Sō Percussion
Bailey Hall, Cornell University
October 24, 2014
8:00pm

Percussion ensembles and their repertoires can be hard sells in the contemporary music market. On the one hand, their emphasis on rhythm over, or in tandem with, melody makes them accessible to a broader audience than their classical allegiances might have us believe. On the other, that very slipperiness renders them moving targets in a genre-driven industry. The members of Sō Percussion, one of the leading quartets of its kind, bring such an eclectic mix of backgrounds, tastes, and talents to the table that any reliance on category would seem long dead. That said, Friday evening’s concert at Bailey Hall charted a disorienting EKG graph of peaks and valleys that left behind more questions than answers.

The program’s frame consisted of two perennial classics by composer Steve Reich. His 1973 Music for Pieces of Wood—a composition for five woodblock players that required a helping hand from Sō’s Operations Manager, Yumi Tamashiro—was captivating and clean. Although not overtly about melody, its pitch-tuned surfaces nevertheless overlapped in melodic ways, blending waves of rhythm into a seamless whole. Clapping Music, composed the year before, was the concert’s encore. Consisting of nothing but clapping hands, it brought the art of percussion to an even more primal level, using only the body and its discipline to enliven the space.

Moving in from either end, however, brought us to the program’s longest pieces, both of which relied on gimmicks that outweighed their musical results. Intriguingly, the score of Todd Lerew’s Flagging Entrainment of Ultradian Rhythms and the Consequences Thereof was mapped out like a choose-your-own-adventure novel, guiding performers to change paths based on their interactions (or lack thereof) with one another. Conceptually robust, despite the title’s dubious use of the word “ultradian,” and not without its beauties (the recurrence of bowed vibraphones and glockenspiels was nothing short of haunting), by the end it was unclear as to what the exercise was meant to achieve. In stark contrast to John Zorn’s influential game and file-card pieces of the 1970s and 80s, this one established a vague mood at best, in service of which beauty for its own sake felt ultimately arbitrary.

Sitting somewhere between the Bowed Piano Ensemble pieces of Stephen Scott and the guitar symphonies of Glenn Branca, but approaching the depths of neither, was Bryce Dessner’s Music for Wood and Strings. An electric guitarist known for his work with The National, Dessner enriches a selective rank of rock musicians, such as Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, that have had successful careers as composers. Yet whereas in other projects—check out his brilliant, heartfelt Aheym, in collaboration with the Kronos Quarte—he shines, too many rough patches overwhelmed the light of this particular experiment. The conceit of Music for Wood and Strings is a quartet of instruments, each a chromatically arrayed guitar neck laid flat and played like a dulcimer. Built with the assistance of drummer Aron Sanchez, who has also designed instruments for the Blue Man Group, their properties were exhaustively explored by Dessner and the musicians in kind. Despite the composer’s professed attempt to align “triadic chord inversions…in complex rhythm patterns to create a kaleidoscopic effect of harmony,” the end effect was neither rhythmically complex nor kaleidoscopic. After about the fifth missed opportunity for an ending, I was left asking: Had this piece been played on standard instruments—pianos, for example, or even plain old dulcimers, for that matter—would it have sustained attention for 30 minutes?

All of which left us with the program’s two star turns. As part of their ongoing commitment to education, the members of Sō Percussion held brief residency at Cornell last spring, during which time they collaborated with student composers to yield new works premiered during Friday night’s performance. Tonia Ko and Corey Keating, both D.M.A. students at Cornell, presented their pieces via the ensemble’s meticulous, animated approach. Ko’s Real Voices and Imagined Clatter was a multifaceted exploration of that juggernaut of the symphony orchestra: the timpani drum. Although her piece also made ample use of gimmicks and extended techniques, none seemed extraneous but rather a means by which to bring out the inner voices of the liberated drums. The strength of her piece was in the details: in the small gong that added a hint of gamelan, in the large gong struck only occasionally, in the delicate triangle and woodblocks clattering throughout. The atmosphere was immediate, artful, and, for lack of a better word, mountainous.

Keating’s Audio Geometry (Pythagorean Triple) for Percussion and Electronics might also be convicted of pretentious titling if it did not practice what it preaches. Scored for marimbas and live electronics, the latter courtesy of the composer on stage, it mapped a resonant and unearthly soundscape. Distortions derived from rehearsals of the piece itself were recycled, warped, and fed through echo chambers in a sampling spiral. What separated his and Ko’s pieces from the program’s subcutaneous selections was their willingness to be closed circuits. Each said what it wanted to say and nothing more. They were also the most musical, moving with organic care by way of a thinking-out-loud approach far more akin to jazz than to merely pedantic composing.

Despite the concert’s low points, and as emphasized by its highs, it was refreshing to encounter unfamiliar music and unfamiliar instruments sandwiched between two evergreens in the field. If anything, the evening’s diversity proved the bravery and exploratory spirit of four souls whose love for the beat reigns supreme.

(See this article as it originally appeared in The Cornell Daily Sun here.)

Dario Castello
Giovanni Battista Fontana
Sonate concertate in stil moderno

John Holloway violin
Lars Ulrik Mortensen harpsichord
Jane Gower dulcian
Recorded June 2008 at Propstei St. Gerold
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher

John Holloway has charted a veritable history of the Baroque violin across the waters of ECM’s New Series, but perhaps none so tantalizing as the selections he has assembled for this benchmark recording. Holloway notes a special affinity for Dario Castello (1590-1658) and Giovanni Battista Fontana (1571-1630), composers whose works he played as interludes in vocal music concerts early on in his career. Now, nearly four decades later, he allows them the full force of center stage.

This program’s featured sonatas denote a time when the violin was coming into its own as a melodic lead (where before it was merely a consort instrument) and the portability and projection of the fagotto, an early incarnation of the bassoon known also as the dulcian, replaced the viola da gamba as the bass line in chamber ensembles. Historical bassoon specialist Jane Gower plays the dulcian alongside Holloway—with whom, as always, is harpsichordist Lars Ulrik Mortensen. It’s a formidable trio playing formidable music, but with a graciousness born of knowledge and experience.

In her book Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music, musicologist Susan McClary brilliantly describes Dario Castello’s instrumental pieces as latching onto “a succession of impulses—some ordered with respect to goals, to be sure, but others producing extended passages of hovering.” Such a characterization might easily carry over into the concerto, to which this music represents a transitional link. Castello’s distinctly Venetian ornaments and flair for ecstatic denouements make of the listening—and, one can only imagine, the performing—a rewarding experience. The album is bookended by six sonatas from his two massive books of the same. All but two, the Sonata Prima à Sopran Solo and the Sonata Seconda à Sopran Solo, feature the dulcian. Those without boast a staggering variety of speeds, dynamics, and textures. Holloway and friends negotiate transitions between slow, reflective stretches of beauty and their cathartic outbursts with ease, and by those changes underscore a grand (but never grandiose) sense of development. Sonatas with the dulcian outweigh the potential complexities of the combination with awareness of line and form. Like masterful Celtic knotters, composer and musicians attend to every curve. Gower’s contributions (note especially the Sonata Ottava à due. Sopran e Fagotto) add depth of character to Mortensen’s sparkling frame, while Holloway enlivens the music’s cyclicity with meticulous intonation. The concluding Sonata Ottava à due. Sopran e Fagotto indeed brims with dramatic finality and, for its quick-witted arpeggios and filigreed structure, is the most virtuosic of them all.

It’s only natural that the music of Giovanni Battista Fontana, closest in style to Castello’s, should occupy the program’s center. Here we are treated to seven of his concerto sonatas, of which four do without the dulcian. To these Holloway brings a rustic energy by means of his bow, yielding and dancing in a veritable profusion of flora and fauna. Fontana, it might be said, was even more of an expository composer than Castello, as evidenced by tactile Sonata Terza Violino Solo and flowing tempi of the Sonata Sesta Violino Solo. Even more so with the dulcian in tow, as in the charged interactions of the Sonata Decima Fagotto e Violino. If these pieces seem more temperate, however, it’s only because the transitions between subdivisions are less explicit, marking as they do a time of great invention in the Italian sonata, so dutifully preserved for our own desire and pleasure for countless years to come.

Georg Friedrich Händel
Die Acht Grossen Suiten

Lisa Smirnova piano
Recorded May 2007, May-June 2008, and Feburary 2009 at Schloss Goldegg, Austria
Engineer: Jens Jamin
An ECM Production

This is not the first time that music from Georg Friedrich Händel’s Suites de Pieces pour le Clavecin (a.k.a. the “Eight Great Suites”) of 1720 has appeared on ECM. Pianist Keith Jarrett recorded for the label’s New Series imprint a selection of suites by Bach’s near contemporary in 1993, and with it endorsed an affirmative reassessment of these exceptional works. Several complete recordings have since been issued, and many more predate it on vinyl, so the press release’s claim that these pieces are “too rarely brought together on disc” is, in fact, moot. Paul Nicholson’s cycle for Hyperion, recorded on harpsichord a year after Jarrett and distinguished by its highly embellished repeats, was a notable companion. Two further accounts have been issued this year (2014) alone. The first, by Richard Egarr for Harmonia Mundi, also opts for harpsichord, while the second, by Danny Driver for Hyperion, joins this 2012 release from Vienna-based Russian pianist Lisa Smirnova as a formidable contender for piano renditions. Smirnova would seem to marry the best of those recent followers, combining Egarr’s charm and Driver’s vibrancy with idiosyncratic success.

Although Händel humbly called these pieces “lessons,” their exact purpose is unclear. Their difficulty is, however, anything but and comprises an earthly counterpart to J. S. Bach’s heavenward considerations at the keyboard. For Smirnova, it is timeless music all the same, as attested by the five years of preparation and careful study she poured into it before a single studio microphone was switched on. Just as intriguing and well considered as her performance of the suites is the order in which she plays them, beginning as she does with the Suite No. 2 F Major HWV 427. A subtle yet bold choice of introduction, it lowers us into Händel’s pond so that we might see the ripples for what they are: as beautiful disturbances brought to life by a human touch. In the latter vein, the suite highlights Smirnova’s technical prowess: her syllogistic approach to the binary Adagios, balance of fluttering trills and steady pacing in the Allegros, and exquisite pedaling throughout.

