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There have been a great number of instrumental albums featuring piano and guitar, but none feel as heartfelt and well-executed as Where There Is Light (42'44"). The duo of electric guitarist Carl Weingarten and pianist Catherine Marie Charlton present the world with music meant to fill the air with more than mere sonic perfume. While lesser musicians tend to oversimplify their subject, Where There Is Light provides eight open, thoughtful, honest, wandering explorations of harmony and melody - rendered ever so fragile by metal strings and wooden keys. The drama and shifts in tone are firmly in the control of the musicians. Listening to this album, as each track opens, breathes and develops, the listener will feel as though they are being confided in by Weingarten and Charlton - with some intimacy meant just for us. Their stirring rhapsody of notes, and pauses, sustaining tones, and slow snaking leads, tells, better than any string of words, of blue feelings and emotional states. Weingarten plucks, holds, strums and loops his electrical timbres in perfect placement around Charlton's elegant piano touches, dabs and strokes. While the clean, clear sounds of the grand resound into reverberant space, subtly driven swells emerge to augment the expression of the passage - yet just as easily, these emanations will draw us away from the recognizable, and into brief dark ideas. At times forceful and dynamic, somehow Where There Is Light never descends into exaggeration. Each beautiful composition feels as though it is an extension of some aspect of the musician's inner life, meant for us to examine and feel their mood, and to perhaps better understand our own. Sometimes, the most powerful works are those sent to us in a whisper.
- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 30 March 2017 |
