Bozzini Quartet, JunctQín Keyboard Collective: Bruton, Doell

The Strad Issue: November 2024

Description: A new label offers a highly compelling debut release

Musicians: Bozzini Quartet, junctQín Keyboard Collective

Works: Bruton: The Faerie Ribbon. Doell: to carry dust & breaks through the body

Catalogue number: COLLECTION QB CQB2433

The Montreal-based Bozzini Quartet has long been a persuasive new music advocate, and this first vinyl release on its own label amounts to a quiet, quirky celebration of its country’s music and musicians. It’s a collaboration with the Toronto-based junctQín keyboard collective (here, three players at a single piano keyboard), and showcases two thoroughly distinctive Canadian composers.

Rocky Mountains-based Rebecca Bruton mines folk-music sensibilities in her expansive The Faerie Ribbon, which unfolds like a series of brief vignettes observing similar material from contrasting perspectives. She conjures some uncannily beautiful sonorities using harmonies spread right across the piano’s range, plus an orchestral-style richness of double-stopped strings, and there’s a Reichian opulence to the piece’s closing sections, with reedy sustained string harmonies against chiming piano figures. The Bozzini plays with elegance and strong definition throughout, with singing, whistling and humming adding another magical dimension.

By contrast, Canadian composer Jason Doell explores a fascinating and very simple idea in his to carry dust & breaks through the body. An apparently unchanging electronic drone slides lower by a semitone across the course of his piece. The string players adjust their tuning to it as the work progresses, while the pianists, naturally, can’t. The result is a compelling contemplation of sameness and difference, of out-of-tune-ness and dissonance (where does one end and the other begin?), delivered with wit and insight through slow-moving, subtle gestures and not-quite repetitions. The Bozzini’s account is magisterial, often cool and detached, but bristling with engagement, and supple in its shaping of Doell’s sometimes enigmatic phrases. It’s a rewarding release, captured in close, warm sound.

DAVID KETTLE