Release Date: 30 May 2025
Unmeasured is the product of a collaboration between composer Christopher Fox and pianist Kate Ledger that started in 2020. It is a showcase of Ledger's skill in articulating a musical moment, and embracing a embodied sense of time, with each work calling on her to shape the performance of notes, chords, and phrases by finding a place for this material within a specific moment. As Ledger notes: "This music permitted me to sink into the detail of now."
Figures of Light throws the listener into a hypnotic world of swirling resonances. A series of broken chords is sounded, ricocheting and reverberating in a suspended state within the body of the piano, until they almost disappear, only for the next to begin. For Fox, these figures are "constellations, or moving bodies that catch the light in bright sunshine, or clouds flying across a moonlit sky." Ledger adeptly navigates Fox's fragmented sonorities to create a performance of delicate beauty.
Es war einmal is based on excerpts of twenty-one stories from the first collection of German folk tales made by the Brothers Grimm in 1810. Here, Ledger is cast in the role of storyteller, with the rhythm of her performance dictated by her own internal reading of each text. "My playing is influenced by the shapes the notes create," writes Ledger, "by the punctuation and patter of the story, by the meaning of the text. Some pitch shapes invoke energies that become part of my performance: meandering, creeping up the keys, rolling around the top of a shape, descending to the bottom of the keyboard." The result is a contrasting series of short movements, each charged with their own sense of pace and evolution, evoking the extraordinary narrative dramas of the original stories.
senza misura is a sustained meditation on harmony's inescapable relationship to duration. The piece consists of twenty-seven sections that may be played in any order, with the duration of musical events within each section either 'longer' or 'more emphasised' than others - definitions that are left to the performer to determine. As such, Ledger has a great deal of freedom to interpret the score as she performs it, weighting each new sonority in response to what has come before. What emerges is bright and jubilant, dark and solemn, warm and nostalgic... with each mood (and others) arising and diminishing spontaneously, projecting a vast sonic landscape as the record concludes.
Kate Ledger Piano
RECORDING CREDITS
Recorded by Alex Harker at the Rymer Auditorium, York on 29–30 March 2024
Produced by Christopher Fox
Mixed by Alex Harker
Mastered by Jobina Tinnemans
Album artwork: Kai Pilger
Design: Mike Spikin
Project management: Alex Harker and Sam Gillies, CeReNeM for Huddersfield
Contemporary Records (HCR) in collaboration with NMC Recordings
Catalogue number: HCR36
