These three works for clarinet and string quartet by contemporary Canadian composers (Grella-Mozejko was born in Poland but lives in Canada) are lithe and supple compositions which have been flawlessly executed by the performers. … River to the Ocean… is a haunting and colorful journey with an organic formal process (even the jarringly bright major chords sound natural and justified, although surprising).

Le livre des mélancolies is a more tangled and twisted chamber piece than its predecessor. The string quartet is more actively engaged with the clarinet sound which makes the clarinet feel less like a soloist and more like another timbral possibility of the ensemble. Speaking of colors, they abound in this work (and the disc as a whole). Each of the three movements stays in a largely meditative emotional space, although each does so in its own sumptuous manner.

Slow Dances harnesses more direct energy than the previous two pieces. Especially in the second movement, A Sort of Tango, there is finally some aggression and power to jar me out of the haze created by the earlier pieces. Don’t get me wrong, I was in a blissful sort of absinthe haze. It was nice to be shaken out of it by a tango (of any sort).

Each of these three pieces is performed with great care, color, and musicality. Quatuor Bozzini makes easy work of the constantly shifting timbral demands in each piece and Jean-Guy Boivert matches the ensemble at every single point along the way.

… A third Quartetski member, Gordon Allen, followed with his new trio, All Up In There, featuring percussionist Michel F Côté and theremin player Frank Martel. Allen started with a very breathy, noisy sound, leaving lots of space in his line. Côté began with a towel draped over his kit, and even without it he retained a very dry sound, with small crisp cymbals. Martel successfully avoided the sci-fi connotations of the theremin, adding a unique colour to the set, manipulating it to truly engage with Allen. Côté had two condenser mics that he ran through two Pignose amps. When he used them as sticks to amplify his kit, he gave the drums a fuzzy, grungy sound that would not have been out of place on a Tom Waits record. At other times he pointed the mics at each other or at the amps, manipulating the pitch and volume of the feedback almost like a second theremin. In the more aggressive moments, Côté played a somewhat tribal rock beat while Allen elicited noise and feedback sounds out of his trumpet and Martel anchored everything with a deep, ominous theremin bassline. The physical gestures Côté and Martel used to improvise were nearly as important as the sound itself…