Peter Child: Reviews: Ritornel
Composed 1985. Semar Editore.

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From The Boston Globe, 23 September, 1986 (by Richard Buell)

The concert opened with Peter Child's "Ritornel" for orchestra and computer-synthesized electronic tape. "Ritornel" starts off with an oboelike sound with a real bite to its articulation. Soon, from the orchestra, come a long-lined melody punctuated by wind and percussion, some sustained chordal writing for strings, the marking-off of orchestra "space" vs. that of the electronics, and an agreeable sense of drifting from one tonal region to another -- but drifting, somehow, in a calm, rational, even rather schematic fashion. Child has seemed more vaultingly imaginative in other pieces -- notably the hallucinatory John Clare songs, which some ambitious soprano should take up -- but this was nonetheless well worth hearing.