Welsh composer and pianist Gwenno Morgan is establishing herself as one of the distinctive new voices in Wales’ neoclassical and cinematic music landscape. Her work is rooted in a deep relationship with place - music shaped by landscape, memory and the pull of home, moving between intimate melodic piano writing and expansive orchestral and electronic worlds.

 

Her debut album gwyw introduced this language through compositions that brought together contemporary classical writing, chamber instrumentation and jazz-inflected harmony. Shortlisted for Welsh Album of the Year 2025, the record drew praise from CLASH and was named among Somewhere Soul’s Top Albums of 2024. Morgan’s music has since found support across BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio Wales, including Unwind and championing from Hannah Peel.

 

That cinematic instinct extends beyond her own records. As a composer for film and screen, Morgan has received multiple award nominations for her scoring work, including a Best Composer nomination for Waiting for Burton, while earlier work has been recognised by the Celtic Media Festival. Across both worlds, her music shares the same preoccupation: how melody can hold a memory, a landscape or a feeling that words cannot quite reach.

 

Her forthcoming second album, gwreiddiau - Welsh for “roots” - turns that question towards home. Written in the years after leaving North Wales, first for Leeds and later London, the record grew from hiraeth: a distinctly Welsh sense of longing, distance and belonging.

 

Across eight paired themes, Morgan draws upon traditional Welsh lullabies and folk melodies alongside her own compositions, filtering them through a contemporary musical language. Each begins in its most exposed form - solo piano, close and unguarded - before being reimagined through strings, synthesisers and orchestral textures, transforming familiar melodies into something larger, stranger and more immersive.

 

The landscape of Wales runs quietly beneath it all: coastlines, mountains, childhood memories and melodies carried across generations. From solitary piano to submerged orchestral reimaginings, gwreiddiau traces the invisible threads that tether us to where we come from - and the landscapes that continue to echo within us long after we leave them.