“2009 : Ten Exceptional Recordings”

Simple Lines of Enquiry

“2009 : Ten Exceptional Recordings”
Alex Ross, The New Yorker magazine

“The test of a great recording is whether you find yourself temporarily unable to live without it. For certain overlapping periods this year, I couldn’t stop listening to…Ann Southam’s immense, mysterious piano piece Simple Lines of Enquiry.” – Alex Ross, The New Yorker

Simple Lines of Enquiry by Ann Southam performed by Eve Egoyan on Centrediscs (a world première recording of a one-hour long Canadian composition performed by a Canadian pianist on a Canadian label funded by the Canada Council for the Arts) has been selected as one of this year’s top ten classical recordings by one of the world’s most renowned classical music reviewers, Alex Ross (music critic of The New Yorker since 1996 and author of “The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century” which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and the Royal Philharmonic Society Creative Communication Award; appeared on the New York Times’s list of the ten best books of year; and was a finalist for the Pulitzer and the Samuel Johnson prizes).

“I can’t say enough about the quiet, simple beauty of Canadian composer Ann Southam’s new, one-hour piano suite Simple Lines of Enquiry, or about its sparkling interpreter, Toronto pianist Eve Egoyan. Just released on the Centrediscs label, piece and pianist create a profound experience that transcends any and all musical genres.” – John Terauds, The Toronto Star

“On his New Yorker blog, the magazine’s music critic Alex Ross singles out ‘Ten Exceptional Recordings’ of 2009. One, sharing the hit parade of the most prominent U.S. writer on classical music with recordings of Mozart, Schubert and Ravel, is Canadian…clearly it has a powerful hold on the attention of at least some people who hear it, and more should hear it. Southam’s work, already one of the most prominent Canadian compositions of the past 30 years because it has caught the fancy of one prominent critic, sounds as though it was written as a response to Feldman’s question: “Do we have anything in music for example that really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away?” If you have an ear for quiet adventure I cannot recommend Southam’s piece highly enough.” – Paul Wells, Macleans.ca