Johannes Brahms: Klavierstücke (ECM New Series 2730/31)

| Tyran Grillo

Johannes Brahms
András Schiff
Klavierstücke

András Schiff Blüthner piano
Recorded March 2021
Kammermusiksaal Hermann J. Abs
des Beethoven-Haus, Bonn
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Production coordination: Guido Gorna
Cover photo: Péter Nádas
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 18, 2026

The distance between Johannes Brahms’s early and late piano music supplies the organizing principle for András Schiff’s latest addition to his ECM New Series traversal of the 19th-century German composer. Schiff begins with the long-lost Albumblatt, written when Brahms was 20 for the friendship album of Göttingen music director Arnold Wehner and later adapted for the Horn Trio, Op. 40. Youthful possibility enters a silent argument with late style, and four intervening decades press upon every note.

Schiff plays a beautifully preserved 1859 Blüthner whose warmth never becomes cosmetic and whose bass register retains an almost archaeological presence. His booklet notes unite personal reflection with close attention to Brahms’s striations, clarifying the interpretive dialogue at play throughout. The instrument extends Schiff’s intimate correspondence with Brahms across earlier ECM recordings, including the Clarinet Sonatas with Jörg Widmann and the Piano Concertos with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. His Violin Sonatas with Yuuko Shiokawa occupy another chapter. Here, the Albumblatt, marked Allegro con espressione, rocks gently beneath phrases of fluid grace. Melancholy passes through sunlit warmth, leaving consolation truer for the pain dissolved within it. Schiff shapes each phrase with the curvature of handwriting, as though the young composer’s hand still pressed against the page.

The Eight Piano Pieces, Op. 76, composed largely in 1878 after Brahms had neglected solo piano music for more than a decade, contract the dimensions of his earlier sonatas while enlarging their interiors. The opening F-sharp-minor Capriccio surges forward, tightened by a fleeting allusion to the finale of Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony that Schiff allows to flicker at the edge of recognition. The jocular B-minor Capriccio rearranges the floor with volatile accents; the C-sharp-minor Capriccio drives every gesture deeper into the keyboard. In the A-minor Intermezzo, an ashen chorale shelters unexpected tenderness. By the ecstatic C-major finale, exuberance carries knowledge of entropy, its brightness sharpened by everything it has survived.

The Fantasies, Op. 116, written in 1892, leave D minor and ultimately return there, each departure altering the point of origin. Schiff lends the opening Capriccio muscular clarity, preserving its contrapuntal grain, while the A-minor Intermezzo finds knowing innocence in folk inflection. The G-minor Capriccio tears open this fragile space with chopped rhythms and distant calls, its ferocity generated through fracture rather than brute force. Brahms originally conceived the central E-major Intermezzo as a nocturne, and its suspended consciousness seems to contemplate contemplation itself. The concluding D-minor Capriccio encloses a vulnerable middle within confrontational outer material.

The Intermezzi, Op. 117, inhabit an even more concentrated emotional world. Brahms associated the opening piece with a Scottish ballad in which a mother laments her absent child, and Schiff lets its rocking motion retain the gravity of that imagined voice. Comfort and grief share one pulse; the lower register answers from beneath ordinary thought. In the B-flat-minor Intermezzo, harmony erodes certainty from within as the phrases darken by degrees. Schiff allows the music freedom to breathe without turning sorrow into theater. Tragedy has been compressed beyond narrative, an ancient text reduced to scorched fragments whose missing sentences outweigh the surviving words.

With the Six Piano Pieces, Op. 118, beauty and desolation become inseparable. The celebrated A-major Intermezzo seems almost too delicate to hold, yet its slow undulation possesses immense structural strength. Schiff sustains its melodic line patiently, allowing inner voices to rise and vanish at their own pace. The vigorous G-minor Ballade, alone among Brahms’s late piano works in bearing that title, expands the dramatic perimeter without breaking the cycle’s inward concentration. By the E-flat-minor Intermezzo, descending figures burrow beneath pitch into a mineral stratum where lament existed before any creature possessed a voice.

Schiff never imposes a single idea of lateness upon this music. His Brahms can be severe or playful, with both qualities transformed by proximity to silence. The Blüthner’s colors disclose the sensual complexity within decay, with the treble carrying an especially pale radiance. Pedaling becomes controlled haunting, one sonority remaining faintly present inside the next. Musical time accumulates rather than passes. Beneath Schiff’s fingers, every chord contains a small excavation of those that preceded it.

The Four Piano Pieces, Op. 119, draw that sentiment toward its most enigmatic conclusion. The opening B-minor Intermezzo begins with descending thirds that Schoenberg praised as evidence of Brahms’s radical structural imagination. The succeeding Intermezzi expose the machinery by which memory converts loss into form, reducing expression to the weight of time bearing down upon intervals.

The concluding Rhapsody in E-flat major initially promises public confidence and heroic breadth, then gradually reveals another intention. Schiff notes the rarity of a work that begins in major and ends in minor. Such a turn overturns the old promise that struggle earns radiance, replacing triumph with a truth too lucid to require consolation. Schiff gives the closing pages a thrilling inevitability, letting five and a half minutes contain the contour of a lifetime without forcing that life into a paltry moral framework.

What begins with a young man writing in a friend’s guestbook arrives at an older man dismantling the mechanisms of arrival. Between them, the piano becomes a theory of consciousness: themes remember futures they have yet to enter, while harmonies age within seconds. Schiff makes this impossible chronology audible, joining pages separated by 40 years through one unfinished act of attention. Time becomes a manuscript written on both sides, its ink bleeding through until every beginning bears the watermark of its conclusion. Somewhere within that translucent page, the 20-year-old Brahms writes a melody for Arnold Wehner, unaware that an old man is listening from the reverse. The older Brahms answers in a minor key whose cadence seals no tomb. He addresses the past as a living stranger, entrusting us with the possibility that memory belongs less to those who have lived than to whatever, across centuries, keeps them alive.

