Mihailo Trandafilovski is not a composer who wants anything from you — not your approval, not your comfort, certainly not your easy assent. Born in Macedonia in 1974 and long resident in London, he belongs to that serious, slightly ascetic tradition of composers who regard the audience as an intelligent partner in difficulty rather than a consumer to be placated. This album, which gathers chamber works from across roughly a decade of creative activity, makes the case for him with considerable force.
Start with Chaconne, because it sets the terms. Peter Sheppard Skærved — who has spent a career making the impossible seem merely very hard — plays it with the kind of piercingly focused tone that strips away any possibility of sentimentality. Trandafilovski was thinking about Isang Yun’s Königliches Thema when he wrote it, and you can feel that Korean master’s influence: the way Yun internalized European modernism without surrendering anything of his own angular, embattled voice. Trandafilovski does something similar — the music isn’t imitation, it’s more like a philosophical argument conducted across generations. The piece ends in silence, but not peaceful silence. Earned silence. The kind that rings.
The clarinet piece, Sandglass, belongs in a different emotional register entirely — and this is one of the disc’s genuine surprises. Roger Heaton is one of the finest new-music claririnists working anywhere, a artist with an almost perverse ability to make extremity sound inevitable, and here Trandafilovski gives him room to move between something almost folk-like in character and passages of concentrated strangeness. The clarinet’s natural speaking quality — that uncanny ability to suggest a human throat — works in the composer’s favor. You never quite lose the sense of a voice, even when the music is most remote.
Šarenilo — the Macedonian word for “colourfulness,” which is also something close to the disc’s organizing metaphor — is a violin duo in two movements. “Mosaic,” the first, crumples conventional expectations with techniques that feel genuinely discovered rather than applied; the second movement, “Nitki” (or “Threads”), offers something closer to peace. It is, among other things, a reminder that Trandafilovski can write lyrically when he chooses. He just doesn’t choose very often. The restraint feels principled rather than temperamental.
Weakan, for violin, clarinet, and piano, is perhaps the most overtly radiant thing here. The piano writing — Roderick Chadwick plays it — is discordant in the way that a bruise is: the color is wrong, but it draws your eye. Linda Merrick’s clarinet flutters at the edges of the texture, and the violin gestures lyrically above everything without ever quite resolving. It’s unsettling in the way that serious beauty often is.
The title work, Polychromy, is for solo cello and was written for Neil Heyde, who plays it here. Its world touches that of Chaconne — the same refusal to smooth things over, the same willingness to let the instrument speak from its extremes — but the cello’s lower gravity gives the music a different weight. Heyde is outstanding: present, physical, technically unimpeachable.
String Dune(s), for two guitars played by the Miyabi Guitar Duo, is — and I say this carefully — the most accessible work on the disc. It traffics in some of the tropes the classical guitar has accumulated over the past century. That’s not quite a criticism. The instrument has a seductive specificity that composers ignore at their peril, and Trandafilovski doesn’t ignore it. But after the astringency of everything that precedes it, you notice the accommodation.
The recording was made across several sessions and venues — Hastoe Village Hall, the church of St. John the Baptist at Aldbury, the Royal Northern College of Music — yet the sound is remarkably consistent: clear, present, neither overly dry nor artificially reverberant. Grain-song, the final solo violin diptych, closes the disc on territory by now familiar but no less demanding for that.
A word about the liner notes, which are unusually good: direct, specific, free of the mystification that composers sometimes mistake for profundity. Trandafilovski writes about his music the way he writes it — without flinching, without flattering the reader.
This is not a disc for every occasion or every listener. But for those willing to sit with music that refuses to meet you halfway, it is rewarding in the way that only genuinely uncompromising work can be. Recommended without reservation, and with full knowledge of what that reservation costs.
