Painted Light
Works by L Boulanger, Edmund Finnis, Camden Reeves, Ayanna Witter-Johnson et al
Solem Quartet et al
Delphian DCD34308 57:39 mins
The title suggests a link between music and light, but applies to only some of the pieces. Edmund Finnis’s Quartet No. 3 is a spacious work in eight short movements, and the subtitle ‘Devotions’ defines its character. Much is slow, and even when there is rhythmic activity, it doesn’t affect the stately harmonic progress, tonally based, with a quasi-religious feeling and echoes of plainsong. It was commissioned by the Solem Quartet, who completely inhabit the idiom.
Lili Boulanger’s Nocturne, better known for violin and piano, works well for string quartet, although the link between early- 20th-century French music and Impressionist painting, now baked into musical discourse, is a convenient fiction. Henriëtte Bosmans gives us the first fast music of the album in the outer movements of her 1927 String Quartet, where there is more sinew in the writing and the playing.
The Blue Windows by Camden Reeves, another Solem commission, is most definitely visually inspired – by Chagall’s stained-glass America Windows. It may be slow, but it couldn’t be more of a contrast with the Finnis: textures are more sparse, there’s far greater use of silence to punctuate phrases and tonality is more fractured. Again, the patient pacing of the performance produces something of real power.
Silences also have a place in Ayanna Witter-Johnson’s World, where her words and music use rests to inflect her vocals. Finally, an arrangement of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’ takes the song into regions which compromise its simplicity, but it’s very sympathetically performed. Martin Cotton