Enzo Favata: Ritornare (ECM 2883)

| Tyran Grillo

Enzo Favata
Ritornare

Enzo Favata soprano saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet
Daniele di Bonaventura bandoneón
Marcello Peghin ten-string guitar
Salvatore Maltana double bass
U.T. Gandhi drums
Recorded January 2026
Bavaria Musikstudios, Munich
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover photo: Jan Kricke
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 18, 2026

Every return contains a betrayal. The place may remain where it was, yet the person approaching has been revised by distance, while memory has moved the streets. On Ritornare, Enzo Favata treats return as imaginative recovery that transforms whatever it retrieves. Music carries landscape within experience, with literature serving as a compass across waters whose histories mingle beneath imposed names. The title points backward, though the album keeps opening forward. Home survives as an activity of attention and belonging that has quietly learned a foreign language in one’s absence.

Favata has long listened for submerged connections. Born in Alghero, Sardinia, in 1956, the saxophonist and clarinetist developed a musical language shaped by his native island, then widened it through the greater Mediterranean and distant shores. Atlantico, formed in 1999, gathered impressions during South American travels while attending to African inheritances across the ocean. “Tukuman” makes this migratory history palpable. Brushed drums and double bass establish a softly revolving ground, soon deepened by Daniel di Bonaventura’s bandoneón. Marcello Peghin’s guitar rises through it, and Favata’s soprano traces the theme in lucid arcs. The tune begins in transit, already pondering somewhere beyond its horizon.

Such movement never requires Atlantico to surrender its center. Favata and Peghin share decades of collaboration rooted in southern Italy, while bassist Salvatore Maltana and drummer U.T. Gandhi join di Bonaventura in a collective whose music expands without compromising its infrastructure. On the above-mentioned “Tukuman,” Favata dances through sudden turns as di Bonaventura weaves through a zoetrope of half-recovered scenes. A locomotive pulse gathers below the surface; elsewhere, the ensemble skims forward on the tensile calm of open water. Their travel is purposeful without submitting to destination, driven by the joy of motion itself.

The album’s journeys are as much literary as they are musical. Favata has recognized portions of his imaginative territory in Isabel Allende and Jorge Luis Borges, whose visible worlds admit secret laws. Gabriel García Márquez occupies another canopy in this forest of affinities. Favata describes Atlantico’s music as suspended between dream and reality, and “El Sur” dwells within that tension. Its melody seems to have waited inside the listener for years, requiring these musicians to pronounce it. Favata’s soprano carries a warm tone through each key change, altering its shape as the harmony breaks into tessellated color. No player merely accompanies another. The music passes among them as collective evidence from a dream whose witnesses recall different aspects of the same event.

That equality of attention gives the album much of its emotional authority. “Escuchame” brings Favata’s clarinet forward with grave tenderness, carrying a winding theme that seems to hold dust in its mouth and an old key beneath its tongue. Gandhi places minute percussive touches around it, while Maltana’s bass turns through the harmony with unforced intelligence. Di Bonaventura and Peghin shelter the theme without enclosing it. The performance reveals an ethical awareness in which each voice makes space for another to become more fully itself. Such intimacy rises from years spent hearing the fraction of a second before a friend decides where to place a note.

The quintet’s history therefore enters the recording as an invisible player. In “Donde nace el viento,” Peghin’s delicate strumming draws reverie into three dimensions, each chord swaying above an imagined Mediterranean courtyard. Favata’s soprano gives the moving air a throat, while marine salt flavors every unspoken word with distant relatives and childhoods spent along the shore. Recorded at Bavaria Studios in Munich in January 2026 with Manfred Eicher producing, Ritornare is Favata’s first album for ECM and Atlantico’s most finely illuminated acoustic statement. Eicher allows silence to acquire mass while every tone retains its contour. Sardinia remains audible beneath the compositions, and other continents move within their rhythmic memory as currents rather than destinations.

This spacious acoustic world carries echoes of classic ECM sessions without collapsing into homage. Ralph Towner and Egberto Gismonti can be sensed in its meeting of lyricism and space. John Surman occupies a nearby constellation, his shadow passing across the low reeds. “Sine nomine” opens a cinematic chamber where Dino Saluzzi’s tenderness meets the patient visual imagination associated with Theo Angelopoulos. Yet influence behaves as nourishment rather than costume. Associations surface and blur into Atlantico’s own language, one assembled from human contact and therefore resistant to distillation. The composition’s title, therefore, feels apt. It moves through identities without accepting permanent residence in any of them, leaving an outline that the mind continues to fill with speculation.

“Milonga del Sol” extends that cinematic feeling through a haunted dance, holding sweetness near an ache it never attempts to cure. Eleni Karaindrou’s bittersweet gravity hovers at the edge, then Favata veers into improvisational flight and loosens the reference’s claim. His phrases persuade gravity to reconsider its loyalties while the band maintains an exquisite balance between ritual and surprise. Di Bonaventura compresses whole lifetimes of longing into the bellows, and Peghin answers with translucent chords. Gandhi and Maltana keep the dance moving from centuries beneath their feet.

Such ambiguity gives Ritornare its peculiar attraction. The music recognizes places the listener has never visited, awakening the impression of a past that belongs to no single lineage. “Ventana” sharpens that paradox through an unprecedented view of a landscape already seen through other eyes. Its window also examines the act of looking, the secret appetite through which attention changes its object. Favata frames the view, then disrupts it, before the ensemble follows him into a terrain where recognition morphs into estrangement. Familiar materials are angled until their concealed surfaces catch the light. The piece asks how long a life can contain beauty before the mind finally notices, leaving a window open inside the question and the observer exposed to an answering gaze.

“Albatros” gathers the album’s virtues into a final statement of astonishing restraint. The tender throatiness of bass clarinet gives the piece an earthbound gait that brightens from within. When the soprano opens above it, the instrument spreads a wing across the morning and calls toward the sea, a prayer for the hidden catch to rise. The ensemble avoids spectacle, allowing desire to lose its dominion in favor of something selfless. Impeccably performed and recorded, Ritornare contains some of the most enduring melodies to emerge from a Manfred Eicher production in recent years, making it a persuasive contender for ECM album of the year. Its deeper triumph resists ranking. Perhaps the self is only the harbor’s temporary arrangement of ropes and salt-worn voices, held together long enough for one vessel to recognize another. Far beneath that exchange, the drowned map turns over in its sleep, and every border drawn upon it opens a patient ear.

