Altiora Peto
Lachlan Skipworth
ABCL01014D
ABC
Altiora Peto is out now in Australia on ABC Classic and all streaming platforms.
Australian composer Lachlan Skipworth has been hailed by The Australian as possessing a ‘rare gift as a melodist’ and by Limelight as expressing ‘both exquisite delicacy and tremendous power’. His newest album, Altiora Peto, explores the expansive, with two concertos, a bass recorder rumination and the overwhelming force of a choral mass. Everything about the album is steeped in colour, each instrument the essential and artful narrator of melodic immediacy and rhythmic nuance. It opens with a trumpet concerto, Altiora Peto: music of bright optimism featuring the fine-tuned agility of trumpet virtuoso David
Elton. Virtuosity here is an expression of playful delight, sewn into the very foundations of the music.
‘Altiora Peto’ is the Latin for ‘I seek higher things’, and this is truly music that reaches up towards
hope, with confidence and joy, the dazzling burnish of the trumpet’s tone soaring over the dancing rhythms of the orchestra. Cavern, for bass recorder and string quartet, is a much more intimate soundscape in which breath becomes sound and sound becomes breath. The soft murmurings of Genevieve Lacey’s bass recorder – a rare, unexpected and utterly magical solo instrument – enclose us in a gentle world of mystery and shadows. Worlds of the archaic and the contemporary meet in Skipworth’s Mass for Easter Day for choir, brass, organ and timpani.
From the opening fanfare to the triumphant Amen over rolling timpani, this is a glorious celebration of sacred music, perfect for the most joyous day of the church’s year. The album finishes with Skipworth’s luminous Flute Concerto, a sublime blend of quicksilver solo virtuosity and radiant orchestral colour. Richly lyrical melodies weave through complex rhythms and harmonies and subtle shifts in light and shade. Captured live in concert, this recording showcases the near-superhuman technical skill and poetic artistry of flautist Andrew Nicholson.