Piano Trio No. 2 "The Armenian" (2016) *
Holland Point Music - for soprano saxophone and marimba (2002)
Ballade - for piano (1994-2001)
Concert Piece - for flute and piano (1975)
Meditation - for cello and piano (1976)
The Lonely Princess - for flute and guitar (1978-1981) *
String Quartet (1973)
Devil's Dance - for violin and piano (1972)

* denotes world premiere recordings

Teacher, world-traveller, musician and composer Ronald Hannah (b. 1945), a Canadian now living in Austria, is of a time and place when institutions, board members, promoters and various so-called Music Societies, would have welcomed and even encouraged composers working on the avant-garde's bleeding edge, writing stuff as foreign and alien as possible to the concept of music, just so they could brand and promote it as "new music". A practice highly endemic within the Canadian music scene from the 1960s to the 1980s. Fortunately it seems that Ronald Hannah was able to disregard this suicidal trend, and has been writing music just new enough to belong to its time, but anchored in traditional expression that still connects with the listener on an emotional, as well as a musical level.

His writing is at its best within the slower, more expressive movements or pieces. The second movement of the Piano Trio No. 2 "The Armenian" for example, well conveys its Middle-Eastern influence on the composer's pen, and sits in high contrast against the manic, Danny Elfmanesque agitated state of the third movement. The flute and piano Concert Piece holds a fine balance between serene and playful passages, and as a whole exudes an idyllic, bucolic atmosphere. The Meditation that follows doesn't break the ambience, as it plumbs the cello's darker colors and highly expressive character. And the piano's subtle chord progressions act as the perfect foil to the cello's lyrical, ruminative discourse. And again in The Lonely Princess, the guitar's steady, chordal harmonic forward momentum, well supports the flute's beautiful flights of imagination, which all unfold under a cloak of sadness and melancholy. The pièce de résistance would have to be the highly expressive Con dolore movement from the String Quartet, performed to perfection here by the Penderecki String Quartet. From its tentative, darkly tinged beginning, it slowly builds to an emotionally charged, harmonically rich and dense climax only to resign in the end. It stands so well on its own and proved so successful that in 2017 the composer arranged it as an Adagio for String Orchestra.

It's obvious that some of these works stem from previous recordings which occurred at different times in different venues. Therefore you may notice a change in the spatial acoustics from one piece to the next, but certainly not enough to deter from the quality of the music and the musicianship on offer.