Penthouse Letters From November 2015

'A composer’s mother tongue is the first music he hears; it therefore determines the “genetic inheritance” of the musician’s sound world. The founding father of Armenian art music was Komitas Vardapet. This recording is released in the centenary year of the 1915 genocide. The pieces in this recital may be animated, contemplative, tender, or solemn, but they are very rarely gloomy or woeful. A sort of trust in the future characterises the “Armenian spirit”.

Letters From The Labyrinth is TSO's first full-length album since 2009's Night Castle. The overall concept is based on TSO's "Night Castle" (2009) and a dialogue between the wisdom of the past and the hopes for the future, via a correspondence between a child and an old friend of the child's grandfather. On "Letters From The Labyrinth" TSO deals with subjects as broad as humanity's journey through the ages ("Time & Distance"), and as specific as bullying ("Not The Same"), the fall of the Berlin Wall ("Prometheus") and the world banking controversies ("Not Dead Yet").