★★★★☆
It’s not just the title – Sophie Hutchings’Wide Asleepis, from beginning to end, a paradox.
It’s somehow soft yet significant; gentle yet ginormous; an atom and the Earth. There is weight to the piece, tremendous weight, despite the fact that it requires surprisingly little of its audience. This is an album that is generous with its beauty, a record eager to impart its secrets to anyone willing to listen.
The key is Hutchings’ masterful tonal control. Though the album always teeters on the verge of what in the hands of others might become melodrama, Hutchings keeps a track like ‘Dream Gate’ from falling over itself, and the layers of instrumentation push the piece higher, rather than dragging it down. Every time the album seems ready to hyperventilate, Hutchings draws a deep lungful of air, and the calm peppered throughout is stark, and powerful.
Hutchings’ technical skill is self-evident, but the surprise is more that she manages to craft tunes that feel neither overtly show-offy nor dry and considered. Hutchings is not just a pianist: she is a profoundly talented composer, with the spiralling ‘Memory II’ perhaps the finest display of her skills.
More than anything, Wide Asleep is a rebuke to stillness. Ever expanding, it’s a Fibonacci sequence turned into sound, an escalating pattern with neither end nor limit. A supreme achievement.
Wide Asleep bySophie Hutchings is out now onPreservation.
