A Review By Peter Merchant
More than a century ago, an American musicologist gave a number of reasons for honouring above all else the violin and its family: "No other instruments require so much patient and unremitting toil in their mastery....and none are so well adapted for the expression of all shades of musical feeling or so nearly resemble the human voice with all its possibilities of tone-coloring". Those reasons are now powerfully reinforced by a superb CD of instrumental music newly released by that master of the mute, Peter Knight. Beneath its soberly two-toned inlay card, on which Knight's own line drawings are themselves a revelation, The Gemini Cadenza (PKCD001) opens a dazzling kaleidoscope of colours.
As with the artwork, so with the contents, Knight has done it all himself - the keyboards as well, which he blends wonderfully with the touching and thrilling sounds that he draws from his strings. The playing shows all of the sensitivity and imagination familiar from Knight's work with Steeleye Span or from his previous solo recording, An Ancient Cause (1991). It achieves plateaus of restraint and repose which become the launching-pads for moments of great excitement and intensity.
The title track is followed by three other items which complement it so perfectly that the whole CD coheres like a splendid double sonata for piano and violin. The other three titles all dwell on the nature of time: its divisions, disappearances, returns. It is as if Knight, though a musician completely devoid of pretence or pretension, were translating into his own idiom the roundedness and deep reflectiveness of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. Here too are four precisely proportioned pieces which move to the music of time and end, beautifully, with a reaching of stillness.