Nat Bartsch - Hope

2021 CD release.

For a majority of her illustrious career Bartsch has focused on music that soothes, first with gentle compositions for a friend undergoing cancer treatment and then her award-winning work with the Nat Bartsch Trio.

‘Hope’ was inspired first by the Black Summer bushfires that ravaged the east coast of Australia, then took what she calls ‘a slight detour’ after the unprecedented impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the long months of lockdown that followed, Bartsch found herself yearning for ‘forward momentum’: writing driving rhythms, faster tempos, percussive piano flourishes as the tracks For Now, Brightness in the Hills and her first string quartet, Over the River, came to life. Then, as Melbourne’s second lockdown slowly lifted, her music returned to the slow and patient, with Emerging.

‘My album’s title is not just those four letters,’ she explains. ‘It’s ‘hope’ as an abbreviation of both hopefulness and hopelessness, and this music explores the space between.’