Cheryl Duvall: The Plains

Canadian composer Linda Catlin Smith was born in New York City in 1957. She began her composition studies in high school in New York and continued music study at SUNY Stony Brook. In 1977 she went to Canada to study composition and theory at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. In 1981 she moved to Toronto. In 1986 she was invited by Morton Feldman to attend his lectures at SUNY Buffalo, NY, as a guest. Her compositions have been commisioned, performed and recorded by a wide range of musicians across the world and she has won awards such as a Jules Leger prize in 2005 for her work Garland. In February 2017, she was selected as one of eight composers selected to be in Another Timbre's Canadian Composers Series and raise the profile of Canadian composers.

As she is considerably younger than Catlin Smith, pianist Cheryl Duvall's first solo album was not released until early in 2020. Entitled Harbour (Redshift Music), it shed light on the piano music of Anna Höstman, and received end-of-year praise in the Wire, a JUNO nomination and other accolades (read review). In the early 2000s during her undergraduate degree, Duvall had discovered a fondness for contemporary music; she decided to decided to take a contemporary course, and Catlin Smith was her teacher. Some years later, when Duvall and violinist Ilana Waniuk formed Thin Edge New Music Collective, they played some of Catlin Smith's music on their very first concert, and later commisioned Catlin Smith's 26-minute "Dark Flower," which was released on the album Dark Flower (Redshift Music, 2023).

During recording of Catlin Smith's 2023 composition "The Plains," written for Duvall, the pianist mentioned to the composer that she dreamt of recording the composer's complete solo piano works, which date from 1989 to 2023. Finding herself with extra studio time after recording the new work, Duvall recorded several other Catlin Smith works. Ultimately, The Plains would stand as the first of a four-volume set chronicling Catlin Smith's solo piano compositions. At 67' 52," "The Plains" is Catlin Smith's longest piano work to date, only being beaten for duration by her opera "Facing South" (2001) and her solo violin composition "Dandelion" (2023). It is too early to judge the full four-volume The Complete Piano Solos (1969—2023) but this first volume eloquently demonstrates that Catlin Smith and Duvall understand each other ideally and are as good a combination as we are like to hear. More, please, as soon as possible...

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