Welcome to the VORTEX! This album is a sonic journey that draws you in through charm and foolery, spinning and whirling you toward the playful, vibrant, haunting, and contemplative. I hope you take the opportunity to start at the very beginning of the album and let me lead you to and through the heart of the VORTEX. Thank you for joining me on this adventure of expression with what I feel have been under-used instruments as solo voices in chamber music: the oboe and English horn. The works featured on this album showcase the oboe and English horn as capable of marking and enchanting the soul of both the listener and performer.

We begin with fragments of themes from Italian Baroque music, woven into Stravinsky’s Neo-classical score for the ballet Pulcinella. The ballet tells a sweet and romantic tale of love punctuated by the antics of the bumbling title character, and it is this mischievous spirit that Stravinsky evokes in his musical rendering. Ari wrote the oboe part of this transcription and collaborated with bassoonist and arranger Cornelia Sommer as they meticulously parsed through details of articulation and colour, carefully resolving note errors and other inconsistencies from the various versions of this music. Their goal is to reflect the piece’s original spirit while immersing themselves in the intersection of Baroque period elegance and Stravinsky’s tongue-in-cheek musical style.
From this light and charming opening, we drift into darker emotions with the lyrical rumination in Jennifer Higdon’s “Aria” for oboe and piano. This duet is drawn from her opera Cold Mountain, where Ada’s aria “I feel sorry for you” delivers a moment of profound introspection. Ada sings to Stobrod as he lies near death. Her words are not only pity for his frailty but grief for the life he wasted in addiction and absence. Ada’s sorrow turns into resolve: she vows never to let life pass her by unseen or unloved. The music captures her tenderness and regret, and ultimately her awakening to gratitude and purpose.

Tempestuous, swirling figures take us directly into Kevin Day’s “VORTEX.” Our title track opens with surprise and intensity, immediately commanding your attention before yielding to a quiet wave of melody—then surging back to the now-familiar turbulence of its rhythmic patterns. The idea for this work was born at the International Double Reed Society Conference 2024, as Ari and Kevin sat on a bench outside the recital hall dreaming of a bold new staple for the oboe repertoire. The IDRS conference, a haven of nerdiness and creativity, became the perfect launchpad. Donning pink and rhinestones for the premiere in 2025, they were met with thunderous applause and a standing ovation. Ari and Kevin are delighted to share this banner collaboration as a centrepiece of this album.

Rodney Sharman’s “Famous Last Words” offers a meditation on the symmetry of life, from music of newborn innocence to the gravitas and reflection of a long life well lived. This adaptation by Sharman uses English horn, piano, and toy piano, collectively conjuring the innocence of childhood, the bloom of youth, the melancholy of memory, and the heartbreak of profound grief. Interspersed with musical lines on their respective instruments, the performers speak an array of moving last words before death, including those of Goethe, Gertrude Stein, Yukio Mishima, and Murray Adaskin. Rodney Sharman writes: “In Romantic music the English horn is conventionally used to portray young love, the pastoral, melancholy, and loss. There is, I think, something to this; more than any other instrument, it evokes (at least to me) imaginary landscapes, shepherds, youth – and youth’s passing.”

We whirl into Jean Coulthard’s ethereal “The Enchanted Island,” where dancing trills, evocative arpeggios, and rippling piano ostinatos ferry us through a landscape of shifting moods. Coulthard wrote this vivid piece when she was in her 80s, at a time when she became deeply concerned with preserving the environment. She felt it apt to use the titles of her music to inspire and give comfort to the young activists she knew. Once she found her compositional footing after studying with Bernard Wagenaar and Béla Bartók in New York, Coulthard was invited to help develop the Department of Music at the University of British Columbia. Fixed in a belief that making music is both for one’s own expression and the pedagogy of younger musicians, Coulthard advanced this political idea of the arts through her compositions.

Ominous, distant thunder and a haunting melody in the English horn mark the next eddy of our spiral. Christopher Tyler Nickel’s “English Horn Sonata” holds a well of expression for the English horn, pushing the boundary of possibilities for the instrument. There are no extraneous notes or artifice for English horn or piano. Each moment of sound is precisely chosen, with a freshness and modernity that is entirely organic. The third movement is energetic, intense, and brilliant—voicing not normally afforded the traditionally melancholic English horn—and is intertwined with an equally brilliant, percussive, and cascading piano part. This recording is dedicated to Ari’s beloved late teacher and longtime member of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Beth Orson, for whom this sonata was written.
The album settles into an introspective reverie with Jocelyn Morlock’s “Verdigris,” which the composer describes as “melancholy and full of existential solitude, like a lone bird crooning to itself in the night.” A soft yet insistent guitar motif begins a soothing meander with the oboe, eliciting memory and contemplation. Originally composed in 2005 for flute and harp, “Verdigris” was reimagined for oboe and guitar in 2010 after Jocelyn heard a recording of Ari performing Astor Piazzolla’s “Oblivion” in this instrumentation. Inspired by the timbral interplay of these instruments, she reshaped the piece to allow the oboe’s voice to drift and hover like mist over the still waters of tender guitar lines.

As the final track on the album, “Verdigris” offers a gentle mooring: a calm arrival after a long journey. With its intertwining lines and translucent textures, it invites the listener to pause, to breathe, to rest. From its delicate ripples to its deeper undercurrents, this music settles like silt, leaving behind a shimmering stillness that invites renewed clarity.