‘Maybe I’m like a still life painter,” says Linda Catlin Smith, “looking at the same objects again and again over the years.” But this survey of Catlin Smith’s chamber music so devotedly performed by the members of Apartment House – eight works composed between 1986 and 2024, ranging from a bass clarinet solo to string quartets – shows that while her preoccupations may have remained the same, the perspectives from which she views her musical “objects” are always shifting, always finding something fresh. Hers is a compositional voice that never shouts, never draws undue attention to itself, yet creates music of compelling beauty.
Flowers of Emptiness, the string trio that gives the disc its title is also the earliest piece here, Das Rosen-Innere, for cello and piano, the most recent, completed earlier this year. The use of repetition, of single notes or phrases, is common to both, as it is to the three string quartets that provide the spine to this collection – As You Pass a Reflective Surface, from 1991, the chorale-like Waterlily of 2008, and the larger-scale, remarkable String Quartet No.6 (2013) in which the purity of the vibrato-free string writing sometimes recalls Tudor polyphony. In its quiet intensity, Catlin Smith’s music is unlike any other.
