"The Blue Light" is a selection of solo piano and chamber works by Irish composer Garrett Sholdice. Sensitive and poised performances by pianist Michael McHale and Crash Ensemble allow this music to fully operate on its own terms – intimate, insistent, soaring, resonating, weaving, and yielding.
The music represented here offers a portrait of a composer with a distinctive voice. “This record”, says Sholdice, “showcases some recurrent preoccupations in my music over the past ten years or so.” He continues: “There is an emphasis on meditative focus, varied repetition, and a certain sense of ritual. Also important is melody, but melody that is discovered, like an object unearthed.”
The album opens with "Und weinen, und lächeln" for solo piano, composed in 2022. Rapid, shimmering passagework gives way to gently declamatory phrases that eventually find their own point of rest. The title comes from a song (“Des Fischers Liebesglück”) by Franz Schubert, a composer whose music has been a touchstone for Sholdice.
"St Dunstan-in-the-East", also composed in 2022, is for piano and string quartet, and takes its title from a church in London. Mostly destroyed by bombing during the Second World War, the decision was taken to turn the ruins into a public garden. “It is a beautiful and unassuming urban space,” says Sholdice. “In this piece, there is an attempt to create meaning out of fragmentary materials, and so, for me, there is an intuitive connection between this music and this place.”
The string quartet "Das blaue Licht" (2013) dates from a period when Sholdice was based in Berlin. Sholdice says: “The title – which means 'the blue light' in German – refers to the luminous blue of the sky above Danziger Straße in Berlin during the hot July weeks in which I wrote the piece. For me, there is a kind of synaesthetic connection between this colour and this music. There is no dialectical relationship between the two parts – just a change in breathing.”
The title of the viola and cello duo "Gymel" (2018) references Medieval and Renaissance vocal music. Again, this repertoire has been important to Sholdice since his earliest musical training as a chorister in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. The term refers to the “dividing” of one vocal part into two vocal parts. Here, the cello and viola begin in unison – as one – and their individual personalities emerge.
The album closes, as it begins, with a solo piano piece. "Prelude No. 12" (2017) is a soliloquy – what the American poet Frank O’Hara might have called a “personal” piece. The music is all about a single, unbroken line – a gentle vector of intention.
soundcloud.com/garrett-sholdice
www.michaelmchale.com
www.crashensemble.com