V/A: Peace Anthems

| Tyran Grillo

At a moment when peace can feel less a condition than a distant country, Peace Anthems asks where the journey toward it might begin. Conceived by producer Sun Chung to mark the fifth anniversary of Red Hook Records, the album gathers artists from across the label’s community around that urgent question. Their answers offer no settled definition and make no claim to resolution. Instead, they open a field of possibilities in which peace becomes connection and reconciliation, transformation and repair. It emerges as the difficult practice of listening to what cannot readily be resolved, then remaining present once certainty has withdrawn.

Across these pieces, notes and silences become measures of shared time. Musical elders travel beside restless sonic architects before the forces of history carry them toward their own fruitful destinations. Qasim Naqvi’s modular synthesizer enters into conversation with the trumpet of Wadada Leo Smith, while Taylor Deupree’s sound design enfolds Kalia Vandever’s trombone and Thomas Morgan’s bass. BlankFor.ms creates electronic architectures for Moor Mother’s voice; Sungjae Son draws tenor saxophone and bass clarinet into the earthly respiration of a pump organ. Elsewhere, Martha Deribe and Simone Maggio cultivate intimacy through voice and Fender Rhodes, Amina Claudine Myers joins Smith at the volatile border between composition and improvisation, and Andrew Cyrille gives rhythm the force of embodied memory. Kit Downes, alone at the pipe organ, searches its vast interior for signals that may never reach their intended recipients. Each artist stretches time toward a place where another relation to one another, and to the land beneath us, might become imaginable. This music does not retreat into an untouched sanctuary. It works for armistice while wars rage, binding breath to breath and carrying hope beyond abstraction.

Naqvi’s “Al Badawi” establishes the album’s moral hue through lush, droning synthesizer pads whose gradual movement makes stillness feel hard won. Tranquility appears here as a human baseline that daily friction and global violence repeatedly disturb. The scale may change, but the rupture remains recognizable: an interruption at the edge of thought, a misunderstanding allowed to harden, a conflict granted enough authority to consume entire lives. Naqvi gathers the scattered self without pretending it can remain whole indefinitely. Calm is held close through the night, only to be discovered missing at dawn. Yet the piece refuses despair. Within its suspended harmonies, the world’s talons are shaved down to harmless nubs, and danger briefly loses the grammar through which it makes itself understood. That reprieve carries ethical weight. Rest becomes preparation rather than escape, a way of restoring the attention required to recognize another person’s suffering.

The stillness of “Al Badawi” passes almost imperceptibly into the more unsettled suspension of “Wither Light and Airy,” where Deupree, Vandever, and Morgan occupy the interval between oppression and liberation. No one can tell whether the music is about to rise or surrender to gravity. Vandever’s trombone mourns the loss of its own innocence against the glittering ash of circumstance and time, its phrases opening into spaces that Deupree handles with meticulous care. Morgan’s bass moves through fields of memory, finding pathways among what has survived and what can no longer be recovered. Their restraint protects the piece from easy consolation. Freedom remains close enough to sense yet too fragile to claim, and the uncertainty gives every gesture consequence. A tone may become a hand extended across distance; the surrounding silence may expose how far that hand still has to travel.

Language enters this unstable territory through “Imaginary Lines,” the collaboration between Moor Mother and BlankFor.ms. Moor Mother’s spoken meditations fracture across electronic textures, while words are torn and restored in the image of political movements whose promises of restitution arrive incomplete. The piece recalls the emotional surgery of early Laurie Anderson but also the sisterhood of Gloria Anzaldúa, sidestepping the evasions of gentle vocabulary by allowing darkness to speak in its own register. Questions of responsibility coil through watery electronic wormholes, pursuing resolutions that remain beyond reach. Underneath them lies a meditation on birth and on those who make birth possible, whether by care or sacrifice. The title exposes the lethal authority granted to invented boundaries. A line conceived in the mind can be enforced upon a body; an abstraction can divide a riverbank or turn a neighbor into an enemy. BlankFor.ms makes those borders audible as distortions in the signal, while Moor Mother searches the damaged transmission for a vocabulary capable of reaching the living.

That search continues in the two collaborations between Smith and Myers, whose respect for inhalation gives every exhalation the gravity of testimony. “Sonic Requiem” hangs in space among the bodies it seeks to acknowledge before diplomacy sweeps them beneath its mound-laden rug. Smith’s trumpet arrives gravelly and worn, bearing the abrasion of a voice required to repeat what power has chosen not to hear. Myers responds with a pianistic touch of extraordinary delicacy, offering sincerity without sentimentality. Their pauses carry names that official parlance has reduced to figures. “Reflections on Palestine” brings a deeper fire to the surface, clarifying its melodic intentions early while preserving the risk of improvisation. Smith and Myers approach grief as a living organism rather than a classified document. The music refuses to turn suffering into scenery. It asks who receives the privilege of being mourned as an individual, then searches for forms spacious enough to restore singularity to the dead.

Sungjae Son’s “The River of Imjin” shifts the album’s center toward a landscape marked by division. Reeds and pump organ generate an inward-facing hymnody drawn from the soil, as though the earth has absorbed every border imposed upon it and begun quietly revising the map. Son touches the harmonic satisfaction of a physiognomy in motion before the music settles upon a countenance recognizably our own, filled with wonder at our capacity for love and shock at the selfishness that so often accompanies it. The river bears memory across jurisdictions that insist memory must stop at the checkpoint. Its current exposes the arrogance of borders by continuing through them, preserving an older knowledge of connection without erasing the pain accumulated along its banks.

Human tenderness acquires a more intimate scale in “War Is Over,” where Deribe’s voice meets Maggio’s Fender Rhodes with remarkable restraint. Anger remains present, but the performers refuse to let it become the only mouthpiece available to the wounded. Their quietness anticipates the labor awaiting everyone once the wreckage reveals itself through clearing smoke. Deribe sings from within the protective space of a lullaby, and maternal care becomes a form of resistance against forces that regard vulnerability as expendable. Maggio supplies warmth without disguising the damage. The title, therefore, reads less as a declaration than as a responsibility. Ending combat cannot repair a nervous system trained to fear the next explosion, return the missing to their families, rebuild a home, or persuade a child that sleep is safe. Peace must enter the smallest rooms and relearn the weight of an unguarded body.

