Digital Audio AlbumEmpyrean Traces / Benaud Trio.
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$POA
This item may be available to purchase from the Australian Music Centre. |
Featured Australian works
Work | Composer | Performers | Duration | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Chromatic Traces for string trio Recorded/performed at: Iwaki Auditorium, Melbourne |
David Kotlowy | Benaud Trio | 13 mins, 45 sec. | |
Empyrean Traces for piano trio Recorded/performed at: Iwaki Auditorium, Melbourne |
David Kotlowy | Benaud Trio | 21 mins, 6 sec. | |
Under Stars for string trio Recorded/performed at: Iwaki Auditorium, Melbourne |
David Kotlowy | Benaud Trio | 10 mins, 4 sec. |
Product details
With Empyrean Traces, De La Catessen Records focuses on
another aspect of Adelaide composer David Kotlowy's career - his
works for trio. It follows the 2021 release of Final Fragments:
Piano Music of David Kotlowy, where Kotlowy's solo piano
compositions were performed by composer and scholar Stephen
Whittington. The three compositions on Empyrean Traces
are brought to life by the Benaud Trio, whose ability to carry
the gentle poetics of such work allows for bravura performances:
as Luke Altmann of De La Catessen says, "it often felt during
these sessions less like we were listening to the Benaud Trio and
more like we were scanning for a signal from outer space."
Indeed, Kotlowy's compositions share something otherworldly. His
compositional ethos is informed by several key influences -
Japanese musical aesthetics; John Cage; Morton Feldman; Ross
Bolleter and his ruined pianos - but while you can hear
relationships between Kotlowy's compositions and these forebears,
Kotlowy is not beholden to that which has come before, and over
several decades, has marked out his own patch of aesthetic
territory with unerring clarity. The works on Empyrean Traces
span the 1990s to 2020s, with two 'earlier' pieces, "Chromatic
Traces" and "Under Stars", revised earlier this decade.
While significant time has elapsed between their composition, the
three pieces on Empyrean Traces share the same 'sound
world', one where an exterior seeming-fragility masks a resolute
interior: these are sturdy, powerful pieces. Kotlowy draws from
several compositional tactics - the use of Cagean time brackets,
or breathing as measure, such that this album, in his own words,
"traces a transition from outer to inner clock time." There is
also a "relaxing of musical austerity" as Empyrean
Traces progresses; the spare chill of Chromatic
Traces acquiesces to the relative richness of the title
composition.
A gorgeous album of deeply moving music, Empyrean Traces
is sure to appeal to fans of composers such as Morton Feldman,
Jürg Frey, or Tōru Takemitsu.
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