Frank Horvat & Vicky Chow: The Banff Suite
Redshift Records

Following his earlier 2025 solo piano release More Rivers, composer Frank Horvat again draws for inspiration from the outdoors, this time the Canadian Rockies. Whereas More Rivers features Christina Petrowska Quilico, The Banff Suite is performed by renowned Hong Kong-Canadian pianist Vicky Chow, who's based in Brooklyn and boasts credentials a mile long. A Bang on a Can All-Stars member since 2009, she's collaborated with a multitude of composers, ensembles, and orchestras and issued more than twenty-five solo and chamber albums. Her 2022 release Philip Glass: Piano Etudes Book 1 prompted the composer himself to say, “There's a certain energy that is uniquely hers,” and the comment applies as much to her inspired rendering of Horvat's suite.

The Ottawa-born Horvat is a University of Toronto composition graduate who lives in the city with his wife Lisa. He's neither a traditionalist nor iconoclast but instead someone intent on engaging listeners with authentic compositions of powerfully evocative character. His music transcends genre and instead orients itself around a focused attempt to translate his sensibility into sound and provide a restorative site for listeners to ease into. His music has appeared on over twenty albums and received acclaim from multiple corners. Horvat's also channeled his creative energies into environmental and mental health projects, such gestures exemplifying his engagement with real-world issues.

Composed during a four-week residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in the fall of 2021 and emblematic of Horvat's sensibility, The Banff Suite comprises eight parts, each one inspired by a different hiking trail in Banff National Park. Anyone who's seen photos of the locale and perhaps visited it will recognize immediately how convincingly its breathtaking beauty, grandeur, and majesty have been translated into musical form. The fifty-five-minute recording might have been laid down at Imagine Sound Studios in Toronto during September 2024, but its spirit is in Alberta with the stirring mountains, turquoise lakes, and trails that make the setting so unforgettable.

There are moments of tranquility and lyricism (the lovely episode during the second half of “Johnston Canyon,” for example) as well as ones that evoke the exhilaration that comes from hiking the park's trails and breathing its replenishing mountain air. The cumulative impact of the work is transformative in the way it enables the listener to vicariously partake of the wonder and reverence Horvat felt as he made his way through the trails. For those who like a deeper dive, the composer wrote commentaries to accompany the parts, even noting the exact date when each hike occurred. While the work holds up perfectly well when listened to without that background, the texts do enhance appreciation for Horvat's attempt to translate personal experience into music.

“Sulphur Mountain” offers a dramatic portal into the work, with repeating patterns suggesting ascent and the considerable physical exertion required for the hiker to reach the summit. Hiking movements are also intimated by the heavy marching figures coursing through “Sundance Canyon,” as are the breathtaking vistas viewable once the top of the canyon's achieved. While momentum is still an essential component of “In Town,” the music, gentle and pretty, feels more relaxed in evoking a stress-free stroll through the area. The tone changes dramatically as a steep, one-step-at-a-time climb up “Sacred Buffalo Guardian Mountain” is undertaken, the hike strenuous and ache-inducing and the music sombre and heavy. Rippling patterns imbue “Johnston Canyon” with a rather Glass-like quality, though Horvat wasn't out to imitate the American composer but instead musically visualize the rise-and-fall of the canyon's white water. “Bow River” unfurls with patient, majestic sweep, while “Moraine Lake" sparkles like a soul-replenishing spring morning. Concluding the work on a triumphant and exultant note is “Lake Louise,” an epic, eleven-minute travelogue inspired by the most ambitious hiking excursion undertaken by the composer.

Any composer working today would be thrilled to have Chow as the interpreter, and Horvat, needless to say, is a most lucky beneficiary; it also doesn't hurt that she has her own connection to the locale, as she grew up in Vancouver and spent much time in Banff. Her engaged performance illuminates his material and captures its many emotional shadings with nuance and technical finesse. Certainly a better rendering of the work would be hard to imagine.

October 2025