012) for guitar. Its three movements are akin to a sonatina, their emphasis on harmonic, melodic then rhythmic facets conveying her concern for formal balance which focuses their expressive flights of fancy.

Two larger works confirm Bray’s earlier achievement. Drawing productive inspiration from poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Federico García Lorca alongside music by Sonny Rollins, the concerto for violin and ensemble Caught in Treetops (2010) launches with a cadenza whose impulsiveness informs its respectively capricious then meditative parts. The four movements of the viola-and-piano piece Invisible Cities (2011) draw on Italo Calvino’s description of Venice for a process of unity within diversity which extends across the whole, thereby making a virtue of any disparity between the instruments and resulting in an ‘otherness’ as evocative as it is tangible. By contrast, the piano quartet Replay (also 2011) unfolds as a volatile yet methodical as well as continuous discourse whose inwardly speculative culmination feels entirely apposite in such a context.

Similarly abstract in content, the string quintet The Sun Was Chasing Venus (2012) outlines a freewheeling game of pursuit whose being governed by the notion of ascent is only made explicit in the heady raptness of its closing pages. Bray’s fashioning of traditional chamber combinations towards inherently personal ends is further demonstrated in Perseus (2015 – first performed by Guy Johnston and Tom Poster, then recorded by them on the King’s College label, 11/17), in which cello and piano evoke the mystery and encroaching terror of a black hole at the centre of the galaxy of that name. Meanwhile, the three movements of the piano quartet Zustände (2016) reflect the ‘states’ of glaciers as these vast formations variously fragment, float then finally coalesce as an ice field with all its ominous grandeur yet impermanence. A rather more yielding sound world can be found in the piano trio That Crazed Smile (2014 – premiered by the Oberon Trio then recorded by them on Avi Music), which distils the nocturnal atmosphere of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in appropriately ethereal terms.

Comparable sensitivity to sound is evident in Yellow Leaves (2012), less a song-cycle than a sequence of songs on haikus by Caroline Thomas (inspired by Shakespeare’s sonnets) whose gradually revealed trajectory of love encountered, lost then regained is conveyed via nine settings for soprano and piano alternately charged and eloquent. Fire Burning in Snow (2013) is its complement: three settings of poems by Nicki Jackowska for mezzo and small ensemble which favour a more elaborate scale, touching on the states of absence and fulfilment en route to the most tenuous emotional resolution. Jackowska’s poetry is also the basis of the three soprano-and-piano songs that constitute Crossing Faultlines (2021), their subject matter exploring women’s experiences in the workplace, respectively covering mentorship, discrimination and ambition in starkly immediate yet highly expressive terms.

Bray’s wider public profile was established with the orchestral piece At the Speed of Stillness (2011-12), a BBC Proms commission whose inspiration in both the surrealist imagery of a poem by Dora Maar and the energy being channelled by the Sizewell power station represents the poles of dexterousness and monumentality between which this music pivots prior to an ending where any emotional resolution is left tantalisingly in abeyance. The orchestra has since moved to the forefront of her activities, and not least with the cello concerto Falling in the Fire, another Proms commission and Bray’s second piece written for Johnston in 2015. The piece was inspired by the carnage wrought upon the ancient city of Palmyra by Islamic State forces, its single movement alternating between brooding soliloquy and tensile confrontation in which a sizeable orchestra is put forcefully yet resourcefully through its paces. Most striking is the climactic cadenza, combative and supplicatory by turns, which is followed by a coda over whose course soloist and orchestra are gradually integrated to a more cohesive if by no means harmonious degree.

Choral music has featured sparingly in Bray’s output thus far, but the a cappella Agnus Dei (2014 – written for and recorded by ORA and Suzy Digby on Harmonia Mundi, 3/16) is both ingenious as a ‘reflection’ on Byrd’s setting in his Mass for five voices and affecting in its take on a text of universal import. Music for the stage is more prominent, ranging from the brief though pertinent The Fox and the Crow (2011) or the all-too-human chamber opera Making Arrangements (2012), to her powerful retelling of the fate of Ruth Ellis – the last woman to be hanged in Britain – in Entanglement (2015). This summer brings the premiere of her first full-length opera, American Mother (2024-25), which relates the experience of Diane Foley, mother of murdered war correspondent James, as she converses with the man convicted of his murder.

This last work appears after a number of orchestral pieces – most notably Forsaken (2021), inspired by her visit to Greenland, which takes up previously explored themes of change and impermanence to ever more refined if equally visceral effect. The commercial release of this and several other works would be more than welcome, the more so given Bray’s status as a composer of genuine substance from whom each new piece is to be keenly anticipated.

Recommended Recordings

At the Speed of Stillness. Caught in Treetops. Fire Burning in Snow. Oneiroi. Replay. Yellow Leaves

Claire Booth sop Lucy Schaufer mez Alexandra Wood vn Andrew Matthews-Owen, Huw Watkins pfs Birmingham Contemporary Music Group / Oliver Knussen; Aldeburgh World Orchestra / Sir Mark Elder

NMC Debut Discs (1/15)

It was this wide-ranging, authoritatively performed collection of pieces that first brought Bray to prominence, confirming her status among the leading British composers of her generation.

Beyond. Invisible Cities. On the Other Shore. The Sun Was Chasing Venus. Zustände

Huw Watkins pf Amaryllis Quartet; Mariani Piano Quartet

Nimbus Alliance (10/18)

This second release devoted to Bray’s music comprises solo and chamber works dating from the period 2011 to 2016. They are linked by their sense of distance, be it physical or emotional, in readings both committed and perceptive.

Passing Shadows

Antonis Hatzinikolaou gtr

NMC (9/13)

Featured alongside works by Joseph Atkins, Peter Racine Fricker, John McCabe, Nicholas Maw, Bayan Northcott and Matthew Taylor, Bray’s highly intricate and evocative piece, superbly realised here, proves a highlight on one of the finest solo guitar anthologies to have appeared in recent decades.

Crossing Faultlines

Samantha Crawford sop Lana Bode pf

Delphian

Bray’s succinct and probing song-cycle emerges the more tellingly from being heard in the context of ‘Dream.Risk.Sing’, a suitably provocative anthology centred on female experiences and featuring music also by Clarke, Dvořák, Price, Michelle Brourman, Carson Cooman, Ricky Ian Gordon, Helen Grime, Libby Larsen and Judith Weir (recorded 2022).