The suites are full of idiomatic variety and avoid formal suite structure altogether. Consequently, Smirnova’s immediate jump to the Suite No. 8 F Minor HWV 433 makes as much sense as the composer’s elision of a Sarabande in the same (this peculiarity also marks the set’s most Baroque Suite No. 1 A Major HWV 426, which Smirnova places second to last). Thus foregrounded, this final suite elegantly flaunts its darker, more mature wardrobe. The extraordinarily lovely Allemande exemplifies both Händel’s sensitivity as a composer and Smirnova’s as a performer, legato phrasings and all. The concluding Gigue, too, shows us her grace and her ability to be fortuitous without tripping over prosody.

The Suite No. 4 E Minor HWV 429 and Suite No. 5 E Major HWV 430 are the only consecutive pairing. The echoing beginnings and sportive finish of the one sit comfortably alongside the dreamy core of the other. Next, the Suite No. 3 D Minor HWV 428 proceeds with gusto. The fantastic keyboard coverage of its Prelude recalls the grandeur of Bach’s organ works and opens a multivalent interface toward the gargantuan Courante. Simple in design yet expansive in effect, its octave voicings in the left hand and spurring trills in the right keep the final Presto in its sights, inspiring some of the set’s most virtuosic control of dynamics. By contrast, the Suite No. 6 F Sharp Minor HWV 431 portions itself more conservatively, keeping its inner fire audible but in constant check.

Händel mixes things up yet again in the Suite No. 7 G Minor HWV 432, for which he adapts the Overture of his cantata Clori, Tirsi e Fileno HWV 96. Here Smirnova puts on the air of a harpsichordist, her style brisé lending bite to every tantalizing swerve. This fullest of the suites is a veritable summation of the whole. From the salon-like Andante to the affirmative Passacaglia, it draws on many autobiographical roots until a new tree is born. Smirnova may be just one of many leaves on its ever-growing branches, but among them holds the sun in frame, her heart glowing green against cloudless sky.

(To hear samples of Die Acht Grossen Suiten, click here.)

Night Song

Ketil Bjørnstad piano
Svante Henryson violoncello
Recorded January 2009 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Pianist, composer, and author Ketil Bjørnstad has been long obsessed with Schubert, going so far as to sneak into his school gymnasium as a teenager to play him. “Schubert’s almost naïve openness, his existential sense of wonder and his emotional passion make him at the same time both concrete and mythical,” says Bjørnstad in his liner text. Hence Night Song, which pays tribute to, and engages in dialogue with, the Austrian great. For this project he is joined by Svante Henryson, a multi-instrumentalist and musical chameleon who plays cello alongside Bjørnstad. And by “alongside” I mean exactly that, for the two musicians recorded, at producer Manfred Eicher’s request, as closely as possible, so as to avoid the divisive tendencies of headphones and glass partitions. Bjørnstad: “It is always special for a musician when an ECM production evolves through a dialogue with Manfred Eicher from the very beginning. It can perhaps be compared to what an actor feels, when working with a film director.”

The nature of this piano-cello pairing is, however, rather distinct from Bjørnstad’s acclaimed collaborations with cellist David Darling, despite the identical instrumentation. Like Darling, Henryson is a gentle-minded musician, one who whispers more than he sings in the title track, which bookends the album with an “Evening Version” and “Morning Version.” There is, however, in his own music (Henryson pens four of the album’s 16 tracks), an altogether idiosyncratic grace. His arpeggios are of the same planar existence as our own, whereas Darling’s seem to float up from the very earth. Songs (for that is indeed what they are) like “Fall” and “Tar” inhale light and exhale pure, cinematic description—which is to say, by means of a music as visible as it is audible. Henryson’s pizzicati in “Reticence” and “Melting Ice” add further layers of breath, activated by a brooding play of shadows.

Due to the Schubert connection (crystallized in the thinner air of “Schubert Said”), one might think that Night Song would sound more romantic, but like much of Bjørnstad’s chamber music it emotes from a heart seemingly teleported from the late Renaissance. The transitions marked out by tracks like “Visitor” and “Share” from inward prayer to full-throated incantation tickle the senses. To better manifest these transitions, Bjørnstad substantially expands his coverage of the keyboard (note the low range of “Edge” and, by contrast, the glittering rays of “Sheen”). Wherever he may be on the spectrum, he always performs with forgiveness. Henryson, too, unravels coils of life force in the hopeful “Serene” and, in the album’s most songlike turn, “Chain.” His precision in the latter is astonishing for its balance of trepidation and peace.

Bjørnstad’s music begs image, movement, and reconsideration of time. In this sense, Night Song may just be his most intimate recording yet, a gem of expression clawed in silver and carefully polished until it is worthy of being slipped on the finger of a hidden muse.

(To hear samples of Night Song, click here.)

Sinikka Langeland
Maria’s Song

Sinikka Langeland voice, kantele
Lars Anders Tomter viola
Kåre Nordstoga organ
Recorded February 2008, Nidaros Cathedral, Trondheim
Engineer: Ove Berg
Editing: Ove Berg, Jean Lewis (Suite, Chaconne)
An ECM Production

ECM may be nominally dedicated to contemporary music, but Johann Sebastian Bach has been a vital touchstone in its classical recordings. Whether acting as a foil to modern works in Thomas Demenga’s multi-album traversal of the Cello Suites or as the exclusive subject of fresh interpretations by Keith Jarrett and András Schiff at the keyboard, Bach has either existed as a point of reference or as a master being reckoned with anew toward the asymptote of definitive interpretation. Only Christoph Poppen has gone a step further, weaving Bach into the work of Anton Webern (as Webern himself had done) and exploring hidden chorales of the solo violin literature. That was, until Maria’s Song, which is by far, and may always be, ECM’s profoundest reckoning with Bach.

Previously for the label, Norwegian folk singer and kantele (15-string Finnish table harp) virtuoso Sinikka Langeland had recorded Starflowers and The Land That Is Not, both of which sought to explore the shared heart of folk and jazz around the heliocenter of Langeland’s full-throated voice. This time she is joined by Lars Anders Tomter, previously of Ketil Bjørnstad’s The Light, who plays a Gasparo da Salò viola made in 1590, apparently one of the world’s finest examples of the instrument. With them is Kåre Nordstoga, playing the 30-register Baroque organ of Trondheim’s Nidaros Cathedral. Nordstoga is the principal organist at Oslo Cathedral and a Bach specialist, having performed two complete traversals of the composer’s organ music over 30 Saturday recitals in 1992 and 2000.

(Photo credit: Morten Krovgold)

The program is a mixture of Marian texts from Luke set to folk melodies and medieval ballads, then threaded through the loom of Bach’s hymns (and the Concerto in d minor, BWV 596) at the organ. In addition, Tomter plays viola arrangements of the Solo Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007 (played an octave higher) and the Chaconne from the Solo Violin Partita No. 2 in d minor, BWV 1004 (transposed to g minor). A few things make this a remarkable project. First is Langeland’s immensity of knowledge, on which she draws to assemble a program of such originality that it feels as seamless as its pairings of word and melody. Second is her voice. Possessed of a luminescent, youthful energy, her intonation makes scripture feel like a sheaf of grain distilled into something digestible by the soul. Last is the utter respect with which the musicians perform, respect that emits a sacred light of its own. And no wonder, considering that the spirit of these texts was at one time forbidden in Norway, where the Reformation of 1537 disbanded monasteries and consigned church relics and artifacts, including depictions of Mary, to state storehouses. Worship of the Virgin thus became the stuff of hidden messages and codes, and in these songs Langeland has enacted their recovery.

“Lova lova Lina” is the first encoding of Mary and, like many of Langeland’s segues throughout the disc, is sung with only the cathedral’s resonant air as accompaniment. Along with the “Ave Maria,” it reappears transformed. At times, Langeland’s fingers find their way to the kantele, both as support for the voice and as a voice unto itself. A reprise of “Lova lova Lina” is especially potent for marrying the two. Narratively inflected singing throughout makes of the shuffled program something of a passion play, in which dialogues between Heaven and Earth come to define the natural order of things. One might expect the viola to brighten Bach’s solo cello writing, when in fact it casts a deeper, more spectral shadow. The feeling is distinctly cyclical, as emphasized by the vocal surroundings, and reaches open-gated confluence in the mighty Chaconne, over which the “Ave Maria” is dutifully papered. The organ, too, sings as it speaks, lifting Langeland in “Vom Himmel kam der Engel Schar,” BWV 607 and, on its own, ascending the spiral staircase of the “Fuga sopra il Magnificat,” BWV 733 at hub of it all. Even the Concerto transcription unleashes the Holy Spirit at an intersection of past and future. As Langeland recalls in her liner notes, “While we played our way through time, the Nidaros Cathedral reflected the spiritual currents of a thousand years. The large Russian icon stared at us as we began to record. The dawn light poured through the huge rose window as we finished the night’s recording.” To be sure, we can feel all of these things…and more.

Manto and Madrigals

Thomas Zehetmair violin
Ruth Killius viola, voice
Recorded May 2009 at Radio Studio DRS, Zürich
Engineer: Andreas Werner
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Violinist Thomas Zehetmair and his wife, violist Ruth Killius, break from their charter roles as one half of the widely acclaimed Zehetmair Quartet for a unique duo recital. In his album liner notes, Paul Griffiths says of the relationship between the two instruments, “What divides is also what binds,” and perhaps no summary could phrase it more accurately. The viola may often be mistaken as a mediator between the violin and the cello, a liminal instrument whose status in subordinate to either. In a setting like this, hearing music specifically written or arranged for the combination, it becomes an equal partner to the violin while retaining the edge of its voice: harmony through distinction.

