Shades of Silence (2012)

'Shades of Silence' for a quartet of baroque instruments is a genuine delicacy.

Thorvaldsdottir… writes with cool calm and flashes of geothermic fire. [Shades of Silence’s] dramatic expanses reflect stillness and consonance, its sustained tones interrupted by mallets on piano strings evoking ice rumbles and col legno and ponticello effects echoing Feldman’s insect scratches.

Her 'Shades of Silence' begins with droning strings and with barely audible sounds produced by plucking, brushing, and rubbing the strings of a harpsichord. Eventually, chiming figures emerge from the cloud of timbre. You seem to be present at the birth of music itself.

The wonderful instrumental colors of Anna Thorvaldsdóttir’s 'Shades of Silence' repay repeated listening.

Perhaps the most captivating music on 'Clockworking' comes courtesy of Anna Thorvaldsdottir, recently named the New York Philharmonic Kravis Emerging Composer. In her 'Shades of Silence', tactile effects — a harpsichordist drags a mallet across her instrument’s strings, a cellist sustains gritty glissandos — swirl into an aura of mystery.

Anna Thorvaldsdottir's 'Shades of Silence' is a rapturous, starkly beautiful concatenation of drones, muted thwacks, and simulated inhalations and exhalations.