Gregg Smith Singers; Cleveland Chamber Symphony; Trio Bariano
Edwin London's Auricles Apertures Ventricles, is tonal and accessible contemporary classical music that resists pandering to its audience. The three extended works on the disc are refined, elegantly crafted pieces, composed in sequence between 1983 and 1985. They reveal a musical sensibility closely attuned to the coloristic and expressive possibilities of pitch and timbre. London incorporates lyricism and drama into these compositions, and not without a sense of humor.
The composer uses Shakespeare's sonnet No. 30, "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought...," as a point of departure for Sonnet Haiku (1983), a fragmented reordering of that text scored for solo soprano, alto flute, and harpsichord. The Hebrew Bible provides analects for sixteen solo singers in Auricles Apertures Ventricles (1984). In Heinrich's Shoes (1985) is a wordless orchestral fantasy closely bound to the discursive progress of New Testament extracts from the Passion According to Saint John.
