Metropolis Ensemble, Erik Hall, Sandbox Percussion - Canto Ostinato

Sometime in 2020 I listened to Canto Ostinato for the first time, and my enthrall- ment with the piece had begun. I was transfixed by its particular amalgam of harmony, repetition, and pacing. By the spring of 2023 I had constructed and released my own solo interpretation, and I assumed at that point my working relationship with the composition had run its course. But I underestimated its magnetism. The following year I was back in its grips, having been invited by Metropolis Ensemble’s Andrew Cyr to expand on the foundation I had laid with the piece. Soon I was in Brooklyn, on a newly-formed team of six with Cyr and the members of Sandbox Percussion, thrilled to be helping architect a brand new large-ensemble arrangement of Canto Ostinato for a summer solstice perfor- mance at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. We did so, our cohort growing to include the students of The New School’s Sandbox Percussion Summer Seminar, as well as composers David Leon, Ben Wallace, and Ledah Finck and the Bergamot Quartet. It was a day we will all remember—sweeping, dreamlike, and what felt like a quintessential culmination. But even then... the piece still beckoned, and it became imperatively clear that this new orchestration called for the embarkment on a studio album—a permanent document of our now-collective ardor. Refined over a year and recorded in New York, 2025, this performance recasts the piece anew in a towering framework of mallet percussion, woodwinds, strings, and piano. It is our truest attempt at conveying Canto’s beauty and magnitude in all its kaleidoscopic harmony, dynamism, tension, and release. I stand once again in awe of Simeon ten Holt’s monumental creation, and to be a thread among this particular sonic fabric is one of the great pleasures of my musical life. I don’t assume we might be so fortunate again... but who knows..
- Erik Hall

Tracklist: