As a child, Anna Höstman loved to play piano. She gave a performance of her earliest written work at age twelve, a joyful experience that she later compared to setting a boat on a river and being carried downstream. On Harbour, recorded at Toronto’s Glenn Gould Studio… she has entrusted the sterring of her craft to the eminently capable hands of pianist Cheryl Duvall. Höstman’s music still conveys an elated sense of being transported by sound. Although this set opens with an allemande and concludes with an adagio, her approach to formal design is manifestly intuitive, personal, and flexible, rather than imitative or bound to historical models.
Duvall nurtures the intrinsic suppleness and buoyancy of each of these six alluring pieces, their melodic trails that seem to wander yet never appear directionless, and yeilding harmonies that suggest dappled light and ventilation, even amid the pensive shadows of darkness . . . pines or the austere clarity of late winter. This unforced yet compelling music, finding its own bearings while negotiating sonic swirls and eddies, brings to my mind Emily Dickinson’s wonderful notion of “rowing in Eden” without chart or compass. Höstman’s phrasing and cadences, her unhurried progress and sensitivity to rays of illumination seem—like Dickinson’s poetry— to be charged with quiet ecstasy, taking intense but gently articulated pleasure in their own fleeting existence within music’s unbounded and mutable flow. — Julian Cowley (Spring, 2020)
Anna Höstman | Cheryl Duvall, piano: Harbour
Redshift Records
That the names of composer and performer are emphasized equally on the cover of Harbour is telling: each is critical to the outcome, pianist Cheryl Duvall for giving corporeal form to Anna Höstman's material, the Victoria-based composer for providing the Toronto musician with material to bring into being. The solo piano recording, the debut full-length of both, flatters each in its own way, documenting as it does their respective gifts as creators.
Recorded, produced, and mastered by David Jaeger at the Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto, the nearly eighty-minute release offers an in-depth account of Höstman's composing style and Duvall's playing. The two are an ideal match. The latter, a powerful advocate for music by living composers, recently commissioned seven new works from Canadians, Höstman among them. In her work (and in her own words), the award-winning composer, currently teaching at the University of Victoria, intrepidly seeks “out tactile encounters with the world while also extending into history, memory, and landscape.”
Her material is personal without being hermetic, intimate yet expansive. Consonance and dissonance go hand-in-hand, entwined harmoniously within the meticulously considered fabric of the compositional design. The six works on Harbour—the longest ones especially—play less like formally notated compositions than adventurous journeys methodically undertaken through natural landscapes (in the booklet's liner notes, she describes her pieces as “a kind of continual walking” and “undirected, though not aimless”). Be forewarned: they're not songs featuring simple melodies and repetitive structures; four push past the twelve-minute mark, with the title piece an epic twenty-six-minute exploration.
Routes are pursued that feel like free associations articulated by Duvall, at such moments the divide separating composer and performer blurred. If one word best describes her playing on the release, it's lucid, the pianist demonstrating at every moment a clear, intuitive grasp of Höstman's music. Duvall's nuanced renderings are marked throughout by fluidity and sensitivity of touch.
Written after Höstman moved to Toronto (she returned to Canada's West Coast in 2018), the album's earliest work, the ponderous meditation darkness… pines… (2010), was inspired by evening walks where she regularly encountered a graveyard, enclosed by a brick wall, stretching for blocks on end. Birthed a year later, allemande is characteristically explorative, its development suggestive of the meandering nature of consciousness and its capacity for drift. At fifteen minutes, the piece affords ample opportunity for reflection, and Duvall uses the extended time to her advantage. Despite the physical fact of temporal advance, the music achieves a suspended, atemporal quality during its most floating passages.
At four minutes, late winter (2019) plays like a microcosm of Höstman's universe, with Duvall surgically examining a motive from multiple angles. Many works, yellow bird (2019) among them, show the composer reflecting a minimalistic sensibility and preference for clarity in using spidery, single-note lines and resisting any impulse to overwhelm the listener with excessive density. Things turn entrancing for the album-closing adagio (2019), what with its repeating figures and gently lilting rhythms.
As would be expected, 2015's harbour is the album's central work, its oceanic expanse allowing it to span multitudes of dynamics and moods. Impressionistic cascades resonate alongside clusters of block chords and sparse single-line phrases collide with angular clusterings over the course of its run, Duvall an attentive midwife to the composer's imaginings. The journey's so far-reaching, the title begins to seem a misnomer, suggesting as it does a ship moored rather than one exploring freely far from shore.
