[…] “Composed in 2016, an interesting aspect of To Become A Tree is the way it moves from an initially vague, broken-up soundworld to a point where the bass clarinet assumes command, squalling into the foreground and highlighting how reserved they’ve all been. … Deep grinding, rumble, resonance… and the work ends; that description perhaps sounds somewhat uneventful, even anticlimactic, but there’s a fascinating sense of interaction and effort permeating the material; perhaps To Become A Tree is less about the result than the effort. … Stoicheia, a concerto for two violins and strings … is a powerful demonstration of how nebulosity and lyricism can come together to make something elusive yet immediate. Taking its title from … Euclid, the piece somewhat alludes to this in an introduction filled with elemental possibilities: gestures, ricochets, runs, melodic feelers, emerging from a kind of treading water to prepare what’s to come. … The emphasis in many of these pieces is quite abstract, focusing on the purely musical, but a markedly different tone is heard in Touching the First Sounds … It’s as if the instruments were caught in the pull of an outside force, causing their pitches to rise, in the process making their united song more plangent and forceful. It’s a mesmerising sequence … Above … unfolds as a blurring of consonance and dissonance, where tones buzz and jar against each other in close proximity, causing ephemeral semblances of clarity that are immediately lost in shimmer. … There’s something hymn-like about its dogged forward motion, forming abstract shapes that once again become a chorus that could hardly be more expressively immediate.” [reviewed in October] […]
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[…] “Composed in 2016, an interesting aspect of To Become A Tree is the way it moves from an initially vague, broken-up soundworld to a point where the bass clarinet assumes command, squalling into the foreground and highlighting how reserved they’ve all been. … Deep grinding, rumble, resonance… and the work ends; that description perhaps sounds somewhat uneventful, even anticlimactic, but there’s a fascinating sense of interaction and effort permeating the material; perhaps To Become A Tree is less about the result than the effort. … Stoicheia, a concerto for two violins and strings … is a powerful demonstration of how nebulosity and lyricism can come together to make something elusive yet immediate. Taking its title from … Euclid, the piece somewhat alludes to this in an introduction filled with elemental possibilities: gestures, ricochets, runs, melodic feelers, emerging from a kind of treading water to prepare what’s to come. … The emphasis in many of these pieces is quite abstract, focusing on the purely musical, but a markedly different tone is heard in Touching the First Sounds … It’s as if the instruments were caught in the pull of an outside force, causing their pitches to rise, in the process making their united song more plangent and forceful. It’s a mesmerising sequence … Above … unfolds as a blurring of consonance and dissonance, where tones buzz and jar against each other in close proximity, causing ephemeral semblances of clarity that are immediately lost in shimmer. … There’s something hymn-like about its dogged forward motion, forming abstract shapes that once again become a chorus that could hardly be more expressively immediate.” [reviewed in October] […]