Darragh Morgan and Robin Michael are superbly well-focused, Mary Dullea and viola-player Matthew Jones no less authoritative in Notes from a Diary.

beautifully played

Though he was born in Iceland in 1941, Haflidi Hallgrímsson has lived in Edinburgh since the late 1970s, when he was appointed principal cello of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. For a quarter of a century now he has concentrated
on composition, and this collection of his chamber music shows the toughness, range and expressive power of Hallgrímmson's writing. The 15 short pieces that make up the viola-and-piano Notes from a Diary (2005) build in a
rather Kurtág-like way to something far greater than the sum of the individual movements, while at the opposite extreme the elegiac and introspective piano trio Metamorphoses, from 1994, is a sustained single movement
derived from the material presented in the opening bars. Seven Epigrams (1996) is another kind of elegy, a sequence of pieces for violin and cello composed in memory of great Soviet writers and composers including Pasternak, Mandelstam and Akhmatova, which most
vividly demonstrates Hallgrímsson's understanding of string instruments and their possibilities.

... The music shimmers with ideas, its complexity at all times engages