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The eight new works in this album are each distinguished by intimacy and virtuosity and linked by composer Jaap Nico Hamburger’s gift for moving from visual to sonic metaphor and narrative. Each is a chamber work, meant for intimate discourse. Writing in large forms comes readily to this composer. His early reputation (Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, Concerto for Harp and Orchestra, and the JUNO-nominated Chamber Symphony No. 2) was identified by this scope and these strategies. His upcoming opera Ariella accomplishes the same. In the expanse of large forms, we see possibilities for spectacle, high drama, banner and emblem, rhetoric and conviction. Jaap Nico Hamburger is a master of these materials But in Tzimtzum and in the eight dialogues it presents, he moves in small forms. Overtly, each is a wholly separate venture. Expressly, each is ignited by separate visions: infinite light, a blue dress in a painting, the marriage of flute and piano, two pianos reinventing a rhythm and blues band from the composer’s youth, four piano preludes reimagining the great masters, an expressionist poet whose life was disfigured by the Nazis, a tapestry of Dutch piano literature, and at largest scale a reawakening of 18th-century dance returned to life in the 21st. It is a brilliant anthology, to be sure, but is there something that interconnects, and interpenetrates? Yes. Tzimtzum is a term little known outside Jewish theology, but one which deserves wider recognition. This album provides it, and in musical application begins to explain a deeper purpose in Hamburger’s eight explorations here. A Hebrew word, it signifies a reduction, a contraction, a concentration and succinctness, a withdrawal in order to make room for the human experience. It connects to notions of the instant expansion of the universe at the time of its Big Bang, and of a determination by G’d to grant room to His creation to explore itself. In this, it connects to concepts of Free Will apposing Determinism. In this, we see how a composer might conceive eight acts of eloquence each filling in spaces ignited by the other.