The program casts a long shadow from 2006, when Heinz Holliger composed his Drei Skizzen (Three Sketches) for the duo, back to the undateable Icelandic folk song Ó min flaskan friða (A love song to a bottle), given a fresh coat of paint in an arrangement by Rainer Kilius. The latter’s pulsing, stone-textured polyphony opens the album, flinted until it sparks. Holliger’s pieces, by not so large a contrast, chart the passage of fire into darkness. The glassy spindles of “Pirouettes harmoniques” are, like so many of the composer’s works, genuine agents of atmosphere, and culminate in a rich, if breath-held, conclusion. Moments of self-reference also abound. The swirling gestures of “Danse dense” recall his Duo for violin and cello, while the “Cantique à six voix” resurrects the more ethereal moments of his Scardanelli-Zyklus. This last movement requires the violist to sing, thus bringing out an antique spirit behind the meticulous abstractions. Holliger’s music follows that of 20th-century individualist Giacinto Scelsi, whose 1957 Manto gives up half of the album’s title. This piece, in which the musicians employ scordatura tuning (as they do in the Holliger), is also in three parts. It makes slow, archeological work of its motifs. Killius sings here, too, only in a trembling incantation, a ritual on the verge of dissolution. Bohuslav Martinů’s Three Madrigals of 1947 is yet another tripartite composition. Its lines are toned and strong, moving from sharp to supple in a single movement. From muted strings and flowering trills come the exuberant dialogues of the final Allegro, which unspools a tower of Baroque stairs into flourish.

The last of the threes comes by way of Nikos Skalkottas. A student of Arnold Schoenberg whose stark, individual qualities as a composer are nakedly audible in the 1938 Duo recorded here. The first movement opens with scraping bows and interlocking lines, all coming together with a certain thickness of description. This foils the central Andante’s blurry sheen and frames the final movement, which percolates through a network of forgotten folk fragments. Occupying a different band of the folk spectrum is Midhouse Air. This 1996 composition by Peter Maxwell Davies references folk music from the Orkney Islands and reaps a field of exuberant dreams.

Two outliers in the program nevertheless blend seamlessly into their surroundings. Béla Bartók’s Duo, composed in 1902, captures the spirit of a faraway dance with presence of mind. In this compact, Neo-Classical gem, the musicians play the same melody, only one of them inverted and backward. Johannes Nied’s Zugabe (2004), on the other hand, is a jagged yet cohesive piece. It bears further dedication to the duo, and from the performance it’s clear as to why. Like two pieces of clay scratched before kilning, they bond through the heat of creation, brushing the recital’s scope with a love and professionalism that perhaps only a married couple can bring to the studio.

Meredith Monk
Songs of Ascension

Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble
Ellen Fisher, Katie Geissinger, Ching Gonzalez, Meredith Monk, Bruce Rameker, Allison Sniffin voices
Bohdan Hilash woodwinds
John Hollenbeck percussion
Allison Sniffin violin
Todd Reynolds Quartet
Todd Reynolds violin
Courtney Orlando violin
Nadia Sirota viola
Ha-Yang Kim violoncello
The M6
Sasha Bogdanowitsch, Sidney Chen, Emily Eagan, Holly Nadal, Toby Newman, Peter Sciscioli voices
Montclair State University Singers
Heather J. Buchanan conductor
Recorded November 2009, Academy of Arts and Letters, New York
Engineers: James Farber and Paul Zinman
Assistants: Nelson Wong and Sean Mair
Editing engineer: Paul Zinman
Location Recording Service: SoundByte Productions Inc., New York
Mixed at Avatar Studios, New York by James Farber, Manfred Eicher, and Meredith Monk
Assistant: Akihiro Nishimura
Produced by Manfred Eicher

These pieces grew out of inspiration from poet Paul Celan, whose “Song of Ascents” suggested heavenly upward motion, and by extension a project to explore the sacrality of directions. Fortuitously, Meredith Monk was asked by artist Ann Hamilton to perform on site in Geyserville, California, where an eight-story tower with staircases in the shape of a double helix awaited Monk and her dedicated musicians. The beauty of the image, despite its live-giving implications, is that a helix has no up or down—or, rather, embodies both simultaneously—so that divinity comes to be expressed through suspension of the body.

As Monk’s subtlest assemblage, Songs of Ascension births a masterfully realized bioform. I use the adverb not lightly, because only mastery could stretch such a stable tightrope between being and non-being and walk between the two as easily as falling. To her vocal montage Monk adds string quartet, percussion, and woodwinds, for an amalgamated effect of such intimate proportions that the seemingly massive roster only serves to compress the music’s molecules into a galaxy of interpretation: it holds its shape by strength in numbers, an ethereal note inked in long before the earth dotted it on the then-blank score of outer space.

Indeed, one might trace an evolution of global life in the album’s embedded structures. Four seasonal “variations” and three so-called “clusters” are its spiritual campgrounds, from which sparks fling themselves into the night sky as the firewood settles. Songs are intoned and invoked, touched by percussion and overlapping strings, and moving in unison renderable only through total corporeal commitment. Gatherings and inner psalms blur into one another until the topography changes into air. Whether in the pointillism of “cloud code” or the ricocheting pings of “burn,” the topographic circles of “mapping” or the piercing meditation of “fathom,” a consistency of vision prevails. The instrumental passages are just as vocal, the vocal just as instrumental.

Songs of Ascension brings the atmosphere down to soil level. It speaks a continuity of earth and sky, the elemental composition of which draws notecraft from the farthest reaches of the universe, which happen to reside between our ears.

Kremerata Baltica
Hymns and Prayers

Gidon Kremer violin
The Kremerata Baltica
Roman Kofman conductor
Khatia Buniatishvili piano
Andrei Pushkarev vibraphone
Marija Nemanytė violin
Maxim Rysanov viola
Giedrė Dirvanauskaitė violoncello
Sofia Altunashvili voice on tape
Recorded July 2008, Pfarrkirche St. Nikolaus, Lockenhaus
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Gidon Kremer and Manfred Eicher

A recent album released of solo piano music by Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer bears the title Gaps, Absences, which best describes the music of the composer, pianist, and essayist who, born 1963 in former Yugoslavia, has since 1991 called France his home. His life as an improviser has brought him in collaboration with Fred Frith, Chris Cutler, and many others of the avant garde, while on the classical side he has enjoyed fruitful collaboration with violinist Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica, having served as composer in residence at the renowned Lockenhaus chamber music festival, where this album was recorded in 2008, and more recently at the Kremerata Baltica’s own festival in Latvia. His Eight Hymns (1986/2004), written in memory of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, begins a tripartite program of monumental works for various ensembles. Scored for violin, strings, vibraphone, and piano, each of Tickmayer’s hymns bears a title of calm strength. His atmospheres are deceptively minimal, at times spectral and at others hovering as mist over a lake at dawn. The instruments interlock in alternating tides and continental shelves. The piano paints evening skies as single notes break off into satellites of a deeper gravitation. The violin is a thin yet utterly present voice, an omniscient myth-keeper whose experiences of assumption, redemption, and remembrance all answer to the same voice. The vibraphone is a pinwheel moved by breath of slumber. Strings move in the draw of a paintbrush from behind a veil of ash and harmonic light. All of this ends in a flower, as fragile as it is trembling, leaving us indeed with gaps and absences of profound resonance.

Such soul-nourishing music finds like spirit by way of Giya Kancheli, who wrote his 2007 Silent Prayer in honor of Mstislav Rostropovich (for his 80th birthday) and Gidon Kremer (for his 60th). The familiar Kancheli themes crystallize in the prerecorded singing of one Sofia Altunashvili. Her pure-toned voice, carried like a feather on exhale, rings authentically for its vulnerability. It’s an unusual voice, an untrained voice, a voice unafraid of a misshapen psalm. As in the Tickmayer pieces, the violin feels thin and unchained, and puts into relief the spaciousness of strings dragging hands across water from methodical vessels. Their occasional interjects feel like proclamations from above, chances to restring the universal lyre. Still, there is a feeling of oppression to this piece, as if the sky had become weighted with death, so that the lively center almost blinds. Even more cinematic in feel than the Tickmayer, Kancheli’s hymnal cast turns wine into water in a single tracking shot.

Equally affecting, if by relatively compressed dynamic force, is César Franck’s Piano Quintet in f minor (1878/79), which occupies program center. A dramatic and chromatically ecstatic work that met with criticism at the time of its premiere, it also makes expert use of its formidable combination of instruments. What appears short and sweet by name becomes epic in performance as Kremer and his colleagues muscle their way through the first movement with heartfelt aplomb, chipping away at the music’s calcified soul as they proceed. Each drift into the major is a barrel over the waterfall of reality. The most genuine passages are the quietest. On that note, the second movement turns an elegiac frame into a window on fertile land. The legato phrasings of the final Allegro, then, are a bittersweet harvest, tempered by the promise of winter’s freeze. In anticipation of that cold, the piano holds a fire in its belly, changing from blue to orange to white as echoes return with nourished grief. For indeed, mourning is the final message of even the brightest day. The tinge of mortality knows no limits of sun.

I’ve just written for Sequenza 21 a retrospective of ECM’s New Series in celebration of the imprint’s 30th year in 2014. Click the cover to read.

