VA - Lachlan Skipworth: Altiora Peto (2024) [Hi-Res]

Australian composer Lachlan Skipworth has been hailed by The Australian as possessing a ‘rare gift as a melodist’ and by Limelight as expressing ‘both exquisite delicacy and tremendous power’. His newest album, Altiora Peto, explores the expansive, with two concertos, a bass recorder rumination and the overwhelming force of a choral mass.

Everything about the album is steeped in colour, each instrument the essential and artful narrator of melodic immediacy and rhythmic nuance. It opens with a trumpet concerto, Altiora Peto: music of bright optimism featuring the fine-tuned agility of trumpet virtuoso David Elton. Virtuosity here is an expression of playful delight, sewn into the very foundations of the music. ‘Altiora Peto’ is the Latin for ‘I seek higher things’, and this is truly music that reaches up towards hope, with confidence and joy, the dazzling burnish of the trumpet’s tone soaring over the dancing rhythms of the orchestra.