Inspired by the open vistas of the St. Lawrence River, Mathieu David Gagnon fills his music with colors and textures that evoke the natural beauty of the Québec landscape. This is quite evident on Volume III, the final installment of a trilogy of recordings by Gagnon’s Flore Laurentienne, an ensemble utilizing a string quartet, two keyboardists, synthesizer and percussion. On the album’s opening “Fleurs,” listeners can almost picture a field of bright blooms, with pizzicato plucking recalling impressionistic renderings on canvas, while the sweep of orchestration blows a gentle breeze across the blossoms. Gagnon’s synthesizer lends a spiritual dimension to the proceedings and hardly detracts from the organic beauty of harp, violin, viola, cello and double bass. “The message, the shareable essence, here is light,” he says. “It is the seed in the ground that becomes a plant and then a flower, blooming at its peak and then inevitably wilting so that the cycle can begin again; it is the quest for beauty in chaos from which harmony is born to transcend it.” With influences from Johann Sebastian Bach to King Crimson, as well as electronic minimalist Hans-Joachim Rodelius, the Canadian composer will be bringing Flore Laurentienne to the U.S. in August and September for concerts in New York City, San Francisco and Chicago.
