For those unaware, The Bozzini Quartet presents a new release featuring Vancouver-based Owen Underhill, a composer who has achieved considerable acclaim, including the Western Canadian Music Award for Outstanding Classical Composition and a Juno nomination.

The album Owen Underhill: Songs and Quartets, his third portrait disc and second collaboration with the Bozzini Quartet, vividly captures Underhill’s unusual musical personality. His work frequently and audibly demonstrates a deep respect for and undeniable knowledge of the concert music tradition, but it is by no means traditional.

The works on this recording are superficially accessible and even somewhat familiar, but as soon as listeners look beneath the surface, a disorienting quality emerges.

Taking his Trombone Quintet as a starting point, he discussed with the quartet the possibility of once again enlisting trombonist Jeremy Berkman for these works, this time on the sackbut. It was then, Underhill tells us in the introductory notes, quite natural to move on to the seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry of Henry Vaughan and Sir Walter Raleigh, sung by the countertenor Daniel Cabena.

1. The Retreat [13:48]
2. Northern Line — Angel Station (String Quartet No. 2), 1: Adagio calmato [4:16]
3. Northern Line — Angel Station (String Quartet No. 2), 2: Ritmico, Con spirito [4:40]
4. Northern Line — Angel Station (String Quartet No. 2), 3: Adagio calmato, Animato Sunlight on Mountain Peak [6:39]
5. Northern Line — Angel Station (String Quartet No. 2), 4: Quodlibet Sunlight on Mountain Peak [2:38]
6. What is our Life? [10:56]
7. String Quartet No. 5 — Land and Water, 1: Dead Tree over Spring Creek [4:37]
8. String Quartet No. 5 — Land and Water, 2: Holy Isle [3:50]
9. String Quartet No. 5 — Land and Water, 3: Raccoon on Wintry Beach [5:00]
10. String Quartet No. 5 — Land and Water, 4: Sunlight on Mountain Peak [4:10]

On what is a simply stunning work of musical art, the new album opens on the chilling, ethereally ornate The Retreat and then brings us the breathtaking quartet that makes up Northern Line — Angel Station (String Quartet No. 2); the first a stirring Adagio calmato, then comes the more furtively entrancing early on, latterly prowling Ritmico, Con spirito, the sedately paced Adagio calmato, Animato, culminating on the grand, playful dancefloor twirls of Quodlibet.

Along next is the organically-imbibed, hauntingly elegant masterpiece What is our Life? and that is in turn backed by the quartet String Quartet No. 5 — Land and Water; which begins with the at first and last quiet, but centered with a skittish nature Dead Tree over Spring Creek, before the resplendent Holy Isle, the searingly sumptuous Raccoon on Wintry Beach then giving way to the final work in the piece, an effortless demeanor shown within the gently strident fare of Sunlight on Mountain Peak.

Official Purchase Link

www.quatuorbozzini.ca