Thomas Larcher Chamber Music
(ECM)
The text of Thomas Larcher’s song cycle My Illness is the Medicine I Need comes from a Benetton magazine article about psychiatric patients. The icy clarity of the soprano Andrea Lauren Brown’s tone is impressive and disturbing, especially in the high leaps and strange melismas that make enunciation difficult.
The accompaniment is partly “prepared”, the composer himself at the eerie padded keyboard. The terse, pithy, arresting directness of the music persists through the two string quartets Ixxu and Cold Farmer, which, played by the Rosamunde Quartet, are bracingly energetic, highly rhythmic even when slow and clearly the product of a feverishly inventive mind.
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RICK JONES