From Quatuor Bozzini comes a new release featuring Vancouver’s Owen Underhill, a figure who has achieved considerable acclaim, especially within Canada. His “Canzone di Petra” (2004), a piece for flute and harp commissioned by Heidi Krutzen and Lorna McGhee, was the winner of the 2007 Western Canadian Music Outstanding Composition Award. His orchestral work “Lines of Memory” won first prize in the 1994 du Maurier Canadian Composers’ Competition, and his Love Songs was nominated for a Juno in 2002. Underhill’s output encompasses numerous instrumental combinations, including orchestral and choral works, plus chamber music that spans traditional ensembles to more idiosyncratic groupings from period instruments to a Chinese ensemble. His compositions have been performed by important groups such as Arraymusic, Quatuor Bozzini, the St. Lawrence String Quartet, Esprit Orchestra, Vancouver Cantata Singers, musica intima, the Vancouver Symphony, and Vancouver Bach Choir and he also been performed Internationally at Alaska’s CrossSound Festival, King’s Chapel Choir, Arcadian Winds, and bassoonist Janet Underhill in Boston, and in Bratislava, Slovakia. Underhill was formerly the Artistic Director of Vancouver New Music and now directs and conducts the Turning Point Ensemble, a large chamber ensemble devoted to 20th and 21st century work.
Songs and Quartets, his third portrait disc and second collaboration with Quatuor Bozzini, vividly captures Underhill’s unusual musical personality. His musical temperament, similar to Martin Arnold, Allison Cameron, Linda Catlin Smith and other noted Canadian artists, was shaped by the beloved teacher and composer Rudolf Komorous at the University of Victoria. His work frequently and audibly displays a deep respect for, and knowledge of, the concert music tradition, yet it is by no means traditional. The pieces on this recording are outwardly approachable and even somehow familiar, yet as soon as listeners peek below the surface, a disorienting quality emerges.
With the two songs on this album, a potential underlying source of their peculiarity is revealed in the liner notes. Underhill initially focused on concocting their curious ensemble rather than first pursuing melodic material or setting text. Taking his previously recorded 1999’s “Trombone Quintet”as his point of departure, he spoke to the quartet about enlisting brass player Jeremy Berkman again for these works, this time on sackbut. “It was then,” Underhill nonchalantly relays in the liners, “a natural step to add the metaphysical seventeenth century poetry of Henry Vaughan and Sir Walter Raleigh, sung by countertenor Daniel Cabena.”
“The Retreat” opens with Cabena effortlessly intoning an elegant melody shadowed by languid string accompaniment and complementary sackbut figures, until, for a fleeting moment, a flight of exuberance bursts through the texture. Then, picking up where they left off, the players return to their original path, concluding the brief section on a lingering ethereal shimmer built from natural harmonics. Straight away, there’s an immediate change of scene, announced by a strident gesture from the quartet. Underhill often favours unstable episodic structures where movement between sections is rather disjunct, yet the sections themselves aren’t typically contrasting enough for it to feel jarring. Couple this device with a harmonic logic that frequently seems ambivalent toward the entrenched consonance-dissonance polarity, and the result is a sort of elusive, fragmentary beauty placed carefully into tentative formal housing. It’s a world that these fine interpreters inhabit with great joy and care.
There’s a faint current of Romanticism lurking in this music and these strains can be found exerting themselves on Underhill’s oblique harmonies or tugging certain melodic phrases toward them—such as in the first movement of his second quartet, “Northern Line -Angel Station.” However, when it comes to dynamics, texture, and overall shape, he keeps these tendencies in check, instead permitting his more eccentric proclivities to steer. One might hear echoes of Janáček’s prophetic quartets, yet devoid of the neurotic urgency of his forebear’s works. Sometimes Underhill’s penchant for space and querying gestures suggests proximity to Feldman and his various descendants, yet he’s too restless to fully cast the listener adrift. Elsewhere, he drops in quotations—here, there are ones from Orlando Gibbons and John Cage, skewed hints of American minimalism, and although he mostly remains within the confines of conventional performance practice, certain moments employ extended timbral and microtonal inflections.
Underhill’s language is an elegant collision of various elements and the fact he is able to so seamlessly reconcile this odd combination demonstrates his skill and imagination as a composer.
Quatuor Bozzini is currently celebrating 25 years together as an ensemble. Throughout this time, they have worked closely with some of the most important minds in contemporary music from Cassandra Miller to Christian Wolff, and Éliane Radigue to Yannis Kyriakides, giving rise to a vast array of commissioned works, some 500 premieres, and numerous recordings, many of which have been released through their own imprint Collection QB. Their eagerness to explore is matched by a rigorous ear for quality and this combination has made them one of the most important chamber ensembles today.
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OWEN UNDERHILL + QUATUOR BOZZINI – Songs and Quartets
COLLECTION QB (CQB 2536) (CD/DL)
Track list:
1. The Retreat (2024) (13.48)
Northern Line — Angel Station (String Quartet No. 2) (1986, 2017)
2. I Adagio calmato (4.16)
3. II Ritmico, Con spirito (4.40)
4. III Adagio calmato, Animato (6.39)
5. IV Quodlibet (2.38)
6. What is our Life? (2023) (10.56)
String Quartet No. 5 — Land and Water (2017)
7. I Dead Tree over Spring Creek (4.38)
8. II Holy Isle (3.50)
9. III Raccoon on Wintry Beach (5.00)
10. IV Sunlight on Mountain Peak (4.10)
QUATUOR BOZZINI:
Alissa Cheung — violin/ violon (I: 1, 7-10),
Clemens Merkel —violin/ violon (I: 2-6),
Marina Thibeault — viola/ alto,
Isabelle Bozzini — cello/ violoncelle.
Daniel Cabena — countertenor/ contreténor (1, 6),
Jeremy Berkman —tenor sackbut/ sacqueboute ténor (1, 6),
Henry Vaughan —poet/ poète (1),
Sir Walter Raleigh — poet/ poète (6)