Press

****The opening Petite Suite, played with knife's-edge precision by contemporary music specialist Miranda Cuckson, is extraordinary, sketching its four movement names with a single violin (sample the final "Roadrunner").

AllMusic

The composer, a San Francisco resident, was given extended applause and took a well-deserved bow.

San Francisco Classical Voice

"Lewis is skilled at setting his texts so that the meaning and imagery land with impact, and his euphonious, extended tonal language is a good fit for Sund’s idyllic celebrations. Lewis follows suit with strikingly bright and pungent harmonies, including a touch of Manhattan Transfer-style jazz. The kaleidoscopic chromaticisms are vivid musical representations of the different kinds of light…"

Opera News

"American composer Peter Scott Lewis (b. 1953) is a masterful creator of song cycles, as we readily hear in his recent offering The Four Cycles (Naxos 8.559815), which includes his complete vocal music to date."

Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review

Peter Scott Lewis has a vivid and idiosyncratic affinity for the human voice, as can be heard on ‘The Four Cycles’, a disc that spans four decades of creative activity. The San Francisco-based composer writes in a style that might be termed ‘rugged lyricism’, with vocal lines and harmonies taking unpredictable directions. The performers include two vibrant soloists, mezzo-soprano Christine Abraham and soprano Susan Narucki, and the expert New York Virtuoso Singers Quartet conducted by the composer.

Gramophone Magazine

San Francisco composer Peter Scott Lewis combines ingratiating surfaces — strong-boned tonal harmonies and melodic gracefulness — with secure structural underpinnings that keep everything logically in place. The results come through handsomely in this compilation of four song cycles of various hues and scales, all of them performed with delicacy and vigor.

San Francisco Chronicle

It's smart, intricately crafted, and it makes a willing, even urgent appeal to a listener's sensibilities.

Datebook: San Francisco Sunday Chronicle

For me, this is the contemporary discovery of the year. It’s a work who myriad stylistic points of reference are negotiated here with chameleon-like ease.

The Strad

A COMPELLING, SELF-PENNED, SELF PERFORMED RECITAL FROM AN URGENT BUT ELUSIVE ARTIST-Vivid, Entrancing, and Remarkable-The composer plays his own scores with all the urgency and commitment one would expect from a performer who knows the music from the inside out.

Gramophone Magazine

A wonderful CD. Exquisite!

La Otra Musica

The music is all fresh and the playing superb.

Oakland Tribune

Peter Scott Lewis is an eclectic composer of a highly poetic nature, yet they also point to the importance of organization in his music and demonstrate a formal consistency. "River Shining Through" (2004) is indebted to the modern string quartet and is the most harmonically complex and energetic piece on the program; yet Lewis avoids the density and hyper-virtuosity that make many contemporary string quartets difficult to appreciate, and the lightness of its rhythms and clarity of its textures bring out the underlying dance impulses.

All Music Guide

Lewis’s guitar technique is utterly clean and precise. He has a fine understanding of his comparatively quiet instrument’s paradoxically awesome dynamic range. His chord voicings are organ-like, and his ability to float his often-austere melodies over large time stretches is satisfying. In sum, if you are a guitar aficionado, this release is essential.

Fanfare Magazine

Peter Lewis is featured here as the soloist in his own four-movement Three Suites, works that show off the formidable technique Lewis commands — his right hand is particularly amazing, capable of the most fleet-flowing repeated notes. Tuneful and highly rhythmic, the suites (especially the last one) have an improvisational feel, with repeated passages that alter slightly and gradually metamorphose into completely different material.

Seattle Times

The guitar suites are wonderfully haunting. I remember what Stravinsky said about the guitar: not small but as from far away. The music brings those distances home. I’ve listened to it over and over. Bravo!

Poet and Editor: The Yale Review.

Thank you for this day that shines in the Valley like a jewel.

