col legno Musikproduktion, München WWE 1CD 20042 (released July 2000) Contents: Sous-structures (1964) 9' Etudes en Série (1965-1972) 50' Ebauches 2'

Sound sample: Etude 3 (complete) - MP3 128kbps - total size 5719kb
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• Sunday Times Album of the Year
  " If ever a recording was a labour of love, it is this one. Hodges is a remarkable virtuoso who has devoted himself to the most challenging but often most neglected corners of the contemporary repertoire. For Hopkins ... Hodges has not only performed his piano music with masterly authority, but surmounted considerable obstacles in seeing it into print. This triumphant disc ... makes a powerful case for Hopkins's exultantly nihilist or existential brand of total serialism. The demands on the listener are stringent, but there is majesty of a kind here, no doubt about it."
  Paul Driver, Sunday Times, 9 July 2000 (full text)
• "These difficult pieces receive performances of the utmost commitment and sensitivity from Nicolas Hodges. He knows how to give an obscure tangle of notes a vivid, almost sculptural shape, and he knows exactly when to bring out the half-hidden rhymes, repetitions and parallelisms that hold the music together. The recorded sound is excellent; clear, but with enough warmth to bring out the music's subtle use of lingering piano resonances."
  Ivan Hewett, BBC Music Magazine, November 2000, p.110
• "Hodges plays magnificently, in his range and fullness of texture and colour, in his feeling for the progression or stasis implied by the harmony (and the beauty), in his phrasing of the wide-spanning melodies that abound, often hesitant or flummoxed, but again always sounding beautiful. One could just say he knows he is addressing - and has the measure of - a masterpiece."
  Paul Griffiths, International Record Review, September 2000, p.96
• "one of the finest young British pianists ... an issue of compelling interest, beautifully recorded and despatched with astonishing command."
  Calum MacDonald, International Piano Quarterly, Winter 2001, pp.72-3
• "No other piano music of the era can match their sensuous logic. Nicolas Hodges' commanding realisation is a release to be acquired and savoured."
  Richard Whitehouse, Gramophone, April 2001 pp77-8
• "...magnificent..."
  Michael Oliver, Gramophone, June 2001, p.37 ('Take Five' column)
• "The limpidity and hypnoticism of Hopkins's music are captured by pianism of exquisite tenderness. Even in loud passages Hodges never forces the tone of the instrument, allowing it to resonate through the natural richness of the harmony. This is not to say however that the pianist neglects the structure of the music in order to wallow in it's purely sonic effects, irresistible though they are; on the contrary, Hodges controls the music admirably investing it with the essential sense of forward motion that it demands."
  David Hackbridge Johnson, Musicweb, August 2001 (full text)
• '2000's most enduring discovery on disc'
  Walt Mundkowsky, La Folia April 2002
• There have been several reviews which are awaiting translation:
  • Neue Zürcher Zeitung
  • Neue Musikzeitung
  • Piano (Germany)
  • Le Monde de la Musique (France), 12/2000
  • Diapason (France), 12/2000
  • Scherzo (Spain)
  • CD-Compact (Spain)

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