Stephen Chatman Chamber Music
Vancouver Visions

LAWREN S. HARRIS SUITE FOR PIANO QUINTET
VARLEY SUITE FOR SOLO VIOLIN
FIVE SONGS FOR SOPRANO AND PIANO
IN MEMORIAM HARRY ADASKIN (violin and piano)
BLACK AND WHITE FANTASY (piano)
VARIATIONS ON 'HOME ON THE RANGE' (string quartet)
WILD CAT (flute)
Borealis String Quartet, Andrew Dawes, violin, Jane Coop, Sara Davis Buechner, and Karen Lee-Morlang, pianists; Robyn Driedger-Klassen, soprano, Paolo Bortolussi, flute
Centrediscs CMCCD 11105 2005

Stephen Chatman (b.1950) is a prolific and very successful Vancouver based composer who has trodden the familiar 20C path from experimental and fairly wild student days to a sober middle age, "many of Chatman's pre-1980 works are complex, virtuosic and atonal. By the late 1970s, his music suggests a more complete musical expression, encompassing a broad range of musical traditions, eclecticism and post modern aesthetics: collage techniques, simplified musical language, tonality, modality, minimalism, traditional forms, popular music influences, counterpoint of styles, veiled references and theatrical elements".

I found the piano quintet and songs rather bland to my taste, but these will be enjoyed by a wider audience (Chapman was the first Canadian shortlisted for Britain's BBC Master Prize competition).

My personal preference is for the younger Chapman, his virtuosic BLACK AND WHITE FANTASY with its jagged wild figuration and alternating black and white key clusters, his extended feline techniqes to suggest his own wild Siamese cat, and the irreverent variations on Home on the Range upon a basis of Haydn's formal string quartet writing.

Well recorded and produced, as are all CentreDiscs' windows onto the diverse developments of Canada's music making.