Witold Lutosławski
Béla Bartók
Musique funèbre

Hungarian Radio Children´s Choir
Stuttgarter Kammerorchester
Dennis Russell Davies conductor
Recorded May 2004 and February 2010, Liederhalle, Stuttgart
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher

Conductor Dennis Russell Davies leads the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra in a program of music by, and dedicated to, Béla Bartók. The disc opens in the latter vein with Witold Lutosławski’s Musique funèbre, composed between 1954 and 1958 for the 10th anniversary of Bartók’s death. The title, often erroneously translated as “Funeral music,” is better rendered as “Music of mourning,” and connotes homage to one of Lutosławski’s greatest inspirations, if not the greatest, for he never dedicated a work to another composer. Although the piece’s overarching development resembles Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, the opening cellos closely prefigure the robust, overlapping memorial of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, even if they do chart a vastly different geography, from collective to individual landing. That initial feeling of density and weight gives way to a dark airiness. Motives bend and sway—at moments pliant, at others sharply angled. Darting violins bring us closer to a sense of inner turmoil and bold reckoning. The Bartókian flavor is clear yet faged, and falls back where it began: in the solemn cellos. Ashes to ashes.

As Wolfgang Sandner observes in this album’s liner notes, for Bartók the music of Hungary’s peasants “was the source of a radical new musical system, not material for reverting to a nostalgic transfiguration of the original sounds.” In light of this, we might reckon his Romanian Folk Dances of 1917 not as an archival storehouse but, more like Estonian composer Veljo Tormis’s choral arrangements, as an experiment made fresh by extant impulses. While for me the reference recording by Midori and Robert McDonald (1992, Sony Classical) gets to the core of the music in ways I’ve not since heard, the Stuttgarters’ soaring performance of this 1937 arrangement for string orchestra by Arthur Willner articulates the orbits of its moons with surprising precision. A delicate piece of nevertheless sweeping proportions, it moves by a hand unseen. The solo violin stands out like a red rose among a field of black, its changes organic, even a touch mournful, in the present setting. As the mosaic evolves, it gives light to the translucent cells of its becoming. The flute-like strings in the enlivening finale give us reason to rejoice in the shadows.

So, too, does the Divertimento. Composed 1939 in dedication to Paul Sacher (who commissioned the work) and the Basler Kammerorchester, it achieves novel balance of spiritedness and restraint under Davies’s direction. Its unmistakable beginning lures with its insistent rhythm but would just as soon fragment into multiple galaxies of melodic thought. There is a smoothness of execution in the tutti passages and a paper-thin delicacy to the solo strings. While one might expect that energy to be sustained, it waxes and wanes in a most natural, thought-out-loud sort of way that lends especial insight into Bartók’s compositional process. The second movement proceeds slowly at first, but then, with the coming of dawn, stretches its gravity. The lower and higher strings forge an implicit harmony, an acknowledgment of the invisible forces connecting them both. The contrast between double basses and violins is one not of tone but of purpose: the lowers an unstable fundament, the uppers a firmament in turmoil. This chaos they share as if it were blood. The final movement returns the promise of that dance with wit. There are, of course, intensely lyrical and slow-moving parts, with the violin carving surface relief, but always returning with that whirlwind of fire.

In the wake of this dynamism, selections from Bartók’s 27 Two- and Three-Part Choruses (1935-41) come as something of a breather. They are not adaptations of folksongs, but were composed in such a style at the behest of Zoltán Kodály. With evocative titles like “Wandering,” “Bread-baking,” and “Jeering,” each is a vignette of imagined life. A snare drum pops its way through the choral textures, by turns martial and lyrical, adding colors of interest throughout. And while these pieces hardly hold a candle to his a capella choruses (the orchestral writing feels at points superfluous), they provide welcome contrast to the veils that precede it with gift of vision.

Boris Yoffe
Song of Songs

Rosamunde Quartett
Andreas Reiner violin
Diane Pascal violin
Helmut Nicolai viola
Anja Lechner violoncello
The Hilliard Ensemble
David James countertenor
Rogers Covey-Crump tenor
Steven Harrold tenor
Gordon Jones baritone
Recorded November 2009 at Propstei St. Gerold
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The limitations of words tend toward failure in expressing the breadth of any creative endeavor. Describing the music of Boris Yoffe is an exceptional case, for here words risk expressing too much. Yoffe himself has lived a life of cutting to the chase. He was born in St. Petersburg in 1968, where he composed and premiered his first works just shy of his 15th birthday. He emigrated to Tel Aviv, completing a degree in composition, and then to Karlsruhe, Germany to study with Wolfgang Rihm. Rihm was struck by Yoffe’s individuality from day one, and includes an affectionate note to that effect in the CD booklet: “His music has great beauty. Can it be misunderstood? Oh yes. But it doesn’t complain. Stays beautiful and giving. Unmisunderstandable. With time also hardened, pointed.”

Yoffe writes one string quartet a day (each just a page long), as if it were scriptural meditation. Of those culled for the present disc, he notes, “For me this recording is a handwritten collection of verse, in which the quartet poems are accompanied by the tenderly coloured miniatures of the sung pieces.” Yoffe’s scores are bereft of dynamics, tempi, and directions, and so the Rosamunde Quartett and Hilliard Ensemble are to be commended for tending to them with so much heart.

I sought him but I found him not introduces the program with ashen strings before the Hilliards’ voices, after a pause, break through the gloom with their palatial moonlight. So does their antiphon continue in meditative interaction with the Rosamundes, whose occasionally sharper gestures merely emphasize a fundamental contemplation. Both registers exist in mutual exclusion, bonded in a reality where contact and surface are one and the same, and the experience of language turns in on itself. My own vineyard I did not keep, by contrast, reflects a less syllogistic approach to text and melody. Brief chains of overlapping voices grow like a vine along brick: filigree to a hardened exterior.

Yoffe allows fragrance to waft through the lattice of his notecraft and opens its interstices to further interpretation. I sleep, but my heart waketh takes this philosophy furthest in a veritable calligraphy of air, born of flesh and thought yet writ large on the wind. Pizzicati in this quartet-only piece feel not plucked but pulled, as if by gravity into a watery hermitage. Death as transfiguration.

My head is filled with dew, my locks with drops of the night is a river run so long that it births a canyon. It is a particularly affecting vehicle for countertenor David James, in whose throat resides angelic hues. This is the most contemplative piece on the album. Its heartbeat folds into strings in My soul went forth when he spoke, for which the body’s connection to a life divine charts an altogether deeper anatomy, one of which veins and arteries are spun from the Word and through which the blood of deliverance dreams like a promise kissed into cognizance.

Yoffe’s elastic sense of proportion confirms the sentiments of Paul Griffiths, who in his liner text characterizes this recording as “a sampling of eternity.” The only possible end result is another beginning.

Zsófia Boros
En otra parte

Zsófia Boros classical guitar
Recorded August 2012, Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Hungarian guitarist Zsófia Boros is a revelation. Having found in ECM an ideal venue for her playing, she is able to unfold her wings in quiet strength. Perhaps taking cue from Cuban composer Leo Brouwer, who saw the guitar as a boundless orchestra and whose music is prominently featured in her debut program for the label, Boros plays her instrument as if it were a piano. Each finger is independent of the others, but connected by a network vaster than the sum of its parts.

The shorter pieces of the program are also its deepest, and include the gorgeous faceting of Brouwer’s “An Idea,” the very simplicity of which allows Boros’s expressive gifts to shine. The same holds true for “Ecrovid” by Vienna-born composer Martin Reiter. It’s a jewel of a piece, steeped in an innocence that fades into a chain of unresolved statements. And in “Eclipse” (by Dominic Miller, an English guitarist born in Argentina), Boros bonds every color change to an overarching spectrum of song-like paths.

Furthest afield, geographically speaking, is the tender slice of contrast that is Ralph Towner’s “Green and Golden,” which despite the title is more about texture than color. Its lines curl ever inward, each a strand of physical synaesthesia. Towner’s braids make fine company for the muted spirals of “Te vas milonga” by Argentine composer Abel Fleury and the Brazilian standard “Se ela perguntar” by Dilermando Reis. Freshened in the acoustics of the Lugano studio, each forms, along with the engineering brilliance of Stefano Amerio and Boros’s obvious humility, an artisanal triangulation of effort to liberate an unadulterated spirit.

One can hardly forget in the longer pieces the distinctly shaded lyricism of Spanish composer Francisco Calleja’s “Canción triste.” The beauty thereof lies not only in the tune but also its feeling of history. It’s as if the composer had been waiting with his guitar beneath a storm cloud so that he might catch the music in the sound hole and grow it like a plant. Although the combination of production and performance is fine throughout, here especially one notices an immediate genius as Boros and the Amerio/Eicher team emphasize the warmth of the guitar’s lower end and the clarity of its upper registers in mutual separation. A meditative rubato glow gives this piece a generative character that pours from the fingers. Also pouring from the fingers are the cascades of “Callejón de la luna.” Written by Spanish composer Vicente Amigo, this piece sails the vessel of its flamenco inspirations toward wider waters: a story of lovers circling the earth until they meet again. Flamenco touches echo also in “Cielo abierto” by Argentine composer Quique Sinesi, but in even more refracted form. For while the percussive acuity and variation of technical flourish makes this a standout for its substantive atmospheres and melodic robustness, its brilliance is to be found more so in its balance of sinking and floating.

The album’s heart beats through Brouwer’s “Un dia de novembre,” which clarifies an uncommon gift for narrative. Brouwer is a master storyteller, and at these fingertips his characters come to life in tangible ways. At one point, Boros leads a rhetorical shift into more rolling motifs with the insistence of a single note. That she does this with such lack of force speaks to the sanctity of her relationship with the guitar. A variation of the same track ends album in somber skies, but beyond them an assurance brought only by dreams that the dawn will bring with it a feeling of return.

(To hear samples of En otra parte, click here.)

Michael Mantler
For Two

Bjarne Roupé guitars
Per Salo piano
Per Salo recorded June 2010 at Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Bjarne Roupé’s guitar tracks recorded August 2010 at home, Copenhagen
Mixed and mastered September/October 2010 at Studios La Buissonne by Gérard de Haro and Nicolas Baillard
Produced by Michael Mantler

Following the monumental Review and CONCERTOS, Vienna-born composer Michael Mantler intersects once again with ECM in an especially intimate project. For Two documents 18 duets written for jazz guitarist Bjarne Roupé and classical pianist Per Salo in a chemical reaction of, respectively, free improvisation and through-composed material. The resulting compound lures a microscope over the crucible of a uniquely cellular approach, which by these vignettes boil down Mantler’s equal footing in multiple registers.

