Sophie Hutchings: "Sunlight Zone"

When a kid grows up in a musical family, they can only go one of two ways. One is they run away to masquerade as oil field workers like Jack Nicholson did in Five Easy Pieces; the other is they flourish behind the family instruments and get beamed at by tuxedo’d relatives. Maybe there’s a slump in derrickmen recruitment around New South Wales at the moment but Sydney pianist Sophie Hutchings is firmly on route two, having just released her debut album Becalmed on Australian neo-classical label Preservation. Hutchings, who began composing a little late for a child prodigy—at seventeen she would’ve only just made the Under Eighteen finals—works with drums, violins, cello, and organs so readily it’s like she’s stockpiling for future TV drama work, though her skill with the piano is the ace weapon here, creating more than just music for cancer scenes.

On “Sunlight Zone,” one of the earlier cuts from her LP, she pushes ivory scales into surprisingly poignant elation for someone in the ambient/classical bottleneck, showing you just how effective young composers can be when they swap hi-jinks for private piano tuition. If you’re using this for break-up music, throw out all sharp instruments first: Hutchings’ teary tinkled ivories swell to the point where they eclipse her throaty backing strings, strings which sing like Warren Ellis had called in at the Kangaroo Valley to produce. As the piece climaxes her playing becomes more and more intricate until it’s hard to connect it to the title—does “Sunlight Zone” mean the tragedy of contracting skin cancer, or inner happiness at a well done tan? Or nostalgia from a girl who longed to skip outside but instead had to learn to play Shostakovich? Either way, there are stirring emotions being worked on here, and Hutchings controls them with a natural ability that would look great at any family achievements night. You can’t help but wonder, though, what it is she’d be playing if her parents had tipped the toys:sheet music ratio. Probably this.