“Surely one of the strongest compositions to appear in the last couple of years”, declared music critic and book author Alex Ross. Additionally, the CD (which was released earlier this year on Wergo), was listed in The Sunday Times Best 100 Records of the Year as well as in The New Yorker's List of "Notable Classical Recordings of 2013"

Tongue of the Invisible is inspired by the lyric poetry of the Sufi poet Hafiz. Liza Lim says: “Hafiz's verses are unbelievably ecstatic and intimate, yet also very fleeting – the way in which he mixes and shifts levels of meaning gives rise to complex and indeterminable frames of mind in oneself.”

Music critic and author Alex Ross discussed Tongue of the Invisible in his concluding lecture for the The Rest Is Noise festival at London’s Southbank Centre on December 7th. Here is an excerpt from his speech:

“One crucial aspect of Lim’s work is her way of negotiating between a broad spectrum of folk and classical traditions and the languages of Western modernism. She is hardly the first to undertake such a project, but she has done it with unusual finesse. A case in point, and surely one of the strongest compositions to appear in the last couple of years, is Tongue of the Invisible, a vocal cycle on texts of the great fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafez, written for the twentieth anniversary of the virtuoso Köln-based Ensemble musikFabrik. 

It is scored for baritone, improvising pianist, and ensemble; the soloists at the premiere, in 2011, and in the pioneering recording, which has just appeared on Wergo, were Omar Ebrahim and Uri Caine. The pianist is not the only member of the ensemble who improvises; all of the players at one point or another are given ad libitum episodes, as for example when they are asked to imitate the sound of bird calls. The composer sees this work as a dialogue between fixed and open forms, between precise notation in the Western tradition and collective improvisations that at moments bring to mind music-making in the Persian classical tradition. 

This dialogue—which can also be described as a tension, and is assuredly not presented in the spirit of feel-good, we’re-all-in-this-together world-music exercises—is evident right at the beginning of the piece. (…)

The sense of gathering complexity over that initial drone reminds me, to a degree, of the opening of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, those lush and tangled and unsettlingly rapid-moving instrumental vines that seem to erupt out of the surface of the earth with the coming of spring. (...)

Across its hour-long span, the score gyrates unpredictably yet purposefully between the extremes marked out by the concept: European and non-Western traditions, notation and improvisation, dissonant complexity and consonant meditation. At the end, we return to the point of departure, the drone on D, but without a false sense of resolution. This is a cosmopolitan music of maximum sensitivity and cultural awareness: in its restless, hyper-alert mediation among multiple voices, it is as much evidence of a great listener as of a major composer.”