Ahead of a double LP release scheduled for 2024, Samuel Reinhard shares two new chamber pieces, written for piano and strings and recorded in a former church in Copenhagen. The two works unfold slowly, the possibility of stillness lapping at the edges of each gently rendered note. “Moments of silence are okay,” the score reassures its performers. “They are welcome.”
 
Reinhard’s experiments of late have brought to the fore the environmental and digital textures that arise when various instruments are recorded and collaged. The unmanipulated recordings that make up Two Pianos and String Trio offer a variation on that perspective from within a continuous, even narrative performance. Aching and affecting as the melodic progressions that make up Two Pianos and String Trio can be, Reinhard’s generosity as a composer lies most of all in his treatment of instrumental silences as openings for environmental presence. The church in which these works were recorded is porous to the outside world, and this music is too. As a sustained piano note fades, it makes space for sonic interjections beyond Reinhard’s jurisdiction. Is that the wind, some birds, a plane overhead? These presences tend to mingle with the listener’s own environs, such that each listening acquires its own textures, its own specificity, cobbling together the immediate and distant into a layered world of small aural possibilities.