This album’s cover is a perfect reflection of how the music it contains is woven—delicate, fragile, sometimes shy and innocent; like something from another world. Upon first listen the question arises – what kind of music is it? Classical or jazz? Is it pure improvisation, or written music? Gradually it becomes clear that it isn’t classical music à la Chopin or Debussy, nor that it is jazz; and certainly not a complicated, lengthy improvisation à la Keith Jarrett. To this end, the message from each selection on this album is simply much too friendly, too conciliatory, too innocent. And Jarrett isn’t really all that friendly. Rather nasty, especially to his audience. No, this is simply unexcited, but always melodious music, which in a sense develops out of itself with a stunning naturalness, and without appearing to be improvised. In fact, this piano music reflects the dream experience of an apparently unusual 26 year-old who discovered his ability to create music of a different kind in early childhood, for himself alone. This ability developed over many years and only revealed his environment when it became clear how it would eventually manifest itself. Outwardly, the young piano composer quietly created the impression of a teachable piano student, who quite naturally began studying music at the end of his school days at the university. Shortly before concluding his studies, he realized that a regular career as a classical pianist who interprets the works of others would run counter to his talent, and inevitably twist his personality.
He decided to leave the university without graduating, then plunged full-time for several years into the role of a chef on the north coast of Scotland, before he finally swapped his wooden spoons for the more delicate tools of a composer in 2010. With this album, ‘Sketches of Light’, Alexander Chapman celebrates his official coming out as an interpretive composer of his own works.
A beautiful, heartwarming life story. Were it not for the touching piano music on this album that speaks for itself, which credibly conveys the voracity of this life story in all its innocence to the listener, you might think this was the creation of the Decca marketing department, whose job is to generate sales by any means.
We listened to this 96 kHz 24-bit FLAC download in an acoustically optimized listening room, through Revel Gem2/B15a loudspeakers, driven by a custommade PWM digital amplifier; with its SPDIF input connected directly to a dedicated audio computer for the downloaded data.
Spectrogram
Sampling rate 96 kHz: verified
Bit depth 24 bit: okay
Commentary:
Since the piano’s overtones here are limited to below 20 kHz, this genuine 96 kHz recording seems almost like engineering overkill.