Most impressive is the musicians’ rhetorical clarity, which despite a separation in training elicits an enchanting cross-fertilization. You might hear the jagged Duet One and think you have the album’s ensuing architecture pegged. But then Duet Two counters with a denser fusion of chord voicing and pointillism, while Duet Six reaches an almost bluesy union of form and content. Roupé’s fingers on the electric guitar are just as exploratory as Salo’s on the keyboard, so that rare passages of unison, as those in Duets Seven and Fifteen, feel more like departures than returns. Roupé’s hard-won crooning over Salo’s insistent finger pedaling in Duet Eight digs deepest into the fertile soil of Mantler’s umwelt, where perceptions of meter and matter switch places.

The beautiful Duet Ten discloses the responsiveness of composer and interpreters alike. Its brevity only serves to enhance the restless core of it all, that creative spark in which resides the potential to flare. Some may burn more brightly than others, but not one emits a hue it was never meant to emit. The notion of integration behind these pieces, then, is something born of their circumstances. In this case, the studio is not a meeting place but a funnel of ideas, from the end of which emerges unpredictable mixtures. Elements of stealth lurk in the shadows of Duets Fourteen and Sixteen, but always with an exit strategy in hand. Theirs is not a code to be broken. It is a break to be coded, a fracture in the window of time that mends itself in Duet Eighteen by molten notecraft.

Thus, the duet functions as a single organism that divides through the fortune of iteration.

(To hear samples of For Two, click here.)

John Holloway
Pavans and Fantasies from the Age of Dowland

John Holloway violin, viola
Monika Baer violin, viola
Renate Steinmann violin
Susanna Hefti viola
Martin Zeller bass violin
Recorded March 2013, Radio Studio Zürich
Engineer: Andreas Werner
Produced by Manfred Eicher
An ECM / SRF2 Kultur co-production
Executive producer (SRF): Roland Wächter

Violinist John Holloway has carved the deepest Baroque relief into ECM’s surface. With sole exception of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin, he has since 1999 been accompanied by harpsichord and organ or cello continuo in thoughtful and superbly executed programs of music by such composers as Schmelzer, Biber, Veracini, Leclair. For the present disc he joins an all-string ensemble of period specialists in a book of music at once haunting and robustly fleshed. Not only is it renewing to hear Holloway free-floating in a choir of equal voices; his choice of material carries further significance for turning back the dial to one of the great masterworks of the late Renaissance.

The Lachrimae Pavans of John Dowland (1563-1626) take thematic root in composer’s evergreen “Flow My Teares,” a song last recorded for ECM by John Potter on his Dowland Project’s debut. By time the Lachrimae were published in 1604, Dowland had been court hopping for a decade. He composed the collection under the auspices of his then-employer, Denmark’s King Christian IV, whose sister-queen Anne was the subject of its dedication. In addition to being musical landmarks, the Lachrimae represent a watershed historical moment in English music publishing. They came at a time of great frustration for Dowland, who never realized his dream of holding post at the English court. But while melancholy pervades, there are sunlit glades to be discovered among the thickets.

Indeed, there’s plenty of sunshine to be had in the “Lachrimae Antiquae,” which prepares for its daily works with nightlong ablution. As from so much of what follows, its darkness seeps through like a contrapuntal substance of harmonic order. Dowland’s beauties turn supplication into strength and draw the clouds nearer to earth with every added layer. Both musicians and music move as one sinuous entity—must do so, in fact, to achieve the limpid consistency required of the “Lachrimae Tristes,” which as the program’s exact center is the most deeply hued jewel of this crown. The qualities of subsequent variations are as individual as their titles. “Lachrimae Coactae” is threadbare yet flourishing, “Lachrimae Amantis” more viscous, and the “Lachrimae Verae” a burnished hasp of a conclusion.

Shuffled into the Lachrimae are exemplary selections of English consort music from Dowland’s time. Of these, the Fantasy upon one note by Henry Purcell (1659-1695) is the most forthright, while the Fantasy for 2 Trebles and Bass of Matthew Locke (1621/3-1677) cradles fleeting exuberances in downtempo reflections. The brightest surfaces come from William Lawes (1602-1645), whose autumnal Fantasy in C for 5 is another highpoint of the literature assembled herein. John Jenkins (1592-1678) gets a nod in the form of his Fantasy No. 12 for 2 Trebles and Bass, a fugal ripple of a piece with ballroom denouement. Its contrast of floating highs and supportive brushwork from bass violin give it a most expansive reach. Last but not least is Thomas Morley (1557/58-1602), a key figure in realizing the Lachrimae in print, and whose Lamento for 2 (excerpted from his Canzonets for two voyces) is a slow dance between forest sprites, whose leaf-hidden conjugations harness moonlight in every step.

Although there’s so much to admire the form and content of this album, it’s just the tip of a mountain of contemporaneous sources. Listening to Holloway and friends making such sweet music is akin to skipping a perilous journey and diving straight into the treasure horde at the end of it. But its greatest value might just be the desire it inspires to backtrack and see what fruitful lodgings might have been missed along the way.

(To hear selections from Pavans and Fantasies from the Age of Dowland, click here.)

Zehetmair Quartett
Beethoven/Bruckner/Hartmann/Holliger

Thomas Zehetmair violin
Kuba Jakowicz violin
Matthias Metzger violin (Hartmann)
Ruth Killius viola
Ursula Smith violoncello
Françoise Groben violoncello (Hartmann)
Beethoven, Bruckner, and Holliger recorded April/May 2010 by Andreas Werner Hartmann recorded April 2002 by Markus Heiland at Radio Studio DRS, Zürich
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Violinist Thomas Zehetmair has become a household name at ECM, and nowhere more passionately than in his world-renowned quartet. While the group has always been adventurous, this album takes that spirit to new heights, and lengths, as it presents a monumental two-disc program of quartets by Ludwig van Beethoven, Anton Bruckner, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, and Heinz Holliger.

(Photo credit: Keith Pattison)

In his brilliant liner notes, Wolfgang Sandner discusses the senescent Beethoven, whose final work, the formidable Opus 135, is the subject of the Zehetmairs’ bar- and hair-raising performance: “Beethoven’s late string quartets share the fate of many works created by great artists in their declining years, works which, as Adorno put it, point to the borderlines of art and almost acquire documentary stature. That is why, he continues, discussions of late Beethoven rarely lack references to his life and destiny.” In other words, the stature of an artist tends to be proportional to one’s biographical investment in that artist, as if the two were bonded matter. But if we were to see this quartet as a rope, we would find that, throughout each movement and between them, the unraveling yields thinner and thinner fibers, each more potent than the last. What distinguishes it as the final work of a master composer is therefore not so much the foreboding admixture of death and reflection that may or may not be intentioned in the music as an underlying spiritedness, held in check until choicest moments of reveal. All of this gives delicate passage into the second movement, which begins in that carefully controlled fragility by which Beethoven was so enamored but sows its field of tension with mounting density. The third movement, marked Assai lento, is cosmic and emotionally naked, a filamented chain into the final movement. Where rhythmic interplay was delightful before, here it surges.

From the end of one’s compositional life to the beginning of it, Bruckner’s String Quartet in c minor, WAB 111, was written in 1862 as a study piece while under the tutelage of German cellist-conductor Otto Kitzler. A smooth mélange of styles, it harbors echoes of Beethoven, and perhaps more explicitly of Dvorák, especially in the opening and closing movements. It is a sumptuous offering, its relief more extroverted in comparison to Beethoven’s inlaid approach, but in the flowing Andante we hear the latter’s game of hide and seek with exuberance before climbing ashore fully intact in the Scherzo, which serves as an amiable and spirited portal into the darker conclusion.

Hartmann’s String Quartet No. 2 is duly special for appearing on this record. First, it was recorded in 2002, eight years before the rest of the program, with a different second violinist (Matthias Metzger) and cellist Françoise Groben (1965-2011), a founding member of the quartet and in whose memory this recording, her last, bears dedication. Second, the music itself represents one of the pinnacles of the 20th-century string quartet. Begun at the tail end of World War II and finished in its immediate wake, it takes a three-movement structure, building on lachrymose foundations a tower of dance. Far from linear, however, it continues the theme of animated expositions out of quiet introductions. By these the music adopts an illusion of self-recognition. Despite its many shadows, the passion and joy with which the quartet plays this piece is fully evident. Groben’s playing is a wonder, bringing out as it does a turgid core. That said, the players do, and must, work together as one unit, for each move pulls the others in empathic response. A pervading heaviness in the central Andantino makes it an especially demanding play, as the performers must engage in deep listening and strictest attention to dynamics. The last movement, a Presto, enables reckoning of those darker predecessors with the light of geometric (if not also geographic) thinking and lends sanctity to the final major chord. Phenomenal.

Last is Holliger’s own String Quartet No. 2. Written by commission from the musicians, this stream-of-consciousness, single-movement work includes aleatory elements and is played scordatura. Like a scientist who pours water from one glass to another yet still finds wonder in the changes, Holliger engages the strings in flowing conversations of elements and transparencies, marking every drop spilled with precision. In this way, he cleverly reverses inner and outer. Like the Hartmann, this piece requires religious attention to dynamic contrast. This is not to say that Holliger is a cryptic composer, but that he composes with solutions rather than questions. One needs not overextend any theoretical impulse to understand the motives of writing that so comfortably favors absorption. This means that the piece’s quieter midsection may seem the very definition of mystery, when in fact it uses the mode of whisper to focus attention on its thread count. Consequently, the more forthright politics of its surroundings glisten with a personal sheen, which finds itself honed by erosion and the shape of human voices, as the musicians are bid to sing in the final scene. With the joining of their throats, these classical constructions of gut and wood become bodies in and of themselves, and render the preceding quartets a limb apiece.

