Storytelling and making – craft and narrative, and the ways in which they are both enabled and complicated by the presence of music – lie at the heart of Matthew Kaner’s compositional world, as revealed on this debut album devoted to his work.
Extended solo works for basset clarinet and for cello are presented by stellar soloists Mark Simpson and Guy Johnson respectively. Violin-and-piano duo Benjamin Baker and Daniel Lebhardt, fresh from their triumphant Delphian debut 1942: Prokofiev, Colpand, Poulence, are joined by cellist Matthias Balzat in Kaner’s evocative and playful Piano Trio, while clarinettist Kate Romano leads the Goldfield Ensemble in a nocturnal diptych for clarinet quintet.
In her booklet note, Kate Romano draws attention to Kaner’s upbringing in a family of artisans and craftsmen, and there is a tangible sense of the well-made in each of these carefully put together works … [Searching for the Dimmest Stars brings] ethereal, sparse textures shot through with faint gleams… Kaner’s sense of descriptive narrative is exemplified by Mark Simpson’s delicate, swooping, wheeling and soaring rendition of ‘The Swift’… indeed, the performances throughout, by a clutch of some of Britain’s finest chamber players, are extraordinarily good. The Goldfield Ensemble and the Baker-Lebhardt-Balzat trio are first rate, and Baker and Lebhardt catch the patchwork tone pictures of the Highland Sceneswith equal acuity … Excellent sound in a dryish acoustic
Gramophone