Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

I Thought I Saw Your Face has been a long time in the making, but its release now in 2020 seems appropriate. Given the heightened levels of anxiety worldwide related to political manipulations of truth, issues surrounding climate change, pandemic-induced panic, and powerful social revolts like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo against outdated intolerances, racism and abuse, this concept album resonates in that it possesses an undercurrent of emotionally-dark character, in parallel with a world struggling to find balance. This is because many of these pieces were originally conceived as a study into specific aspects of depression, with the richness and depth of the cello offering composers broad spectrums of perspective - from despair to intimacy, caressing love to direct aggression. Twenty years on, such pieces continue to express the gamut of emotional opinions to be found in today's world.

The commissioned works (tracks 2,3,4,7,8) date back many years, by composers now well-established on the Australian and international music scenes. Themes such as isolation, uncertainty, sensorial numbness, anger, melancholy, hysteria and more all featured in discussions and are expressed musically here. The album is expanded further with the addition of other existing Australian works, plus two from a Danish composer - Simon Christensen - with whom I have worked over many years whilst living in Denmark, as well as a composition by me dedicated to my former teacher Janos Starker upon his passing.

I Thought I Saw Your Face is not a light album. It is intended to make the listener question whether we truly understand those whom we meet or know, particularly in a world of obsessive, social-media-driven self adulation, which often masks another deeper reality. The album does however, through some of the lighter works, offer some glimmers of hope - that guiding undefined force which pulls us back from the brink when we least expect.