Michael Jon Fink's From a Folio, a suite of six short pieces for cello and piano and one central piece for six cellos, a set of songs without words, was composed for new-music cellist Derek Stein, with whom Fink has been performing in various small groups during the past few years.

As the elegant, subtle music unfolds, radiating a deep, emotional sense of form, the listener is quickly drawn into a highly nuanced, lyrical sound world. Fink’s characteristically reductive but expressive style is evident throughout, as the set’s quiet intensity builds to a muted ecstasy and then returns to a somewhat serene state.

“An 18-minute suite of seven brief movements for cello and piano, excepting the central movement, Aftersong, for multiple cellos…. Fink provides several direct views onto an expansive yet unpopulated landscape…. It’s quite haunting if you choose to dwell here.” —Grant Chu Covell, La Folia

“Melancholy, slow, simple. Post-classical comes to mind, like Olafúr Arnalds stripped of his electronic shades, but let’s not forget that the Cold Blue crew were doing post-classical before the term post-classical was coined. And From a Folio is a work as typically Cold Blue as they come: misleadingly simple, and gorgeous like contemporary music has no business to be.”—François Couture, Monsieur Délire’s Listening Diary