Anna Höstman | Cheryl Duvall, piano: Harbour
Redshift Records

That the names of composer and performer are emphasized equally on the cover of Harbour is telling: each is critical to the outcome, pianist Cheryl Duvall for giving corporeal form to Anna Höstman's material, the Victoria-based composer for providing the Toronto musician with material to bring into being. The solo piano recording, the debut full-length of both, flatters each in its own way, documenting as it does their respective gifts as creators.

Recorded, produced, and mastered by David Jaeger at the Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto, the nearly eighty-minute release offers an in-depth account of Höstman's composing style and Duvall's playing. The two are an ideal match. The latter, a powerful advocate for music by living composers, recently commissioned seven new works from Canadians, Höstman among them. In her work (and in her own words), the award-winning composer, currently teaching at the University of Victoria, intrepidly seeks “out tactile encounters with the world while also extending into history, memory, and landscape.”

Her material is personal without being hermetic, intimate yet expansive. Consonance and dissonance go hand-in-hand, entwined harmoniously within the meticulously considered fabric of the compositional design. The six works on Harbour—the longest ones especially—play less like formally notated compositions than adventurous journeys methodically undertaken through natural landscapes (in the booklet's liner notes, she describes her pieces as “a kind of continual walking” and “undirected, though not aimless”). Be forewarned: they're not songs featuring simple melodies and repetitive structures; four push past the twelve-minute mark, with the title piece an epic twenty-six-minute exploration.

Routes are pursued that feel like free associations articulated by Duvall, at such moments the divide separating composer and performer blurred. If one word best describes her playing on the release, it's lucid, the pianist demonstrating at every moment a clear, intuitive grasp of Höstman's music. Duvall's nuanced renderings are marked throughout by fluidity and sensitivity of touch.

Written after Höstman moved to Toronto (she returned to Canada's West Coast in 2018), the album's earliest work, the ponderous meditation darkness… pines… (2010), was inspired by evening walks where she regularly encountered a graveyard, enclosed by a brick wall, stretching for blocks on end. Birthed a year later, allemande is characteristically explorative, its development suggestive of the meandering nature of consciousness and its capacity for drift. At fifteen minutes, the piece affords ample opportunity for reflection, and Duvall uses the extended time to her advantage. Despite the physical fact of temporal advance, the music achieves a suspended, atemporal quality during its most floating passages.

At four minutes, late winter (2019) plays like a microcosm of Höstman's universe, with Duvall surgically examining a motive from multiple angles. Many works, yellow bird (2019) among them, show the composer reflecting a minimalistic sensibility and preference for clarity in using spidery, single-note lines and resisting any impulse to overwhelm the listener with excessive density. Things turn entrancing for the album-closing adagio (2019), what with its repeating figures and gently lilting rhythms.

As would be expected, 2015's harbour is the album's central work, its oceanic expanse allowing it to span multitudes of dynamics and moods. Impressionistic cascades resonate alongside clusters of block chords and sparse single-line phrases collide with angular clusterings over the course of its run, Duvall an attentive midwife to the composer's imaginings. The journey's so far-reaching, the title begins to seem a misnomer, suggesting as it does a ship moored rather than one exploring freely far from shore.

June 2020