“Three Years Later,” performed by Naqvi, Smith, and Cyrille, confronts the endurance contained within that responsibility. Cyrille’s Afro-Caribbean-inflected pattern on cowbell and toms expands the album’s geographic consciousness, making rhythm a vessel for histories that official borders cannot contain. Naqvi’s electronics inhabit the fundament, while Smith’s trumpet addresses the firmament with a cry shaped by survival. The title recognizes time’s failure to guarantee healing. Three years may mark recovery or merely measure how long an injury has gone unanswered. Cyrille’s pulse keeps both possibilities in motion. Memory does not stand still here but travels through the body and teaches the hands a different way to count.

Kit Downes inscribes the collection’s musical arc with two solo pipe organ works that push the instrument beyond its inherited associations with ceremony and permanence. “Into the Woods – 3 Weary Calls” suggests animals dying beyond human sight, their fluted swan songs thinning through the darkness. The organ becomes habitat as much as instrument, its pipes opening hollows where exhausted voices seek shelter. In “Closing Meditation for OM,” a train whistle enters the imagination as a breath of life while higher callings burn through their brief trajectories, leaving the sky emptied of reassurance. Downes finds frailty inside the organ’s immensity. Air moves through engineered chambers, yet the result feels mortal, uncertain of its destination and aware that every call depends upon someone choosing to answer.

With all proceeds benefiting the International Red Cross, Peace Anthems converts contemplation into material aid. Its modest scale enlarges its purpose, joining aesthetic attention to the practical work of sustaining lives. The album understands that peace cannot remain an attractive principle preserved beyond the reach of consequence. It requires maintenance, protection, and a willingness to recognize whose security has been purchased at the expense of another person’s fear. These musicians provide no anthem that a crowd could sing without complication. They offer something more demanding: a rehearsal for attention, conducted in tones porous enough to admit grief and disciplined enough to keep grief from becoming destiny.

Perhaps peace begins where imagination accepts responsibility for what it has imagined. Every border started as a thought. So did every refuge. These artists, each a force of good in their own right, leave us with that unnerving symmetry, placing creation and destruction frighteningly close together. The same human faculty that invents a reason to exclude can conceive a door, then build it wide enough for the stranger carrying the name we have not yet learned. An anthem earns its name by making room for voices history tried to render posthumous. Here, that space becomes an empty altar, upon which listening lays the first stone.

(For more on Sun Chung and the Red Hook label, see my recent interview with him for All About Jazz here.)

Andy Sheppard: Salt Catchers (ECM 2856)

| Tyran Grillo

Andy Sheppard
Salt Catchers

Andy Sheppard tenor and soprano saxophones
Rita Marcotulli piano
Michel Benita double bass
Recorded March 2025, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover photo: Jan Kricke
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 11, 2026

Across six ECM releases, Andy Sheppard has treated ensemble form as an instrument in and of itself, altering the ambient details around his reeds so each setting reveals a different nuance of his breath. The quintet on Movements in Colour surrounded him with shifting densities, Trio Libero pursued more intense conversation, and his quartet with Eivind Aarset opened electronic passageways through acoustic terrain. Most enduringly, the trio with Carla Bley and Steve Swallow placed his lyricism inside a world where wit could hold hands with pathos.

Salt Catchers begins another chapter, bringing the English saxophonist together with Italian pianist Rita Marcotulli and French bassist Michel Benita for the first time as a unit. Their cohesion suggests that certain ensembles exist before they are convened, awaiting only the studio in which their latent testimony can be documented. The drummerless format retains a trace of Sheppard’s years with Bley, whose “Lawns” is the sole nonoriginal among nine pieces, yet memory is a hidden foundation rather than a governing premise.

Most of the album was written during the pandemic, as Sheppard moved from the guitar-centered environments of earlier projects toward chamber music’s concentrated intimacy. Marcotulli opens fissures within composed material, while Benita touches the folkloric roots of Sheppard’s writing without disturbing the earth around them.

A Portuguese shadow passes through Salt Catchers. Now living near Lisbon, Sheppard draws on the gravity of saudade, allowing longing to organize melodies that function as complete emotional bodies rather than maps for improvisation. Their romanticism carries something of John Martyn, absorbed so thoroughly that its source has become molecular. Recorded in Lugano in March 2025 under Manfred Eicher’s direction, the album gathers geography and recollection into a deceptively calm surface, demanding that every note justify the silence it displaces.

“Elevation” establishes this economy with piano that raises a transparent structure around the listener. Sheppard’s tenor enters above its own shadow, offering a melody whose openness contains the ache of distance, while Benita traces the invisible contours that keep it suspended. An echo of Charles Lloyd inhabits Sheppard’s spacious tone, though time may be the deeper influence: decades of listening move through his sound as sediment, leaving the line clear as the past gathers beneath it.

Where “Elevation” offers a horizon, “Lawns” provides an address. Bley’s composition flowers into a suburban psalm, its chords carrying the holiness of ordinary refuge. Marcotulli’s phrases hold survival and repose within the same circumference, as Sheppard’s breath-softened lower register gives the melody human grain and Benita places each note with tender exactitude. With each iteration, the harmony resembles a childhood house whose rooms change dimensions whenever one tries to enter.

The title track begins beneath the keyboard’s conventional surface. Reaching into dampened piano strings, Marcotulli releases metallic murmurs and half-born harmonics. Sheppard’s soprano evokes salt as residue and preservative, the crystal in which an evaporated sea continues thinking. When the musicians reach the concluding unison, three private trajectories have discovered a single edge.

The Portuguese current nears the surface in “Encantos,” whose buoyancy gives Sheppard’s melody an unforced radiance. Enchantment survives through partial concealment: the tune gives itself freely while keeping a central chamber locked. Later, “Salgado” answers with understated montuno inflections and geometric harmonizations.

“Draw You In Stars” opens with a luminous piano arpeggio, a spiral staircase whose destination recedes as it rises. Sheppard’s tenor exposes a vulnerable grain before he and piano meet, then part for Benita’s restrained, quick-minded solo. Marcotulli moves farther from the harmonic center, seeking a truth faithful to instability.

Marcotulli opens “This Too – Three Hills” like a book at an unknown page, and Sheppard enters carrying the next sentence in his breath. The hills become folds in memory, elevations made by all the mind has buried unevenly. As the playing dissolves into breath and pause, each phrase embraces uncertainty instead of converting it into drama.

