THE BOSTON GLOBE: With concerts canceled, new albums offer a bridge to the artists we love
THE BOSTON GLOBE: With concerts canceled, new albums offer a bridge to the artists we love
BY DAVID WEININGER
“Presumably without knowing it in advance, Robert Honstein has crafted the perfect music for our quarantine moment. How many of us have spent the spring and summer holed up at home, growing ever more impatient with our confinement? If you need a cure for the feeling of being trapped in your domicile, here is “Soul House,” an ingenious and unequivocally gorgeous love letter by Honstein, a former Boston composer, to his childhood home in New Jersey. Each of the piece’s nine movements conjures a particular part of the house, and while there’s an audible sense of nostalgia, “Soul House” is no exercise in simple sentimentality. Instead, Honstein uses long-breathed melodies, refined textures, and irrepressible energy to create mini-tone poems that evoke wistful memories (“Bay Window”) or a carefree childhood (“Backyard”). The openness of Honstein’s musical language makes the episodes of biting dissonance all the more striking. The players in Hub New Music render all of it with effervescence and transparency. Listen, and see if you can’t rediscover the magic of your own dwelling.”