WHOLE HEART | VAN MAGAZINE FEATURE
The Textural and the Tactile
September 22, 2022
Moving further down the strings register is a catalog of composers whose works and lives are currently intersecting. In the liner notes for “Whole Heart,” Claire Bryant notes that many of the works commissioned and recorded for this album came about because of longstanding friendships with the composers, some going back to childhood. The result is indeed whole-hearted, with pieces tailor-made to Bryant’s strengths as a cellist but with legs to become wider gems of solo and duo repertoire. About two thirds of the way through Caroline Shaw’s “Limestone & Felt” (a duet for Bryant and violist Nadia Sirota), Sirota begins to play a perfect fifth in a pattern that soon accelerates, drawing in every microtone between those two notes in the process. The line multiplies and dissolves, an electronic loop delivered in analogue in a moment where the bright texture of limestone meets the static of felt. It’s 30 seconds that I want to play on repeat for an hour.
The textural and tactile recur as themes both explicit and implicit throughout “Whole Heart,” which seems fitting as the album, as well as two of its works, came about during the early days of the pandemic. The opening track, Andrea Casarrubios’s “Seven,” takes its name from the New York ritual of paying homage to first responders and frontline workers every evening with a cacophonous deluge of cheers and pot-clangs every evening at 7 p.m. The first movement opens slowly, lethargically; a person’s body disconnected from the world around them through the haze of isolation. Bryant’s increasingly-urgent cello lines begin to break up the monotony, delivering the same theme with new variations, movement, and life as the evening hour approaches and the communal act of noise comes together once again.