Absence takes intimate form in “Those That Left.” Piano and bass communicate across a missing center, exchanging signals whose tenderness derives from what they decline to resolve. Marcotulli’s dream logic brings light to grief’s edges without making loss decorative. “Irene” then gathers bass and soprano into a supple dance before piano widens the emotional field. Elegant without sweetness, it draws darkness inside radiance, knowing beauty does not cancel sorrow but grants it another form of circulation.

Marcotulli is the session’s revelation, turning modest gestures into portals through which whole emotional cartographies appear. She does not decorate the music; she alters its physics. Benita gives every contour a quiet gravitational center, allowing Sheppard’s melodies to travel without losing human proportion.

The title contains the key. Salt preserves by entering what it preserves, becoming inseparable from the body it protects. These musicians practice a related attention: each voice receives the others deeply enough to be changed, yet no identity dissolves. Listening becomes a willingness to let another person’s silence speak for itself. Perhaps civilization begins there, in the discipline required to let another person’s unfinished phrase live.

Samuel Beckett: Stirrings Still (ECM New Series 2801)

| Tyran Grillo

Samuel Beckett
Trevor Bača
Stirrings Still

Paul Griffiths narrator
JACK Quartet
Christopher Otto violin
Austin Wulliman violin
John Pickford Richards viola
Jay Campbell violoncello
Recorded 2023 and 2024, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineers: Michael Rast, Lara Persia, and Michael Hinreiner (mix)
Cover photo: Rosemarie Clausen
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 4, 2026

Completed in 1987 and first published the following year, Stirrings Still was Samuel Beckett’s last message in prose, a dispatch from that uncertain border where the voice survives even as the self begins to lose its outline. More monologue than story, it finds an unnamed man whose passage may lead through a vast wheatfield drained into black and white, or deeper into the stumbling grain of memory itself. The distinction gradually ceases to matter. Life and what lies beyond become double exposures on the same strip of film, each haunting the other with the possibility that consciousness is merely the afterimage cast by its own disappearance.

Beckett cherished music, especially the songs and string quartets of Franz Schubert, whose melodies often travel farthest just they seem to be coming back home. Something of that impossible homecoming inhabits Beckett’s prose. His sentences circle their subjects until repetition becomes a form of erosion, each recurrence touching the old wound from another angle. Phrases withdraw before reappearing with their centers of gravity subtly displaced. Meaning flickers among them, less an object to be grasped than a disturbance of breath registered in passing. Stirrings Still is therefore already a kind of chamber work, its developments tightening toward the point where language encounters the silence it has carried within itself all along.

Paul Griffiths’s relationship with this world reaches back more than half a century. His first encounter with Beckett arrived at a decisive age, when the boundary between art and life can still vanish without warning. “A student production of Waiting for Godot was put on at the Oxford Playhouse in November 1965,” he recounts to me via email. “I was in my first term as an undergraduate and had just turned eighteen. It changed my life. Little by little (I was living on a student grant) I bought pretty much everything of Beckett’s that was in print.” That formative shock and stretching of personal resources can be felt in his narration of Stirrings Still. Griffiths does not approach the text as a monument to be admired from a respectful distance. He speaks from within a lifelong proximity, as though the words have accompanied him for so long that they now belong to his private scaffolding. Such familiarity allows him to resist theatrical enlargement. Every hesitation carries its own weight, and each repetition sounds newly discovered in the mouth.

The recording also belongs to producer Manfred Eicher’s longstanding conversation with literature, a dimension of his work sometimes eclipsed by the attention given to his cinematic imagination. Griffiths places the project within a history extending to the origins of ECM New Series: “Spoken-voice recordings were part of the New Series from the beginning, and they trace some part of Manfred Eicher’s literary world, which he also partly shares with some of the musicians he’s worked with—Heiner Goebbels, for example, and Kurtág.” Literature, in this context, forms part of the label’s underlying sensibility, shaping its understanding of voice and the charged intervals surrounding utterance. Eicher’s ear has always extended toward those places where one art begins to think through the materials of another.

The path to this particular convergence was itself Beckettian in its patience. In 2006, Eicher asked Griffiths to seek out a composer capable of writing music that could exist in the closest possible sympathy with a recording of the text, preserving its austere sovereignty while answering its inner music. A decade passed. Then, hearing the JACK Quartet rehearse Trevor Bača’s Akasha at Harvard in 2016, Griffiths recognized that the search had been listening for its own answer. Asked what in Bača’s work provoked that recognition, Griffiths answers with characteristic directness: “Not much more to say about the genesis. To answer in one word: intimacy. His music speaks intimately and is made intimately, down to the finest nuance. Also, of course, the string quartet was the obvious ensemble, and I felt this was music that could withstand and deal with the huge presence of Beckett.”

That final phrase identifies the central danger of the undertaking. Beckett’s presence is indeed huge, despite the spareness of the material. And so, any musical candle lit in its shadow could easily become decorative or subservient, reducing itself to atmospheric confirmation of meanings the prose has already supplied. Bača declines the obedient servitude of accompaniment. His score runs beside the words as a parallel stream with its own depth and darkness, neither illustrating the text nor competing for possession of it. Heard in alternation with Griffiths’s narration, the JACK Quartet enters as another order of consciousness, contemplating Beckett from beyond the reach of speech. The strings draw the listener beneath the semantic surface, into the undertow where words continue to exert their pull after their immediate impact has loosened its grip. Griffiths gives the narrator a voice worn almost to the grain, while Bača opens chambers around it in which solitude can resonate beyond the dimensions of the solitary.

What emerges is a work suspended between articulation and subversion thereof, each dynamic carrying what the other must relinquish. Bača’s finest gestures seem microscopically fashioned, alive to the pressure of bow hair and the tremor released when one surface encounters another. Within these sounds lies a physical knowledge that language can approach but never quite retain. Something continues on the far side of saying, faintly stirring in the dust from which every word is born and to which every word returns.

