Butterfly Lightning Shakes the Earth is a new miniature album of her own compositions by cellist India Gailey.  Back in the day we would probably have called this an EP as there is about 20 minutes of music in all.

The first piece; Mountainweeps, consists of three sixty second pieces for solo cello.  This was written for Arlen Hlusko for Instagram performance when that platform limited videos to sixty seconds!  It’s a sort of meditation on the impact of climate change on alpine environments.  It’s quite complex for such a short piece and quite beguiling.

Butterfly Lightning Shakes the Earth, by contrast, is a kind of three movement concerto for cello and orchestra.  It’s inspired by a Buddhist concept of “Joining Heaven, Earth and Humanity”.  Although the musical language is nothing like, say, Brahms, the effect is very much of a grand Romantic piece with cello in dialogue with a large orchestra including rather a lot of perc\ussion.  It’s not exactly tonal but it’s not at all abrasive.  There are rather beautiful meditative patches; some quite “light” and others where the cello, in its lower registers, seem to brood over the orchestra.  At other times it gets very “big”.  One passage reminded me weirdly of Turandot.  It’s a unique voice and definitely worth a listen.  Gailey plays cello with her usual skill with fine accompaniment from Symphony Nova Scotia conducted by Karl Hirzer.

The recordings; both made in Halifax earlier this year are rich, clear and well balanced.  It’s being released as a physical CD and digitally in Mp3 and FLAC (standard res and 24bit/48kHz).  I listened to srtandard res digital files.

Catalogue information: Redshift Records TK552.