Keller Quartett
Ligeti String Quartets / Barber Adagio

András Keller violin
János Pilz violin
Zsófia Környei violin (on String Quartet No. 2)
Zoltán Gál viola
Judit Szabó violoncello
Recorded June 2007 and October 2011 (String Quartet No. 2), Radio Studio DRS, Zürich
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“How times have changed,” notes Paul Griffiths in his liner text to this album of string quartets by György Ligeti (1923-2006) and Samuel Barber (1910-1981). “How a recording can change them.” Indeed, at the bows of the Keller Quartett, the capabilities of two violins, one viola, and a cello are intensely magnified by performance and composition in equal measure.

Ligeti’s single-movement String Quartet No. 1 (1953/54) takes the title Métamorphoses nocturnes. It opens the program with a DNA helix, from which a single aberrant rung breaks free as a model for the others. The Kellers handle such structural changes with graceful science as warped dances and dizzying draws stoke the embers of continuity from beginning to end. Pizzicati become tactile pressure points, signs that the titular metamorphoses take place in those interims where dreams expand into days’ worth of experience yet take up only a sweep of the second hand. Darker textures at the center of this quartet prefigure Henryk Górecki’s own by decades, while the unforgettable slap pizzicato from cello marks the path with fortitude. The sheer variety of textures is beguiling enough. That Ligeti is able to combine them so organically takes a depth of attention of which few are possessed. A flock of harmonic glissandi toward the end elicit some of the most atmospheric writing for the medium, lasting only as long as the thought to include them before the cello snakes into affirmation and quiet recoil.

The undefeated Adagio from Barber’s opus 11 String Quartet (1935/36) is a chromatic dream come true. Needing no introduction, it nonetheless feels introduced here by the Keller touch. Tasteful, selective applications of vibrato allow for smooth textures to arise, especially in the second violin and viola. Furthermore, the musicians back off at the piece’s climax, thus rendering it less insistent, more of a blossoming than a cutting through, and setting up rawness in the cello-heavy afterglow. It’s somewhat regrettable that the rest of the quartet should be so often ignored, and the missed opportunity to correct this tendency here is only somewhat perplexing, for full inclusion might also have undermined the intimate compactness of the disc, which if pushed to a double could lose its hold on the listener (I would argue for the opposite). Either way, Barber’s contrapuntal beauties are vibrant and secure in this unique Ligeti sandwich.

Second violinist Zsófia Környei replaces János Pilz for Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 2, which over the course of five movements proves itself to be microscopically bonded beneath a seemingly fragmented surface. Where the mood is slow and sustained, the feeling is of viscous substance from which arise globules that never quite attain autonomy. The mostly pizzicato center forges dawn from dusk, welcoming ephemeral bow contacts in latent purchase. The final Allegro, by contrast, orients itself by a language most akin to cinema. As if in a credit roll, arpeggios and peripheral utterances sweep themselves into recession, leaving only a trail of shadows for us to follow.

Then again, the invitation to follow might itself be an illusion born of the listening process, which can never repeat itself exactly as before. And so, not only can a recording change the times; it can record change itself.

Gidon Kremer
Giedré Dirvanauskaité
Khatia Buniatishvili
Peter I. Tchaikovsky / Victor Kissine – Piano Trios

Gidon Kremer violin
Giedré Dirvanauskaité violoncello
Khatia Buniatishvili piano
Recorded August 2010, Himmelfahrtskirche, Munich
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Russian-born composer Victor Kissine first eased into ECM when violinist Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica recorded Kissine’s orchestration of the Schubert G-major quartet for the label in 2003. The present disc of piano trios gives Kissine’s own music a welcome spotlight, placing his 2009 Zerkalo (The Mirror) in conversation with a masterwork of the medium: Tchaikovsky’s opus 50 a-minor Trio.

For this reference performance of Zerkalo, Kremer joins cellist Giedré Dirvanauskaité and pianist Khatia Buniatishvili, the very trio to whom the work is dedicated. From the beginning it’s clear that Kissine’s music doesn’t believe in beginnings. Rather, it raises one hand to the sky and another to the earth, leaving grooves of barest traction along the way and notating the resulting paths, yet always with the unwritten periphery in mind. Throughout the piece, Kissine riffs meticulously on the piano’s essence as a percussion instrument. Its echoing relationship to pizzicati provides as much rhythmic as melodic emphasis. It might seem a bold move to begin the album with this nominally modern piece were it not also so delicate in its infusions of place and time, creating of those philosophical staples an intimate and dialogic repose. Speaking to the latter is an astonishing variety of timbres, from the flute-like breath of Dirvanauskaité’s bow to Buniatishvili’s field of twigs and branches, and all of it kissed by Kremer’s wiring. Zerkalo speaks mostly at the level of a whisper and turns the magnification of its microscope higher with every pianistic reset. The music ends—again, not really an ending—in the manner of a palindrome, touched by an evening breeze that has licked brine and carried with it the dreams of freshwater afterlife.

Tchaikovsky’s Trio is headed with the words “To the memory of a great artist,” referring to pianist Nikolai Rubinstein, on whose first death anniversary the piece was premiered. In light of this, it’s no wonder that Tchaikovsky himself claimed it an elegiac piece. And yet, such a range of moods courses through its two gargantuan movements that choosing any single quality from among them would seem a sacrilege. We may read plenty of mourning into the cello writing especially, which like Peter Pan seems at times embroiled in a struggle to attach shadows to the pianism’s running feet. But then one notices Tchaikovsky’s feel for space, no better served then by engineer Peter Laenger, and which like the composer’s Souvenir de Florence turns harmonies and compulsions into imagistic storehouses.

The drama therein exists not only in the heft of its 20-minute first movement, but also in the sensitivity of its outpouring. Its most robust sections are also its tenderest, as in a beautiful passage just over halfway through in which violin and cello circle slowly around the piano’s lumbering chords. The Trio concludes with a theme and 11 variations. Enchanting passages abound, as in the fifth variation, for which the piano floats into higher registers against folkish backing from the strings. The churning reverie of the ninth variation and anchoring pizzicato cello of the eleventh are further highlights. All roads lead to the bracing Finale and a Coda that sends us off with a lullaby, that we might dream of the music’s continuance.

(To hear samples of Piano Trios, click here.)

ECM’s New Series has been producing classical releases of highest caliber since 1984. As the German imprint quietly celebrates its 30th anniversary, these words attempt an affectionate survey of its output. Then again, how does one delineate a history of that which is so much a part of it? Jean-Luc Godard addresses this very question in his Histoire(s) du cinéma, of which the soundtrack saw a New Series release (ECM 1706-10) in 1999 and from which this essay borrows its title. The parenthetical “s” of Godard’s masterwork serves not merely to hinge the singular and the plural, but to unravel the multiple, simultaneous registers of the filmic medium—moving, as it were, from an “either-or” to a “neither-nor” approach. A film breaks down not only into individual frames, but also into molecular compounds within those frames, until signs of the original become nothing more than the breath expended to describe it. Similarly, the New Series vision, under the watchful ear of producer Manfred Eicher, has for three decades programmed music as if it were a field of signs that live among and within us, each an ephemeral capture that begets infinite others.

The New Series bears no discernibly overarching aesthetic. Just as ECM proper has diversified the pasture of jazz with flowers of stark variation, so has the New Series loosened the borders of the classical landscape through democratic enhancements of technique, instrumentation, and concept. Indeed, the success of the New Series vision has grown in direct proportion to its inclusivity, even as it has refined an idiosyncratic corpus of composers. If one can say that Eicher has brought a classical sense of detailing toward the jazz-oriented records that earned him first renown, one might also say that he brought to classical recording a feeling of jazz, insofar as whatever spirit animates the improviser with unquantifiable purpose also thrums like a shell around every classical recording worthy of the ECM moniker.

Inception of the New Series traces back to 1980, when Eicher first heard Arvo Pärt on the radio. Not knowing what it was, he searched for quite some time before connecting those angelic sounds to a name that would define the label to come. In its role as the first New Series release, Pärt’s Tabula rasa (ECM 1275) is said to have introduced an ancient world to a new sound. And yet, it would be just as accurate to say that the album introduced an ancient sound to a new world. In other words, it wasn’t the newness of Pärt’s music that turned the album into such a watershed moment. It was, rather, its resonant heart, to which listeners across genres and affiliations found immutable connections, points of relatability, and glimmers of familiarity in its starry sky. Such an interpretation existed already in the name: New Series. As for the “new,” one finds it in the recordings and performances. The word “series,” on the other hand, connotes linkages between past and future tenses in an unbroken chain of influence. Like the single line that underscores the label’s logo, it’s a horizon, either side of which brings innovative possibilities to the old, and old possibilities to the innovative.

Within the parameters of Eicher’s discerning archaeology, much credit must go to ECM’s committed engineers, of whom Peter Laenger and Stephan Schellmann stand out for their clear, adaptive methods. Schellmann’s tenure with the label has been remarkably varied, ranging from violinist John Holloway’s benchmark accounts of transitional Baroque repertoires to the chamber music of 20th-century Korean composer Isang Yun. Moreover, Schellmann has shadowed András Schiff’s 10-disc traversal of the complete Beethoven sonatas and, within the last year, an extraordinary account by Anna Gourari of Sergey Prokofiev’s Visions fugitives. Laenger’s most commercially successful intersections with ECM have generated collaborations with the Hilliard Ensemble, including the much-beloved Officium project with Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek. He has also been involved in Pärt productions, Tabula rasa not least of all, and made audible the slightest whispers of Russian contemporary Alexander Knaifel. The contributions of these and others at the mixing board are integral by presence so tangible that their all-too-often-ignored efforts would be impossible not to notice.

