Linda Catlin Smith
Chroma
1991 release ** This disc features a colourful array of contemporary works by international and Canadian composers. From the reflective and lyrical Little Venice to the dazzling, virtuosic percussion piece She Who Sleeps with a Small Blanket, Toronto’s premier contemporary chamber ensemble, Arraymusic, provides the listener with a five course meal for the ears. Linda C. Smith Little Venice, Steve Reich New York Counterpoint, José Evangelista Merapi, Rodney Sharman Dark Glasses, Kevin Volans She …
Flowers of Emptiness
"Maybe I'm like a still life painter," Linda Catlin Smith says, "looking at the same objects again and again over the years." Yet this survey of chamber works—spanning 1986 to 2024—shows a composer whose perspectives continually shift, finding something fresh in each iteration. Hers is "a compositional voice that never shouts, never draws undue attention to itself, yet creates music of compelling beauty." The Guardian awarded five stars, placing it #3 in their Top Classical Releases of 2024.
Apa…
Wanderer
Wanderer assembles eight sophisticated chamber pieces from Linda Catlin Smith, rendered by the ever-inventive Apartment House ensemble. Across this collection, Smith’s distinct voice emerges through piano, strings, winds, percussion, and brass, revealing an uncompressed sense of time and patience. Philip Thomas’s solo piano work offers gentle resonance and poised silence, while duos and quintets - performed with Mark Knoop, Mira Benjamin, Anton Lukoszevieze, Heather Roche, and others - bring nua…
Ballad
In the catalog of contemporary composition, Linda Catlin Smith occupies a luminous yet quiet space. Her music resists momentum in favor of presence, exploring the beauty of slowness and the porous borders between harmony and noise. Drawing on the lineage of Morton Feldman while affirming her own sensibility, she builds worlds where stillness and fragility become active forces. Each piece unfolds like a painting observed over time, the ear adjusting to small variations in tone and contour that ac…
Among the Tarnished Stars / Quatuor pour la fin du temps
UK ensemble Apartment House performs two landmark works for the same instrumentation of violin, cello, clarinet and piano: Olivier Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1941) and Toronto based composer Linda Catlin Smith's Among the Tarnished Stars (1998). Released by Another Timbre in August 2019, this recording takes a fresh modern approach to the Messiaen, drawing out its experimental character, while revealing the sense of drama and intricate gradations of sonority in Smith's rich and mys…
Drifter
Drifter marks the beginning of Another Timbre’s Canadian Composers Series, assembling ten pieces from Linda Catlin Smith dating from 1995 to 2015. The album is a crossroads of chamber color, poised restraint, and poetic clarity - performed by members of Apartment House and Montreal’s Quatuor Bozzini in a spirit of intimate collaboration. Smith’s writing privileges patient melody and delicate counterpoint, bridging tough compositional rigor with textures of shimmering mystery.
The double disc jou…
Dirt Road
Dirt Road stands as a milestone in Linda Catlin Smith's catalogue - a single work expanding over an hour, composed in 2005 and commissioned for dance. Performed by Mira Benjamin (violin) and Simon Limbrick (percussion), the piece moves through fifteen loosely connected movements, each open to interpretation and marked by Smith’s trademark transparency. The violin floats above sparse percussion gestures - wood, metal, vibraphone, and bowls - sometimes in suspended dialogue, sometimes drifting acr…