Naomi Pinnock

Lines and Spaces is a portrait of the British composer Naomi Pinnock, four works from 2010 to 2016 that draw tender, finely graded sound formations out of very reduced material. Turning imperfection into sound is central to her writing. Gestures are compressed to their essentials, always shadowed by the possibility of not existing at all, and often pushed to a melancholic extreme.

The performers are Quatuor Bozzini, the baritone Omar Ebrahim with the London Sinfonietta under Beat Furrer, the pianist Richard Uttley and Ensemble Adapter. The string quartet was recorded in November 2019 at the Church of St John the Baptist in Dethick. Words comes from a BBC Radio 3 broadcast of March 2011. The piano piece was taped at SJE Arts in Oxford in May 2019, and Music for Europe at the Haus des Rundfunks in Berlin in January 2019, coproduced with Deutschlandfunk Kultur. The booklet text is by Dirk Wieschollek.

String Quartet No. 2 (2011-12) opens in a heavy, wearily advancing motion, built from varied repetitions of a descending chord progression. In the second movement it turns into resigned circling figures that end in a barely audible, toneless pizzicato on the bridge. Lines and Spaces (2015) for solo piano comes from Pinnock's encounter with the paintings of Agnes Martin, whose square canvases reveal the subtlest nuances of colour and line. The piece is reduced to horizontal single lines and vertical, chordal spaces, and lets their relations develop. Words (2010-11) is for baritone and ensemble.

Pinnock often takes her starting points from literature and painting. Music for Europe (2016), for flute, clarinet, percussion, piano and harp, was already sketched when the United Kingdom voted to leave the EU. She was devastated by the result, and says she cannot tell where she stops and the music starts: "The fragility you hear is not contrived."

CD, Wergo WER 6431 2, released in 2020 in the German Music Council's Edition Zeitgenössische Musik, with a 34-page booklet in German, English and French.