A Temperament for Angels (written in 1989 and fully revised for this recording in 2003) combines equal measures of beauty and grit in a powerful, kaleidoscopic, elusively shaped textural music that is compelling from its first quiet violin note (to its full sixteen voices of strings and electronic/sampled sounds and percussion) to its final shimmer of decaying cymbals. Often dark and moody, this music speaks in broad, chromatic harmonies and light, nearly detached single pitches, shuttling almost mobile-like between these extremes with a natural grace and sense of inevitability.
Reviewing a live performance: "A Temperament for Angels demonstrated … a complex system … producing dense, slowly changing sounds . . . atmospherically gloomy and harmonically quite subtle." —Keith Potter, Musical Times (London)
This recording features two of Los Angeles’s most noted new-music specialists and members of the celebrated chamber group The California EAR Unit: violinist Robin Lorentz and cellist Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick , each tracked multiple times. |