Binding these artistic confluences is Eicher’s willingness to not so much think outside the proverbial box as redefine and expand what that box may contain to begin with. An especially fascinating orbit of the ECM solar system has been traced by a relatively small but no less life-sustaining planet of spoken word projects. These have taken various forms, as in the above-mentioned Godard soundtrack and in the unaccompanied recitations of actor Bruno Ganz, who has lent his voice to the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, T.S. Eliot, and Giorgos Seferis. There is, too, the gorgeous pairing of cellist Frances-Marie Uitti and author Paul Griffiths, there is still time (ECM 1882), which dovetails poetry by Griffiths, limited to the 482-word vocabulary as spoken by Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, into the cellist’s fully immediate improvising.

I recently caught up with Griffiths, who kindly offered his insight into working with Manfred Eicher in the studio.

“Manfred said almost nothing, but what he did say was crucial. No less crucial was his just being there. We hadn’t prepared very much—hardly at all. We tried some things out that didn’t work. Others did, sometimes at a first take. It was hard work, and extremely easy. No pressure. Just let it happen. Room for spontaneity. We kind of relaxed into intensity. Frances’s playing was—you can hear this, and though I don’t like the word I have to use it—an inspiration.”

Griffiths’s summary of the recording process happens to be an effective description of the listening that attends it. One may come to each New Series recording afresh, suspending expectations toward even standard repertory in favor of the novel expositions sure to take place. Sometimes the listening clicks, achieving unity of absorption at first meeting. Other times, understanding grows as experiences bond with the music, little by little. There is room for spontaneity in how one may hear the sounds and, yes, an inspired communication behind it all.

I began, though, by asking Griffiths about his first experience as New Series listener. “That would have to have been the Arvo Pärt album Tabula rasa, when it came out, in pre-CD days, in a foot-square sleeve of unglossy white, which would be so difficult to keep clean, but one would try,” he said. The historicity of his reply would seem to treat the album in question as an artifact and reminds me that my first copy of the same was on the even more outmoded medium of cassette. And his initial impressions?

“I was bowled over, like everyone else, especially by the title piece. Before that ‘Arvo Pärt’ was just a name floating around—one of the younger Soviet composers who’d taken modernism on board—without that name being grounded in any experience of the music. We’re talking of a time, of course, when knowledge of music from the Soviet Union was very limited. To anticipate your third question, I can’t remember what came next—maybe the second Pärt album, Arbos, or a Lockenhaus compilation. But I’m not sure I was aware that the Lockenhaus disc came from the same stable; it took a little while, for me at least, before I began to have a notion of an ECM identity.”

And what did that identity signify once he became aware of it as such?

“There was the matter of design, which impressed in a very different way when sleeves were 12” by 12”—I vividly recall the beautiful starkness of, especially, the Arbos cover, with the title in blue-green against dark grey. Then the notes were always good. But of course it was the sound, the combination of intimacy and distance, and the awareness that a recorded performance is not simply a recording of a performance but something distinct—the Glenn Gould lesson, absorbed with total simplicity and straightforwardness. It may have taken me a little longer to notice that ECM was also creating its own repertory.”

On the topic of notes, any fan will have become acquainted with the contributions of Griffiths, who along with music critic Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich has brought his erudition to the lion’s share of New Series booklets. In addition to an encyclopedic knowledge of contemporary classical music and its lineages, Griffiths has given beautiful, narrative readings to handfuls of compositions in ways thitherto unexplored. I inquired about his first assignment, which to his recollection was Kim Kashkashian’s disc of three Hungarian viola concertos—by Bartók, Kurtág, Eötvös—with the Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra (ECM 1711).

“That would have been in the late nineties. I knew it had to be good. I would guess that everyone working for Manfred, in whatever capacity, strains to deliver only the best. That’s part of his skill and his success, that he doesn’t impose but somehow opens, lets you achieve as much as you’re able. The terms are perhaps too grand in which to talk about liner notes, but I felt—and still feel, maybe twenty or thirty albums later—an ECM assignment to be a special opportunity.”

Special, too, for those on the receiving end of their intellectual labor.

No such musical body would stand without the nourishment of its composers. In this respect, ECM has widened the listenership of previously insularly known figures. Pärt, to be sure, heads the list for his inaugural significance, but more lastingly for the unpretentious depth of his notecraft. Here is a human being of flesh and less tangible things who tends the latter with such integrity that even those who wouldn’t normally consider themselves classical listeners have made his motives a staple of their listening diet. I hesitate to describe Pärt as a “universal” composer, implying as the term does a reach fanning out from this blue orb and its galaxy into countless more beyond, when in reality his power has the opposite effect, burrowing so far inward that it caresses the spark which makes each of us unique.

Pärt’s ruminations comprise but one landmass in a changing map that has lowered its waters to reveal archipelagos, canyons, and glaciers—each possessed of its own topographical influence. In this respect, one value of the New Series is its vested interest in the marginalized, the exiled, and the misunderstood. Estonia has blessed us further with the folkloric choral interpretations of Veljo Tormis and the glowing architectures of Erkki-Sven Tüür, while the former Soviet state of Georgia has given the thematic persistence of Giya Kancheli, Ukraine the postludinal elegies of Valentin Silvestrov, and Armenia the open loom of Tigran Mansurian’s threadbare prayers. On the European continent, we find the meticulous microscopy of György Kurtág, while Gavin Bryars emotes from across the English Channel with his sonorous fusions. Through all of this, the works of Bach—and, more recently, Schubert and Schumann—have become touchstones. Hence, my final question for Griffiths on the nature of ECM’s classical interests, to which he replied:

“Yes, there certainly is an ECM repertory—a world where Schubert and Schumann are more prominent than Beethoven, and certainly than Mozart—but I’m not sure its rationale can easily be defined. Factors include Manfred’s taste, of course, but also his loyalty to artists and his curiosity, or perhaps his eagerness to go against his own grain. Perhaps there’s a sort of intimate yet intense expressiveness that links all these things. And an absence of show. Is it possible to think of a composer unimagineable on ECM? Wagner? But then I could imagine the Siegfried Idyll, with the right performers and the right context. Oh, perhaps the key is in some sense of the music—and the performance—creating an arc of an uncompleted circle, a sense of something beyond.”

Mention of performance speaks to the talented musicians that have lent their hands, bows, and voices to the above repertoires. Notable among them are violinist Thomas Zehetmair and his famously score-less quartet; cellist Thomas Demenga for his pairing of Bach’s cello suites with contemporary chamber works, to say nothing of his phenomenal homage to Paul Sacher (ECM 1520/21); Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica for their sense of adventure; Kashkashian for her impeccable tone and tireless championing of modern music; the now-disbanded Hilliard Ensemble and their thriving protégés Trio Mediaeval for likewise expanding vocal repertoires with utmost professionalism and respect; pianists Alexei Lubimov and Herbert Henck for their artful assemblies and contrasting touch at the keyboard; and tenor John Potter’s Dowland Project for unusually organic permutations of the troubadour’s heart. These are but a few.

There are those—namely Meredith Monk, Heinz Holliger, and Thomas Larcher—who fulfill both categories with comparable proficiency, and still others who are in categories all their own: violinist Paul Giger, composer Heiner Goebbels, and keyboardist extraordinaire Keith Jarrett. That Jarrett has been able to cross the line so fluidly between jazz and classical realms speaks to the blurriness of that line. Whether playing Bach’s French Suites on harpsichord (ECM 1513/14), the 24 Preludes and Fugues of Shostakovich on piano (ECM 1469/70), or fronting an orchestra in sweeping accounts of Mozart piano concertos, his contributions to the label circle back to where it all began: with him at the keyboard and Kremer at the violin ushering in an age of discovery as Pärt’s Fratres prepared to speak its mantra for all time.

In line with an arbitrary and subjective tradition, I conclude with the following “Top 10” list of New Series recommendations. More than anything, it reflects a hierarchy of personal engagement and as such may or may not overlap with your own experience of the label. Either way, I hope it will be cause for (re)discovery. The astute fan will note that a good portion of my picks was recorded in the first half of the 1990s. This is no coincidence. Many of my favorites immediately proceeded from my introduction to the Series by way of Pärt’s Te Deum (ECM 1505) and represent something of a golden age for the label, during which production, aesthetic, and selection were for me at their peak of harmony.