The late, great, Northwest poet

Peter Scott Lewis is a composer of considerable talents. ... solid construction ... strong rhythmic sections ... luminous ... ably performed by Kees Hulsmann and The Berkeley Symphony Orchestra ... under Stephanie Friedman’s flawless diction ... Robin Sutherland’s fine solo performance.

20th Century Music

What you find is a serious, straightforward neo-romanticism, almost Bergian, without the Viennese master’s edge. Written in the mid 1980s, at the height of a flowering of concerto composition in the United States, Lewis’ Violin Concerto is a fine example of the genre. It is challenging for the soloist and accessible to the audience, without pandering or condescending.

American Record Guide

Rhapsodic Images, is an immediately winning work for the conventional complement of a piano trio (piano, violin, and cello). There are moments aplenty of genuine melodic and rhythmic interest that held my attention throughout.

Fanfare Magazine

This CD is a real find. It is a great recording of what might best be described as post-modern chamber music by the California composer Peter Scott Lewis. Beaming Contrasts and Through The Mountain are the two highlights. They are both substantial new works that deserve to become staples of the contemporary chamber music repertoire.

Classical Express

Delightful... Shimmering...Skillful. Unmistakably the work of an alert young American. Recommended.

Fanfare Magazine

Peter Scott Lewis’ new CD (Beaming Contrasts) of chamber music is passionate, yet lyrical. This is music making by a virtuoso composer.

Esquire/Japan: Tokyo

Beaming Contrasts is a driving, full of jagged, jazz like rhythm; an earnest piece, tightly constructed, and telling in its use of dissonance.

Guitar Review, New York, NY

It is obvious that the composer (having written a guitar concerto) knows the instrument well and exploits his aural resource with a fine ear.

Strad Magazine

The boldest essay was Peter Scott Lewis’ Beaming Contrasts (1989), dialectic of steel and catgut exploring both differences and similarities between string and guitar textures. The amplified guitar strident, biting nature seemed to slice air when the duo played in jazzy syncopation with the quartet.

The Washington Post

A Finely Crafted Composition (Beaming Contrasts).

The New York Times

A short, two-movement piece (played as one,) Night Lights derives its musical from, of all things, melodies-lyrical melodies with strong, clear profiles. That, along with the committed, no-hold-barred performance by the Alexander, made the work absorbable on a first hearing without sounding facile or glib.

The San Francisco Examiner

The composer Peter Lewis has the rare ability to make the language of his compositions emotionally accessible to the listener. Although not all his works for guitar are atonal, his Guitar Concerto is melodically and harmonically abstract and also rhythmically complex. However, the music does not perplex, but is surprisingly pleasing and sensual. Herein lies the composer’s originality.

Guitar Review, New York, NY

The work has a number of highly lyrical passages interspersed with spiky segments, all combining into a constantly absorbing whole.

The Times, Trenton, NJ.

“The Four Cycles in this release on the Naxos label's fine American Classics series are song cycles in the classic sense, unified by a common poetic thread and musical structure.

All Music Guide

With the composer in charge of the recording sessions, I am sure he was well pleased with the performances.

David's Review Corner

Lewis shows equal skill and intuition when writing for winds.

Sequenza 21

The music is euphonious and often disarmingly pretty, but with a core of strength that shows itself in surprising harmonic choices and vigorous instrumental textures

San Francisco Sunday Chronicle

The piece makes demands on the soloist in ways that are both exciting and rewarding, with fresh sounds deftly woven into the total fabric.

The Montclarion: Oakland

Both composer and poet capture the misty shades of the Northwest hills in their music and words, and while this is in the "new classical" vein, it will nonetheless appeal to any audience with good ears and an adventurous spirit.

Steve Taylor

Peter Scott Lewis’ new CD creates orchestral music, joined by unique chamber music, blended in a careful manner.

juke VOICE

San Francisco composer Peter Scott Lewis writes music marked by an appealing combination of intricacy and rhetorical straightforwardness

San Francisco Sunday Chronicle

Lewis develops a beautiful tension between strings and percussion that grips you tightly.

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