Claire Victoria Roberts - Inconsistent (2023) Hi Res

Claire Victoria Roberts, a young Welsh composer who makes the confounding of expectations part of her appeal, has just released a single track from her forthcoming album. Nigel Jarrett listened to it and places it in the shifting context of contemporary music-making.

Old-school reviewers might justifiably describe one or two of Claire Victoria Roberts’s publicity shots as glamorous and unusual for a composer who’s written dazzling music for the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and others. But, for Roberts, sowing such confusion is part of her persona. Whatever a pigeon-hole is, she’s not about to be forced or enticed into one. Not to be pigeon-holed might be her musical reason for being.

Roberts is a rare exception to the view that most composers have neither the desire nor the ability to create in more than one style, still less to make from them something original. For many, the struggle towards meritorious achievement in one is full-time and often marked by stuttering progress. Roberts’s progression from one to another has a way of dissolving the parameters she crosses.

In addition to those glam snaps, describing herself as being based ‘in Carmarthen and Barcelona’ is a further pointer to how she moves, unclassifiable, from one genre to another. She’s the archetypal boundary-blurrer. To say that she’s just released a single from her latest album is to employ phraseology that might define her work as a certain kind of ‘commercial’ proposition – not one, for a start, recognised as a buzzingly-bright contemporary whose work has been played at symphony concerts and kindred events.

She’s a composer, singer, and violinist working in jazz, orchestral, folk and what one might at a stretch and in terms of her public persona describe as ‘pop’, except that as soon as one begins mapping anything she does the labels self-detach and blow away.