“One night as he sat at his table head on hands he saw himself rise and go.” Thus begins the world into which we are introduced, accompanied by nearly mournful scrapings from the strings. They touch resonantly upon a premonition of death, though the narrator is granted no consoling return to whatever enchanted him as a child. The circumstance of living forces him instead toward the limits of what can be known. A window remains locked because opening it would expose more than the mind can bear. He is left to imagine a form of intercorporeal travel in which light acquires qualities beyond day and night, while the vagaries of experience fall as rain upon drought-stricken earth.

From this threshold come the most delicate tremblings, poised at the edge of audibility, where mortal questions cease to be asked because the answers must also die if they are to be genuinely felt. Those haunting fringes of strings and fretless fingerboards provide a passage for the ghosts of implication. An insectile agitation enters the instruments, suggestive of animal life. The sound seems to remember some primordial condition before flesh and thought became convinced of their separation. Bača allows timbre to retain that ancient uncertainty. A scrape may be the distress of wood under pressure, yet it also carries the sensation of a body trying to hear beyond itself.

As the narrator, poised between tenderness and robust resignation, continues to riff on the fragility of his own existence, the music reveals a premonitional character rather than a commentative one. Siren-toned descents foreshadow the broken heart of solitude, and whisper-quiet stirrings release the title from abstraction. Appearances and disappearances implicate us in their zoetrope, each open slit a death, with the moment beyond it offering another life begun. Creakings suggest the internal groaning of bone on bone, the expression of a body in retrograde. Flinching angels exchange glances with lock-staring demons in a currency of dangerously intimate proportions, always returning to center before resuming their games of perception.

Once the framework of self-awareness begins to lose its structural integrity, the strings grow more animate. They tremble in real time at the realization that something deeper than vibrational frequency is at play, an almost instantaneous relativity that flies straight into the heart of grief. Every bow stroke appears to alter the temporal pressure around Griffiths’s voice. The quartet does not surround the speaker so much as expose the detachments already contained within him. His pauses widen into territories, and the score crosses them without pretending to know what waits on the opposite side.

Beckett’s alter ego is always seeking a way, only to discover that every doorway leads further back in. A quivering harmonic becomes another slipstream into the flowering mind, where wilting and blooming remain equally present. Through a harshly beautiful economy of language, what appears bare on the page acquires in discourse a richness of observation about the human condition. Impulses scrabble in the walls of the subconscious, evading the reach of neurological fingers before falling into the hands of the very soul they describe with unabashed honesty. Griffiths follows these movements without imposing an emotional map upon them. The tenderness of his reading comes from acknowledging how little tenderness the universe itself appears obliged to provide.

Bača’s attention to detail occasionally touches the borderlands explored by George Crumb, another composer drawn toward language at its margins. Yet Bača occupies this territory with a privacy distinctly his own. He listens into the spaces between words, where the tail of one utterance curves toward the head of another in a continuous rotation of exhalation and inhalation. Within the interval separating those breaths, the self becomes perceptible as a rhythm rather than a stable possession. The bow reverses direction while sustaining the illusion of a single note, and consciousness performs an equivalent maneuver, repeatedly changing course while calling the result continuity.

The deepest achievement of this recording may lie in how thoroughly it dissolves any secure division between the witness and the witnessed. The man sees himself rise from the table, Griffiths gives breath to the man, and the quartet listens to that breath from a region his monologue cannot enter. We receive each layer as we add another through the act of attention. Perception becomes a relay conducted across bodies that can never meet, yet briefly inhabit the same uncertainty.

Perhaps the unnamed man is therefore doing more than approaching extinction. In watching himself depart, he invents the witness who might survive him. Beckett entrusted that witness to language, Griffiths lends it mortal breath, and Bača places it within the vulnerable substance of sound. We inherit the man’s vigil without acquiring his identity. For a little while, his consciousness passes through ours, asking for neither rescue nor remembrance. It reveals something more unsettling: that the self may be only the temporary custody of an awareness forever arriving from elsewhere. Our lives are shaped by the voices we shelter, most of whom will never know our names. In this sense, consciousness has always been on loan, and listening is the obscure means by which we return it like a library book we checked out and forgot about long ago.

La Buissonne Studios (RJAL 397003)

| Tyran Grillo

Released in 2005 as a promotion-only compilation, La Buissonne Studios occupies the elusive third chamber in the catalogue attached to the celebrated recording complex at Pernes-les-Fontaines. Its history was built through improbable labor. Gérard de Haro and two childhood friends first recorded musicians in a modest space at L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue; an encounter with bassist Barre Phillips sharpened their desire for a professional studio. They found a hangar and house in Pernes, worked with acoustician Marc Beaufils, and opened La Buissonne on September 1, 1987.

Since then, its rooms have helped define modern European jazz as a silent collaborator, familiar to ECM devotees yet present across numerous labels. Only one ECM recording appears here. That scarcity clarifies the compilation’s purpose: less a house sampler than a map of circulation, showing how one acoustic language can pass through radically different bodies without imposing a uniform complexion. Many selections arrive as excerpts, fragments of fresco carrying enough pigment to imply the civilization around them.

The Jean-Philippe Viret Trio opens one inward passage with “Par Tous Les Temps,” as heard on Étant donnés (Sketch SKE 333025). Édouard Ferlet sets an arpeggio in motion as Viret’s double bass moves beneath him and Antoine Banville’s cymbals scatter radiance across the pulse. A processional shimmer brushes Steve Reich’s language without surrendering jazz’s appetite for contingency.

The Sketch label reappears through Michel Graillier and Riccardo Del Fra’s “Blue Wind,” via Soft Talk (SKE 333014), where piano and bass achieve rare conversational transparency. The inward gravity deepens in Stéphan Oliva’s “It Should Have Happened a Long Time Ago,” from Fantasm (RCA Victor 74321739252). Bruno Chevillon bows his bass until sorrow acquires grain, bowing to minute percussion marks from Paul Motian at the edge of Oliva’s piano.

That private concentration eventually seeks a public body. Under Bernard Struber’s direction, the Orchestre Régional de Jazz d’Alsace turns “Le Phare,” the title piece of its Enja album (ENJ 93592), into a festival whose gaiety contains structural rigor. Guest Louis Sclavis adds another hinge; brass and reeds exult while the rhythmic center remains lucid.

