Catching Up: Smith, Demoč, Lonsdale

Sunday 2 February 2025

While I get back up to speed, there’s been a whole lot of praise for Another Timbre’s latest Linda Catlin Smith collection. I’ve got no argument with that. Flowers Of Emptiness pulls together eight chamber works spanning nearly forty years – it’s quietly astonishing to think of how she’s created such a substantial body of work. As you would expect, the dimensions of each piece are modest (two exceed ten minutes, another stretches to nearly twenty) but they all establish an immediate presence and profundity through being contemplative without ever settling into passivity, combining seriousness of intent with lightness of touch. The gentleness of harmonies and dynamics in her language initially suggests a superficial resemblance to the current fashion in modern music for the polite and inconsequential, but where the latter typically resolve the tensions of their work into the lulling certainties of melody or vague folklorism, Smith turns those same elements towards abstraction, offering up emotion without interpretation. The musicians of Apartment House play this music with an authority that now imparts interpretative leeway; in the works for string quartet the silences and pithy fragments here resemble John Cage on the cusp of finding Zen.

The batch of three discs released by Another Timbre late last year are all repeat appearances by old favourites of the label, each featuring performances by members of Apartment House. Zamat is their fourth release by Adrián Demoč, a set of three new chamber pieces. Each is an exquisitely worked study in instrumentation, with Demoč reducing the substance of each piece down to the state of almost monody, articulated by subtle differences in colouration and texture with just enough variation to keep up the appearance of forward motion. The title work, for clarinet, bass clarinet, viola and cello, moves back and forth on the spot between a handful of notes, plucked strings hedged amongst the guttural effect of low clarinets, producing a complex, ambiguous tone. Gebrechlichkeit is a pensive string quartet that broods over several frail chords of close clusters, moving from one to another only when the strings’ various methods of attack have been exhausted. “…o protón jasu…” repeats the same instrumentation as Zamat, only with both clarinets in the upper register and evrything played in high treble, a loose gathering of thin harmonics. The sound here is naked and astringent, reminding me that Demoč’s music is not always as comfortable as it first appears.

Eden Lonsdale has had only one previous Another Timbre release from about a year earlier but apparently it’s already sold out. Dawnings is a double-disc of five longer pieces, in which longer durations allow Lonsdale to stretch out into elongated chorales like Cloud Symmetries (four violins played by Mira Benjamin, Chihiro Ono, Amalia Young and Angharad Davies) and Shedding (the seven violas of Ensemble Ipse). Each of the above pieces use strongly constricted pitch ranges to focus on timbre and small changes found within stasis. In my review of last year’s Sawyer Editions release, I talked about “hazy washes” and “thick, roiling textures”; in these works those elements appear more starkly, with less obvious direction point from one state to another. The large ensemble work Constellations, perfomed by Oerknal and conducted by Hardy Li at the 2023 Gaudeamus Muziekwiek, is almost too rich and roiling as it luxuriates in antiphonal layers of instrument groupings threaded through with organ chords. Most remarkable is the title work, in which Heather Roche on clarinet and Kerry Yong on piano seamlessly transform back and forth between figure and ground, always spare and unhurried yet always moving while appearing to be in the same place. There’s no melody as such, nor any particular direction of travel, but somehow you listen and at one moment one is high and the other low, then the other is high and one is low without any apparent intervention.