Interior Design for solo violin

If you’ve ever been in the stress-inducing position of redecorating a house, don’t start to sweat—Steve Mackey has already looked at all the paint chips and carpet samples and made the hard choices for you. Your job as the listener is simply to sit back and enjoy the textures and colors as they appear. Though I doubt seriously that even if I spent the rest of my life in a practice room I would ever be able to approach Curtis Macomber’s technical virtuosity, his precise reading of Interior Design is so clear it resonates in my own hands as if they are coursing over the instrument. Mackey points out in the liner notes that Macomber has likely played more of his works than any other single performer, and it shows: he owns this work for solo violin from start to finish.

—MS