Arditti Quartet, Iridium Quartet, Camilla Hoitenga - Burned into the Orange: Music of Peter Gilbert (2021)

Composer Peter Gilbert releases his second full length album on New Focus, Burned Into the Orange, a follow up to his 2008 release The Bold Arch of Undreamt Bridges. Featuring performances by the Arditti Quartet, Camilla Hoitenga, Magdalena Meitzner, Jeremias Schwarzer, Richard White, Michael Veit, Emanuele Arciuli, and the Iridium Quartet, Gilbert's music explores rich, sensual ensemble textures that highlight the uniqueness of individual timbres and the ephemerality of the crystalline moments that contain them.

Composer Peter Gilbert fills Burned Into the Orange with a musical energy that sometimes patiently envelopes its listeners in phosphorescent harmonies and at other times pulls them through an intense timbral tunnel. Gilbert writes: “My music often aspires to create a sonic architecture that helps us lose our sense of time completely and allows us to partake in a kind of more direct aural experience in search of passageways to transcendence.”

The album opens with the voice opens wide to forget that which you are singing, a bracing sting from the Arditti Quartet as violin double-stops are pulling themselves apart while a stratospheric chorale gleams above. But the cutting edge of this sonic beam soon relaxes into a series of resonant clouds: vibrating, glistening, then subsiding into the next hovering tone-formation. The title comes from Gilbert’s adaptation of one of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus which suggests that in forgetting what we know of song (forgetting we are even singing) we are opened to becoming one with music—a breath of the “Everything”. In this light, the drawn-out processes of sound sculpting (in which the Arditti Quartet’s renowned virtuosity is on display as they bring high relief to the microscopic details of vibrato and intonation) seems to incarnate this “different breath”, this essence of being.

Upon the Awakening features closely recorded piano in what feels like a pre-echo of the album’s final piece. After the Arditti Quartet’s long, burrowing crescendos, this piece is a welcome exhalation. The cathartic ringing of the chords quickly takes on a kind of post-reality shimmering that suffuses the calming chorale in luminescence.

If the voice opens wide... manifests the sound of sound as vibration and Upon the Awakening manifests it as the hazy glow of reverberation, then Burned Into the Orange turns the sound of sound into gentle pulsation. The magic of the Iridium Quartet’s performance is that the saxophones seem to bend and melt into one another as the pulses’ tempos push and pull and overlap into an undulating series of bending layers and gently beating multiphonics.