The January 2023 issue of Gramophone Magazine features a review of Nadia Shpachenko’s recording of Invasion: Music and Art for Ukraine:

“Lewis Spratlan’s Invasion is a raucous, volatile tone poem for a sextet of piano, saxophone, horn, trombone, percussion and – I assume to provide some local Ukrainian colour – mandolin, written at speed in March this year.… Invasion is the music of indignation and outrage, its combative nature (it does have a more contemplative central section) mirrored in the scoring, with broadsides of drums, brass fanfares, and the maniacal presence of the mandolin which, with the piano, seems to indicate a human presence amid the mechanistic carnage. The performance is powerful, in a rather airless recording, the booklet illustrated sumptuously with full-colour paintings by Ukrainian artists Shpachenko commissioned and by children in her battered home city of Kharkiv.… The album is a programme of two halves, however: the larger part (Invasion is the opening track) is a succession of recent compositions – all predating the war – for piano solo by Spratlan that cover a wide variety of expression.… Shpachenko audibly has a deep understanding of Spratlan’s compositional processes, and – in writing all bar Wonderer for her – he clearly has an appreciation of her pianistic abilities. The whole album may not be the sum of its parts, its expressive diversity at times bafflingly wide, but each individual part is impressive, and mostly haunting.”

—Guy Rickards, Gramophone

Full review in the January 2023 Issue and gramophone.co.uk