Matthew McCright: Hanging By a Thread
Proper Canary

Matthew McCright's eighth solo album conveys the feel of an engrossing recital of contemporary piano music. Its eleven pieces are adventurous and innovative yet also accessible, each one marked by clarity, integrity, and imagination. The composers couldn't have asked for a better interpreter of their work, the Minneapolis-based McCright an experienced performer, accomplished recording artist, and, as a member of the piano faculty of Carleton College, educator. Hanging by a Thread is his first solo release since 2021's Endurance and follows three albums on Innova Records and separate sets of piano music by Gene Gutchë and Olivier Messiaen on Centaur Records and Albany Records, respectively. While McCright possesses a prodigious technical command, Hanging by a Thread calls upon his sensitive side in equal measure. Of course such a title automatically suggests a connection to the pandemic, and sure enough the recording sessions for the project, begun in 2019, were disrupted by its onset. He acknowledges that during the production process he was “grasping for a lifeline, nervous that it would never be finished,” but obviously the project eventually reached the finish line.

In some cases the album content mirrors the turbulence of that period, a prime example Dorothy Hindman's 2021 work, To Spill Oneself Away, which, in the pianist's words, “uses perpetual motion to achieve a remarkable feeling of being pulled in every direction, all at once." The piece is animated from the start by twinkling upper-register patterns that cycle obsessively whist minimal notes provide a stabilizing ground at the opposite end of the keyboard. Gradually the poles converge to form a mesmerizing tapestry of intertwining lines, their movements gracefully ebbing and flowing like towering ocean waves. Hindman's eleven-minute setting flows seamlessly into Alican Çamci's pensive miniature olgun bit meyvenin sesiyle—düserken (…with the sound of a ripe fruit—falling) before Andrea Mazzariello's five-part As Far As You Can Stretch a Web takes over, the album's single multi-movement piece. Here and in the composer's other album piece Your Hands, As They Are, Mazzariello reflects on childhood memories of his father's playing and considers his own relationship to the piano, including an eventual loss of playing ability. Consistent with such thematic terrain, the movements advance through multiple moods, from wistful (“Prelude”), dignified (“Grid”), and meditative (“Prelude, refracted”) to rapturous (“Tether (or Once you lose it it's lost)” and, finally, plaintive (“Preludes, folded”).

February 2023