As Nick Storring writes in the release's liner notes, Höstman's music is marked by contradictions, its accommodation of both restraint and abandon a particularly salient feature. The composer herself identifies a clear parallel between the music she writes and her experiences growing up in the coastal wilderness: whereas nature can be quiet and still, it's also abundant with life and energy. In an electronic context, these pieces would invite the label soundscapes; the word applies here too, even if the presentation is wholly acoustic. Höstman's landscapes, it might also be said, play like maps of the mind distilled into sonic form.
Ron Schepper, June 2020, Textura
Anna Höstman: Harbour Cheryl Duvall (piano) (Red Shift Records)
A celebration of “the special trust and reciprocity” existing between Canadian composer Anna Höstman and pianist Cheryl Duvall, this quiet, jewel-like disc is a beguiling introduction to a distinctive voice. Höstman’s memories of childhood piano lessons led her to avoid writing for the instrument, initially struggling “to turn it into a compositional voice that’s different from just a reaction to your own memory of the instrument”, and there’s the constant sense here that she’s thought deeply about how the piano can best articulate her thoughts. Höstman’s music is succinct and lucid, all superfluities banished, the six works here reflecting her “ongoing interest in the reduced line”. The earliest work here, 2010’s darkness… pines is a sonorous sequence of unrepeated block chords, inspired by patterns in brickwork spotted during evening walks in Toronto. Höstman compares her music to continuous walking, “undirected though not aimless”.
harbour, the most substantial piece here, audibly reflects Höstman’s decision to compose it on a grand piano instead of her beloved upright, the bell-like sonorities deep and rich. And though it’s wonderfully sustained, you sense that she’s happier when painting on a smaller canvas. The shorter works are a perfect marriage of style and scale; pieces like yellow bird and the sublime adagio miracles of refined understatement. Duvall’s sensitive, nuanced playing is superb, the sense of intent never flagging.
by Graham Rickson 05 December 2020
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ABOUT: Harbour is the debut album of both Victoria-based composer, Anna Höstman and Toronto pianist Cheryl Duvall. Duvall is best known as the co-founder of Thin Edge New Music Collective, a perpetually curious chamber ensemble who have collaborated directly with the likes of Sarah Hennies, Barbara Monk Feldman, Maria De Alvear and Linda Catlin Smith. Höstman teaches at the University of Victoria, a school long revered for nurturing idiosyncratic talent. Its graduates include Höstman herself, Linda Catlin Smith, Cassandra Miller, Eve Egoyan and eldritch Priest (author of Boring Formless Nonsense). Listed as the Wire’s best Modern Composition album of 2020, its long-form titular piece is a 2021 JUNO-nominee (for Best Classical Composition). I CARE IF YOU LISTEN said that the disc “affirms what levels of expression quiet music is capable of when it is not forced to shout, but rather allowed to unfold on its own terms.”
COVERAGE:
News — The Weeknd leads the 2021 Juno Awards nominations with six nods, Kate Scott, eTalk.ca
Year-End List — #1 on 2020 Modern Composition Chart, The Wire
Year-End List — Rambler releases of 2020, Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Johnson’s Rambler
Review — Graham Rickson, The ArtsDesk
Review — Ron Schepper, Textura
Review — Ettore Garzia, Percorsi Musicale (in Italian)
Review — Andy Hamilton, International Piano
Review — Kathleen McGowan, I CARE IF YOU LISTEN
Review — Julian Cowley, Musicworks
Review — Christian B. Carey, Sequenza21
Review — Peter Margasak, Best of Bandcamp Classical, February 2020
Review — Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Johnson’s Rambler
Review — Paul Baker, Only Strings
Review — John Eyles, All About Jazz
Review — Nick Ostrum, Free Jazz Blog
Review — Dolf Mulder, Vital Weekly
Review — Kevin Press, Exclaim!
Review — Ben Taffijn, Nieuwe Noten
Radio — Signal To Noise, Slack City
Review — Roger Knox, The Whole Note
Roundup — Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise
Roundup — Winter Music Preview — A Closer Listen
Podcast — Samuel Andreyev Podcast (feat. Cheryl Duvall)
Podcast — The Moderns