Claude Barthélemy finds harsher collectivity in “Mama Barth Blues,” recorded with the Orchestre National de Jazz for La fête de l’eau (Le Chant du monde 2741228). His guitar strikes the ONJ’s polished mass and releases gorgeous unrest. Andy Emler’s MegaOctet pushes the principle beyond decorum. The previously unreleased “Bal Tribal,” featuring Marc Ducret’s acoustic guitar, wanders through a hospitable delirium where direction keeps changing its name. On “4/4 Cm3/Horizons,” included on Dreams in Tune (Nocturne NTCD 361), Médéric Collignon’s voice becomes percussion and alarm signal before breaking into ecstatic fracture, as Emler’s ensemble treats meter as tensile sculpture.

Another family of pieces gathers around the exposed voice and its difficult bargain with intimacy. “Down by Love,” from Youn Sun Nah’s So I Am… (In Circum Girum ICG 0204-1), holds self-possession and vulnerability within the same trembling filament. David Neerman’s vibraphone opens suspended space, while Benjamin Moussay, Yoni Zelnik, and David Georgelet alter its depth and footing. Nah sings from the point where command begins to quiver, and that quiver becomes sovereign territory.

John Greaves approaches the art of song from a more autumnal interior on “The Price We Pay,” preserved on The Trouble with Happiness (Le Chant du monde 274 11 99). Sophia Domancich’s piano and Vincent Courtois’s cello enlarge the chamber in which mortality has taken a seat. Lucilla Galeazzi brings fiercer blood to “La Luz de Oro,” heard on Trio Rouge (Intuition INT 33532). Her diction tears a bright incision through the darkness, Courtois answers with pizzicato cello, and Michel Godard’s serpent coils through the lower register.

The geographic imagination then widens. Daniel Mille’s “Entre chiens et loups,” the title track of his Emarcy release (013535-2), lets the accordion carry an entire horizon inside its bellows. Jules Bikoko’s double bass provides the patient floor; Jean-Christophe Maillard moves between piano and guitar, with Minino Garay’s percussion tracing paths through the dust.

Carlos Maza’s “Guanabacoa,” appearing on Fidelidad (Emarcy 016109-2), opens the frame across a broad percussive field. Maza’s piano, voice, and cries of acclamation make awareness sudden and bodily before the excerpt withdraws. Jean-Marie Machado’s “Tua-Badalada,” taken from Leve leve muito leve (Hortus/Didier Maes H 100), gathers singers and wind players into modal pageantry. A trace of Carl Orff passes through the writing, though Machado’s fairytale has stranger laws, its tower built downward into recollection.

Scale contracts as smaller ensembles excavate dream matter. François Raulin’s “Légère Houle,” on Trois plans sur la comète (HatOLOGY 582), places his piano beside Bruno Chevillon’s bass and lets François Corneloup’s baritone saxophone roam through the clearing they create. Voice doubling introduces a child’s candor, turning wonder into a form of exact knowledge.

Claude Tchamitchian’s “Rêve. Hommage à Sayat Nova,” drawn from Le monde est une fenêtre (Émouvance EMV 1018), brings his double bass into dialogue with Gaguik Mouradian’s kamancheh across a narrow abyss. Earth and ether exchange substances; wood dreams in mineral. Louis Sclavis and Vincent Courtois achieve related concentration in “Grand Comme le Monde,” a clarinet-and-cello theme drawn from Denis Gheerbrant’s film Grands comme le monde rather than a conventionally catalogued album. Its brevity gives it the density of an inscription.

Rhythm itself becomes philosophy in Daniel Humair’s unreleased “Drum Solo,” drawn from the Work sessions for Sketch. Humair sends thought through skins and metal, asking how consciousness might proceed if it had no nouns, only impact and decay. Sparkle carries shadow, even as momentum becomes a life force whose destination recedes.

Eric Watson’s “Tryst,” documented on Full Metal Quartet (Owl Records 159 572-2), answers with the perilous discipline of the ballad. Mark Dresser’s bass and Ed Thigpen’s drums create a foundation supple enough to disappear. Watson’s piano offers tenderness without sentimentality, leaving Bennie Wallace’s tenor free to roughen the lyric surface. His sound bears the abrasion of a truth dragged across distance, and the quartet’s restraint makes every fracture audible.

Two larger visions convert audibility into conscience. Jon Balke’s North Magnetic Orchestra supplies the compilation’s lone ECM emissary with “Falling,” included on Diverted Travels (ECM 1886). Strings gather around Per Jørgensen’s wordless voice, creating a lullaby whose destination has been erased from the map. The piece suspends arrival, asking listening to survive without possession.

Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra carries that suspension into historical responsibility on Bill Frisell’s “Throughout,” heard on Not in Our Name (Verve B0004949-02). Although the album was recorded in Rome, Gérard de Haro mixed it and La Buissonne later hosted its mastering, proof that the studio’s authorship sometimes begins after the musicians leave the recording floor. Carla Bley shapes the opening with Haden, Chris Cheek and the horns unfold in varying densities of duration, and Steve Cardenas threads guitar through the restrained ache. The performance never confuses beauty with innocence. Its tenderness has political weight because every lucid tone carries the pressure of what lucidity obliges us to see.

François Couturier, Jean-Marc Larché, and Jean-Louis Matinier gather those obligations into “Epilogue Requiem,” part of Music for a While (Émouvance EMV 1017). After Couturier’s piano opens in dark concentration, Matinier’s accordion and Larché’s soprano saxophone gradually lift the music into another register, though hope arrives with scars still legible in its grammar. The title promises an ending, while the performance quietly disputes the jurisdiction of such a concept.

Across this rare disc, La Buissonne’s crystal clarity makes room for separateness, preserving the pressure around a cymbal stroke, the darkness under a bowed note, and the breath before a singer risks becoming audible. The microphone receives vibration, but also ancestry and unborn meanings gathering around a phrase. What the studio preserves is that instant when something personal becomes an aperture. Through it, one can almost glimpse a future archaeology in which our civilization is known neither by its monuments nor by the catastrophes it mistook for destiny, but by the care with which a room once held a vanishing note and refused to let its fragility count as disappearance.

