"Maybe I'm like a still life painter," Linda Catlin Smith says, "looking at the same objects again and again over the years." Yet this survey of chamber works—spanning 1986 to 2024—shows a composer whose perspectives continually shift, finding something fresh in each iteration. Hers is "a compositional voice that never shouts, never draws undue attention to itself, yet creates music of compelling beauty." The Guardian awarded five stars, placing it #3 in their Top Classical Releases of 2024.
Apartment House performs eight works structured around first recordings of three string quartets (Waterlily, As you pass a reflective surface, String Quartet No.6), plus a bass clarinet solo (Blackwing), clarinet quartet (Nightshade), early string trio (Flowers of Emptiness), cello-piano duo (Das Rosen-Innere, composed earlier this year), and violin duo (Lamento). Together they present a portrait of "one of the leading composers of her generation"—Smith's sixth Another Timbre release following Dirt Road, Drifter, Wanderer, Ballad, and Among the Tarnished Stars.
Smith identifies "a thread of thought that runs through most of my work—a kind of reflective atmosphere, a concern with harmony and colour." Her language is "pared back to the bones, yet never consciously feels empty or repetitive." The use of repetition—single notes or phrases returning, transformed—connects the earliest piece (Flowers of Emptiness, the 1986 string trio) to the newest (Das Rosen-Innere). But where superficially similar contemporary music resolves tensions into "lulling certainties of melody or vague folklorism," Smith "turns those same elements towards abstraction."
String Quartet No.6 (2013)—the album's longest work at 19 minutes and one of the label's "favourite quartets of this century"—exemplifies Smith's mature voice. With no title beyond its number, the piece establishes "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 suggests repose, yet the music remains restless, exploratory.
