Kate Moore: Dances and Canons

The hypnotic album Dances and Canons is the debut ECM recording of both Australian composer Kate Moore and Dutch pianist Saskia Langhoorn.

Moore was born in England in 1979 and lives now in the Netherlands (where she studied with Louis Andriessen, among others). However, it is Australia, where she grew up, which has left the strongest impression on her creative imagination, its teeming natural soundscapes transmuted in her music of swirling pulse patterns and shifting, layered planes of sound. In pianist Saskia Lankhoorn (also born 1979), Moore has a dedicated and resourceful interpreter. "It's impossible to listen to this music," writes George Miller in the liner note, "and not wonder about the enormous technical demands it makes of the performer."

Lankhoorn, no stranger to demanding music, made her first broadcast performance on Dutch radio at the age of 16, playing Schoenberg; she met Moore in 2003 when both were at the Royal Conservatorium in The Hague. When Lankhoorn co-founded the new music group Ensemble Klang, Moore was one of the first composers she programmed. Since then they have worked together on numerous occasions and in contexts including concerts, dance, theatre, film and installations.

The seven pieces on this album - for solo piano, two pianos, and multiple pianos - span over a decade of Moore's development as a composer, from Stories for Ocean Shells, written in 2000, to the 16-minute Canon, for four pianos, which was completed shortly before the recording session produced by Manfred Eicher in Lugano's Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera.

Personnel: Saskia Lankhoorn (piano)