1. Giya Kancheli: Exil (ECM 1535). Kancheli’s Exil will forever be the crowning achievement of all for which the New Series stands. Recorded in the defining acoustics of Austria’s Sankt Gerold monastery and featuring the incomparable soprano Maacha Deubner, its sounds are of an order beyond the craft of any wordsmith. Hear it, and you may just find that your heart has been holding a space for it since before you were born.
2. Paul Giger: Chartres (ECM 1386). The Swiss violinist combines improvisation and through-composed scripture in a peerless—all the more so for being solo—exploration of the Chartres cathedral. Through extended techniques such as overtones, percussive tapping, and choral textures, Giger forges an effect so unearthly that it pulls ghosts from every stone.
3. Heinz Holliger: Scardanelli-Zyklus (ECM 1472/73). Holliger’s seasonally inflected obsession is a masterpiece. From the album’s mysterious cover, in which the autograph of Hölderlin’s alter ego floats in a sea of stars, to the shuffling of a cappella settings into small orchestral longings, and all of it sheltering an epic flute solo by Aurèle Nicolet, there’s enough here to satisfy a lifetime of returns.
4. Erkki-Sven Tüür: Crystallisatio (ECM 1590). With a background in progressive rock and abiding interest in jazz-like sonorities, Tüür pulls out all the stops in his ECM debut. Shorter works for various orchestral combinations build to the title composition for 3 flutes, glockenspiel, strings, and live electronics, and beyond it to the 1994 Requiem, which stands as one of the most compelling examples to ever bear the title.
5. Gavin Bryars: Vita Nova (ECM 1533). Though Bryars seems to have faded from the label’s auspices, there was a time when he flourished, and never to such beauteous effect as on Vita Nova. The album documents some of countertenor David James’s most articulate singing on record, both among the Hilliards and with a haunting trio of strings, and amends the composer’s atmospheric precision with textual resonances, even in the absence of words.
6. Arvo Pärt: Miserere (ECM 1430). Of the many recordings I might have selected from the Estonian composer’s archive, Miserere stands apart. Pärt’s handling of the title work balances the apocalyptic and the introspective with such care, it’s a wonder the musicians don’t weep as they play. The singers’ interactions with organ and winds prepare the skin until the ritual drumming of Sarah Was Ninety Years Old anoints with holy genealogy.
7. Christopher Bowers-Broadbent/Sarah Leonard: Górecki/Satie/Milhaud/Bryars (ECM 1495). There’s nothing quite like this rarely mentioned record, which combines the smooth limb-work of organist Christopher Bowers-Broadbent and the atmospheric reach of soprano Sarah Leonard (both featured to astonishing effect on Miserere) across a bridge of music by Górecki, Satie, Milhaud, and Bryars. While the middle two are writing for organ alone, the album’s massive bookends feature the unusual duo, and the results shatter. Between the declamatory punctuations of Górecki’s O Domina Nostra and the stream-of-conscious narrative of The Black River, for which Bryars sets words of Jules Verne, listeners might very well find themselves transformed.
8. Hans Otte: Das Buch der Klänge (ECM 1659). Even more rarely mentioned is this enchanting album of solo piano music by Hans Otte, which in Henck’s capable hands comes alive in a most assured interpretation. Otte’s infusion of fundament and fragment belongs to a world unto itself.
9. J.S. Bach: Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis (ECM 2229). Despite the fact that Bach lurks in so many places, some more overtly than others, it wasn’t difficult to settle on this recording by master oboist Heinz Holliger, violinist-director Erich Höbarth, and the Camerata Bern, though Keith Jarrett and Kim Kashkashian’s rendering of the viola da gamba sonatas (ECM 1501) comes a close second. The sheer fullness of Holliger’s phrasing and feel for rhythm alone make this one worth owning. That, and one of the finest Bach programs ever assembled.
10. Arianna Savall/Petter Udland Johansen: Hirundo Maris (ECM 2227). So many albums might have occupied this place in my list, but this one is a more recent discovery and therefore freshest in mind. Singer-harpist Arianna Savall, daughter of Jordi Savall and the late Monstserrat Figueras (in whose memory the album is dedicated), and Oslo-born singer and multi-instrumentalist Petter Udland Johansen form the core of the titular project, which explores folk roots in early music of Norway and Catalonia. Bound by an uncompromising instinct for melody and augmented by spirited arrangements, their artistry seems boundless in one of the more surprising bouquets to sprout from ECM soil.

Honorable mentions might just as well include every other release from the label, but I would highlight, in catalog order: Meredith Mon’s Dolmen Music (ECM 1197), Steve Reich’s Tehillim (ECM 1215), Paul Hindemith’s Viola Sonatas as played by Kashkashian (ECM 1330-32), Thomas Demenga’s pairing of Bach’s 4th Cello Suite with works of Heinz Holliger (ECM 1340), Gesualdo’s Tenebrae as sung by the Hilliard Ensemble (ECM 1422/23), the same ensemble’s landmark recording of selections from the Codex Speciálnik (ECM 1504), an impressionistic rendering of Federico Mompou’s Música Callada by Henck (ECM 1523), an all-Sándor Veress program which includes his Passacaglia Concertante under baton and oboe of Holliger (ECM 1555), Eleni Karaindrou’s soundtrack to the film Ulysses’ Gaze (ECM 1570), Arvo Pärt’s a cappella magnum opus Kanon pokajanen (ECM 1654/55), the Trio Sonatas of J. D. Zelenka (ECM 1671/72), Heiner Goebbels’s spectral Surrogate Cities (ECM 1688/89), Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble’s sophomore album Mnemosyne (ECM 1700/01), H.I.F. Biber’s Unam Ceylum as played to perfection by Holloway and friends (ECM 1791), the Italian Duo Gazzana’s dynamic Five Pieces (ECM 2238), Dobrinka Tabakova’s label debut String Paths (ECM 2239), and Victor Kissine’s profound Between Two Waves (ECM 2312).

Finally, no New Series conspectus would be complete without at least passing mention of Valentin Silvestrov’s Silent Songs (ECM 1898/99). Though not originally an ECM production, Eicher saw fit to reissue these invaluable recordings of poem settings for baritone and piano. Like the label that revived them, they speak for the forgotten so that we might remember. (See this article as it originally appeared for Sequenza 21.)

Reto Bieri
Contrechant
Music for clarinet solo

Reto Bieri clarinet
Recorded September 2010, Propstei St. Gerold
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Within the ECM New Series sub-catalogue of solo recordings, the label debut of Reto Bieri stands out for impeccable selection and technical prowess. The Swiss clarinetist studied at Basel’s Academy of Music and at the Juilliard School before embarking on a solo career in collaboration with new and established composers alike, and the fruits of those efforts are bursting from their skins on Contrechant. Luciano Berio is the only featured composer with whom Bieri did not work in preparing for this album, and his 1983 Lied opens the program with its cantabile, legato phrasings. Aside from establishing something of a theme (in his liner text, Paul Griffiths notes among these pieces an affinity for song), the meticulousness of Bieri’s approach to the instrument sets a precedent for mood and timing. At his fingertips—each a hand unto itself—the deceptive simplicity of Berio’s spatial grammar feels omnipresent.

Likewise omnipresent are the grammars of Salvatore Sciarrino and Heinz Holliger. Both composers make illustrative use of multiphonics and formidable extended playing. The former’s 1982 Let me die before I wake reveals a matrix of overtones so rich that the addition of any other instrument would be an intrusion. Its artisan quality seems to plane away its own surface until underlying patterns are revealed. The album’s title piece comes from Holliger. Composed in 2007, it strikes a characteristic balance between darkness and whimsy. Each vignette therein is a window both into itself and into the whole. Across a range of transcendent voicings, it steps through a spectral door in the five-minute epilogue. Holliger’s Rechant (2008) bears dedication to the late Swiss clarinetist Thomas Friedli, with whom Bieri briefly studied. Despite its kindred telemetry of action and reaction, of interpretation and extrapolation, a lighter footprint makes it a song of more internal measures.

The title of Elliott Carter’s Gra means “to play” in Polish and was written in 1993 to commemorate Witold Lutosławski’s 80th birthday. With its leaping figures and exacting breath control, it is a virtuosic feast, to be sure. Beyond that, its youthful pilot light flickers with verve. Péter Eötvös’s Derwischtanz (1993/2001), on the other hand, travels upward rather than inward, shuffling staircases before falling like an autumn leaf with no purpose but to decay. The latter piece pairs well with Lightshadow-trembling (1993) by Gergely Vajda, a student of Eötvös whose embodiment of title feels like a narrative too restless to contain.

This is, in the end, what connects all of the above: an uncontainable feeling to be experienced.

(To hear samples of Contrechant, click here.)

Franz Schubert
Moments musicaux

Valery Afanassiev piano
Recorded September 2010, Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera, Lugano
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Valery Afanassiev returns to ECM with his second program dedicated to Franz Schubert (1797-1828). Whereas his much-lauded Lockenhaus disc reckoned with the massive final sonata, here focus is on the Moments musicaux (D. 780, Op. 94) and the Opus 53 D-Major Sonata, both late works of characteristically bipolar flavor. Also characteristic are Afanassiev’s interpretations of them, infused as they are with ebullience and melancholy in equal measure. In his liner notes, the Russian pianist muses on the notion of a “no-time’s land,” a momentary space that Schubert has filled with this music. It is a lingering moment, a moment to take pleasure in the details of one’s surroundings, a moment that is itself music. He notes also the tendency among (a certain number of) Japanese poets to unravel a moment, “driving it to the brink of eternity.”

Such aesthetics operate at turning points throughout the disc, first noticeable in the transition between the C-Major Moderato and A-flat Major Andantino of the Moments musicaux. Schubert composed its six miniatures sporadically between 1823 and 1828. That Mendelssohn called them “Songs without Words” should come as no surprise, for the block chords that pervade the first of the two sections in question lay down a solid foundation for all the melodies to follow. Emotionally vibrant yet somehow neutral (the notes shuffle one step back for each taken forward), these mercurial waters yield an Arthurian sword of innocent beauty. Neither parallel nor divergent, these streams meet in the solace of a universal unfolding. Following the charming, child-like storytelling of the f-minor Allegro moderato, the c-sharp minor Moderato owes its texture to Bach, whose keyboard style it expertly emulates but also colors with its own romantic flair before returning to f minor in a galloping Allegro vivace. Afanassiev excavates the latter with just the variety it needs to catch our archaeological regard. Last is an Allegretto in A-flat Major. Its statelier posture and chromatic inhalations make it the most mature moment of the set.

Characterized by Afanassiev as “an assortment of games,” the D-Major Sonata is something of a fountain of youth. “Unlike Schubert,” he goes on to say, “I shall never play hopscotch again except in some of his sonatas.” A relatively brisk sonata by Schubert standards, the Opus 53 can hold a candle to any of Beethoven’s and rests on the foundation of its massive first movement. A dense opening reveals flowery, delicate runs, alternating between drama and reflection within a naked stream of consciousness. The second movement, while longer, is more introspective. Afanassiev’s management of its densities depends on a feel for harmony as masterful as the composer’s. Like the Scherzo that follows, and even the concluding Rondo, it fuels its own ambition with transparency.

Afanassiev is an artist keyed into cinema, philosophy, and cultural difference. He brings this knowledge to his Schubert, which opens its eyes like sails and catches the wind of an interpretive spirit. Through this allegorical filter, he turns life into light and shines it on the keyboard without compromise. These pieces, then, become part of a brighter whole, wherein beats the heart of one who had many more songs to sing.

(To hear samples of Moments musicaux, click here.)