Pause

Dublin composer Jonathan Nangle’s transcendent music for strings comes to life in these luminous recordings by Crash Ensemble, Ireland’s leading ensemble for adventurous new music. Pause is the debut album from a composer whose work draws on a carefully selected palette of ravishingly beautiful materials. This is music of serene focus; often fragile, always intricately woven. In Where distant city lights flicker on half-frozen ponds (2011), Nangle enhances a solo violin with electronic resonators which subtly colour the musical material like a heat shimmer. My heart stopped a thousand beats (2008) is a slow ritual for viola and cello, unhurriedly unfurling into a series of fragments.