Robert Honstein - Lost and Found

A Closer Listen

Robert Honstein‘s new album Lost and Found is a collection of three separate works for percussion with a common theme: childhood. We’re fortunate to have three beautiful videos of each of the works, so we’ve shared each of the videos below and largely allowed the works to speak for themselves.

The album opens with “An Index of Possibility”, a creative revisitation of those happy toddler days spent getting pots and pans out of kitchen cupboards and investigating what sounds they can produce. At first the investigations have a quiet, considerate quality, but as the piece develops, the composer becomes excited by the possibility of motion. Percussion trio Tigue, who commissioned and performed the piece, embody this spirit of curiosity and adventure.

“Down Baby Down”, the second work, is inspired by the children’s clapping game of the same name but here Honstein explores what would happen if the game were performed on the wooden body of a ‘cello. The result has a really playful groove and New Morse Code, the percussion duo who commissioned and perform the work, capture the sense of fun wonderfully.

The closing “Lost and Found” sees the composer returning to his memories of the community pool where he worked as a teenage lifeguard. The lost and found box, he writes, was “both forgettable and fascinating, mostly inconsequential, but occasionally irresistible” and here the music is both charming and occasionally macabre, ably performed by Michael Compitello.

Lost and Found is available now from New Focus Recordings. (Garreth Brooke)