Unfinished Business is a CD of music by Toronto based composer Tristan Zaba.  It’s mostly songs for soprano (McKenzie Warriner) and piano (Paul Williamson) but the second and longest track; Matryoski and Blue Vase is a solo piano piece that plays with different textures and densities; sometimes very spare, sometimes very busy, for twelve minutes.  There’s also a shorter, ceaselessly busy piece Swan Dive.

There are a couple of song cycles as well as a concluding “song”.  Finishing Songs sets three texts by e.e.cummings.  They are quite varied ranging from “Crepuscule” which is very sparse for both piano and voice with short phrases and lots of pauses through the more elegiac “Epitaph” to “Finis” which features a rather conversational vocal line over very busy piano.

Études for a Dying Race consists of four songs to texts by Zaba in each of which a Greek god meditates on his/her extinction.  They are pretty varied with a very high and scoopy vocal line for “Zeus” through something simultaneously more conversational and lyrical for “Athena” and the very high, jazzy setting for “Hades” to “Hera” where the vocal line carries the song over a very sparse piano part including a prepared element.

The album closes out with, appropriately enough, Endings in which Zaba speaks and sings an extract from Mary Shelley’s The Last Man over occasional notes from the piano.  The concluding phrase perhaps sums up the album better than I can; “and, like light, it gives its own colours to all.”

It’s quite varied music in a very distinct voice.  Clearly contemporary but not in a way that might frighten people off.  There’s almost a sense of poetry being declaimed in a classical or Celtic manner with accompaniment designed to just point up a word or phrase here or there.  Warriner and Williamson do a great job of bringing it to life.

It was recorded at UTEMS and sounds fine.  It’s available as a standard CD, as MP3 and as CD quality and 88.2kHz/24bit FLAC.  I listened to CD standard digital.  The booklet contains some useful notes as well as full texts.

Catalogue number: Centrediscs CMCCD 33723