This is a beautiful CD, overflowing with creative new Canadian chamber music for – for the most part – strings in small settings, but adding piano on one track. The sound quality is technically (not on every track…) as well as artistically top notch, and the works themselves are all interesting and beautiful in their own way.

David Wall’s “In media res” (1991) for string quartet inaugurates the CD, beginning in a mode straight out of the quartet world of Bela Bartók, with edge, with staccatos, with fast interpolations and a brilliant counterpoint.
The title is Latin and means “in the middle of things”. The composer explains that he really was in a tough spot at the time of working with this piece, unable to get hold of the situation.
As stated above, this is a modern – but not ultra-modern – quartet, so anybody who likes Ligeti’s or Bartók’s quartets will surely appreciate this. There is not a dull moment, and the Penderecki Quartet does a great job of the interpretation! This short quartet claims its place among the classics.

Linda Catlin Smith succeeds David Wall with her string quartet “As You Pass a Reflective Surface” (1991). This too is a very short quartet with its single movement and its six and a half minute duration. Though it is written in the last decade of the 20th century it throws you right into the mood of the gloomiest sections of Beethoven’s late quartets, which have been said to picture and old man talking to himself about serious things. I feel an introspective melancholy in this beautiful – tonally beautiful – string quartet. It really gets to you. One would hope for much more quartet music from Linda Catlin Smith. Her music here is timeless, and that is its true quality. It immediately talks to your soul, your spirit, without taking the detour through any period-defined quirks. Wonderful, impressing! The composer says: “The title comes from a letter I received from someone far away”…

Writing solo pieces for cello is a daring prospect, and I’m not only thinking about the Suites for Solo Cello by Johann Sebastian Bach, but also about, for example, Benjamin Britten’s music for the cello. Nonetheless, Alfred Joel Fisher manages very well with his “In Darkness” (1985), a six-movement piece of moderate duration.
There is a drawback here, however, concerning the quality of the sound. There is nothing the matter with the cello sound, which is close, vibrant, colorful – very immediate… but the hall makes noises… It might be the ventilation or something else – but it does disturb the impression, I’m sorry to say. Fisher’s piece was recorded at the Convocation Hall in Edmonton, whereas the preceding works were done at the Maureen-Forrester Hall in Waterloo, with an absolutely silent recording space. The problem with ventilation or undue room reverberation – even cars and trucks outside the hall (who do not appear here!) is not an uncommon problem. The most alarming example that I’ve experienced was a recording on Philips with Gidon Kremer performing J. S. Bach’s “Sonatas & Partitas for Violin Solo”. There was as much noise from heavy trucks gearing up outside the studio as there were Bach sonatas on the CDs, and I sent them back and got reimbursed for them. A more recent recording was Rachel Podger’s recording of the same Bach pieces on Channel Classics. They contained so much car noise that I am unable to listen any more to the discs, even though Podger’s playing is excellent. Yet another noisy disc is the acclaimed recording on double bass of three of Bach’s Cello Suites on Sony Classical by Edgar Meyer; destroyed by cars! It’s sad, but it’s true.
“In Darkness” carries too much ventilation noise, but the playing is great. Some parts remind me of the cello playing in Shostakovich’s first Cello Concerto!

Keith Hamel’s “Each Life Converges To Some Centre…” (1992) for piano and violin, is recorded at the Convocation Hall in Edmonton too, but on another date, and without the ventilation noises. This is a very peculiar piece, more “modern” than the preceding works. It progresses in a somewhat minimalistic mode, with repetitive patterns in the violin part, punctuated by a Feldmanesque piano. Hamel is also a computer music specialist, and the director of the Electroacoustic Music Studio at the University of British Columbia. Maybe this is why certain characteristics that do not show up in the other work on this CD emerge here. It is clear that Hamel displays a different intellectual and artistic aspect on the compositional process. I don’t say it’s “better”, but it differs from the other pieces. Some of the more frantic whims give me associations to Walter Fändrich’s CD “Viola” and to some composers on the eastern shore of the Baltic.
The composer’s own explanation of the composition borders on a Stockhausenesque mentality. Interesting reading!

Alice Ho partakes with “Caprice” (1994). It’s a solo cello piece of about six minutes – very intense. Incidentally, this was recorded at the Convocation Hall in Edmonton at the same day as Alfred Joel Fisher’s piece above, and the disturbing ventilation sound interferes with the musical experience, diminishing it somewhat… If you can concentrate on just the music, it’s a rewarding event. A short lyrical section is contrasted with the intense events surrounding it.

Ron Hannah’s “String Quartet” – the longest piece on the CD with its eighteen minutes - is clothed in a more classical guise, but this time in a Webern – Berg – Schoenberg style, with chromatic twirls and fanciful dance figures appearing in a multilayered counterpoint in sometimes simultaneous but unequal tempi – very sophisticated! There is flair, an esprit here, of a certain airy intellectualism, very pleasing to a connoisseur of the fine things of life! It is classical also in its distribution across three movements, and the second movement is fittingly slow, introspective, in a remarkably beautiful intonation and a counterpoint that is devastatingly serene and clear, bringing you – I’m not kidding! – almost to tears. This is high art. I have to find out where I can obtain more CDs by Ron Hannah, because this string quartet makes it mandatory to go looking for further wonders. Masterly! The playing, too, leaves nothing more to wish for. It’s perfect! The hall remains silent too!

The last work is “Strumienie snu” for string quartet (1995) by Piotr Grella-Mozejko.
Now this is a different story altogether, In fact, this is probably the only piece of the CD, which could be labeled ”avantgarde” or “new”. I read some strange remarks in the booklet about metronome marking and that what appears in the score sounds very different from the way it looks. The booklet says: “This [automatically] creates a contradiction between what one sees in the score and what one hears: while the music seems extremely slow and drawn out, the performers are looking at pages upon pages full of activity which would be impossible at a quicker tempo”.
There are many interesting events taking place here, which you can observe with a tense attention. The piece sort of catches your ears and your mind in a concentrated act of listening, and though Grella-Mozejko’s piece is the most unmelodic, the most “unbeautiful” of the works on the CD, it may well be the most interesting, the most intriguing!