The Outflung Net

| Tyran Grillo

Issued in Germany in 1992, The Outflung Net is a rare six-LP box whose very lack of a conventional catalog number suits its elusive character. The title comes from Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, where a fly cast spreads so widely that it seems to have “a center wherever you look.” That image is an ideal emblem for this gathering of ECM New Series recordings. Arvo Pärt may supply its spiritual center, but every disc becomes a center in turn, each extending a line toward Bach, modernism, improvisation, ritual, and the fertile silence for which producer Manfred Eicher’s label had become known. More than a sampler, the set is a compact aesthetic manifesto.

Pärt’s Miserere (ECM 1430) is its natural threshold. The Hilliard Ensemble under Paul Hillier, soprano Sarah Leonard, organist Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, percussionist Pierre Favre, the Western Wind Chamber Choir, and the Orchester der Beethovenhalle Bonn under Dennis Russell Davies inhabit music whose power lies in the tension between utterance and suspension. In the title work, Psalm 51 advances almost word by word, clarinet responses turning language into dialogue. The “Dies irae” erupts like a storm at the end of the world, yet the performance never mistakes volume for grandeur. Leonard’s ascents, David James’s countertenor radiance, Gordon Jones’s grave baritone, and the Hilliards’ collective purity lead from devastation toward an order glimpsed rather than possessed. Festina Lente spirals with stately paradox, while Sarah Was Ninety Years Old sets voices, organ, and Favre’s drums inside an austere arithmetic of awe. Few recordings make interrupted thought feel so complete.

Two albums by Swiss cellist Thomas Demenga place Bach beside living modernism, not as opposing camps but as mutually illuminating practices. On Bach/Holliger (ECM 1340), he is joined by violinist Catrin Demenga and oboist-composer Heinz Holliger. The latter’s Duo trembles and darts with sibling precision, his Studie über Mehrklänge turns circular breathing and multiphonics into a strangely lyrical anatomy of the oboe, and Trema makes the cello shiver as if pursued by its own shadow. After such exposed nerves, Bach’s Fourth Cello Suite arrives cleansed of familiarity. Demenga plays without decorative vanity, drawing a dark inward song from the Sarabande and allowing every fingerfall and resonance to enter the recording’s crystalline air.

Bach/Carter (ECM 1391) reverses the route, opening with the Third Cello Suite in a performance of warmth, mobility, and improvisatory lift before stepping into Elliott Carter’s quicksilver world. Demenga is joined by flutist Philippe Racine, clarinetist Ernesto Molinari, violinist Hansheinz Schneeberger, pianist Paul Cleemann, percussionist Gerhard Huber, and conductor Jürg Wyttenbach. Esprit rude, Esprit doux, Enchanted Preludes, and Riconoscenza per Goffredo Petrassi sketch compressed dramas of interruption and pursuit, but the Triple Duo is the summit: three instrumental pairs exchange ideas with the precarious grace of an intoxicated gymnast. Carter’s simultaneities can seem like scattered strata until time reveals their underlying geology. Heard after Bach, their density is not disorder but another species of counterpoint.

Gavin Bryars’s After the Requiem (ECM 1424) supplies the box’s most openly elegiac landscapes. Its title piece, written as an instrumental afterimage of the Cadman Requiem, brings Bill Frisell’s electric guitar together with the violas of Alexander Balanescu and Kate Musker and Tony Hinnigan’s cello. Frisell burns slowly through the strings like northern light, his sustained tones less a solo voice than a spirit learning the texture of mourning. Elsewhere, Balanescu, clarinetist Roger Heaton, pianist Dave Smith, Bryars on bass, and percussionists Martin Allen and Simon Limbrick navigate The Old Tower of Löbenicht and Allegrasco, while Evan Parker, Stan Sulzmann, Ray Warleigh, and Julian Argüelles form the saxophone choir of Alaric I or II. Bells, low reeds, spare ostinatos, and corroded melodies make the album feel antique without imitation.

The set then widens beyond the concert-hall frame. Trommelgeflüster (ECM 1249) is Harald Weiss alone on percussion and voice, though “alone” hardly describes its populous theater. Steel-toned steps, melismatic chants, whistles, outbursts, and distant twangs gather into a ritual that continually questions its own regularity. Weiss’s theatrical and intercultural imagination risks pastiche, yet the music’s physical conviction pulls its materials into one breathing organism. Part I moves as if across sun-struck earth before Part II enters darker, more dreamlike territory. The title means “Drum Whisper,” but the album whispers with an entire body.

Walter Fähndrich’s Viola (ECM 1412) closes the collection by reducing the field to a single instrument and opening it onto uncertainty. A composer, improviser, and sound-installation artist, Fähndrich gives his pieces only Roman numerals. Overtones sway, rapid arpeggios climb into spirals, sul tasto passages ring like buried bells, and scratches become avian calls and insect song. His precisely governed bow does not tame these sounds so much as release their inner ecology. The final, expanded return to “IV” refuses neat circularity, leaving the ear at the threshold of another possible performance.

Across these six records, ECM’s celebrated spaciousness is never merely atmospheric. Pärt’s prayer, Bach’s architecture, Holliger’s fractured breath, Carter’s restless syntax, Bryars’s weathered remembrance, Weiss’s embodied ritual, and Fähndrich’s improvisational earth all belong to the same outflung net. Its center is everywhere because attentive listening keeps moving it. Rare as an object and even rarer in the coherence of its vision, this box preserves a moment when New Series seemed less like a label imprint than a new way of organizing musical time.

Special thanks to Bernhard Liebenberg for bringing this collection to my attention.

ECM New Series Collection 1995

| Tyran Grillo

Released in Germany as a promotional anthology, ECM New Series Collection 1995 gathers 26 passages from a fertile landscape. Eleni Karaindrou’s Ulysses’ Gaze (ECM New Series 1570) lays out a path of travel before us with two themes whose cinematic origin loosens into a larger psychic terrain. Kim Kashkashian’s viola draws the personal through the political until both seem filaments of one buried nerve. Mourning gathers speed and reveals dance inside its dark clothing, while instrumental conversation becomes conversion, turning grief toward an exuberance too scarred to call innocent.

That traffic between fragment and world deepens in György Kurtág’s Hommage à R.Sch (ECM New Series 1508), where the dedicatory composer’s miniature forms become living particles. Piano and clarinet gather around the viola in the eponymous Hommage à R.Sch., op. 15d, giving the music sudden visibility. Schumann enters through Märchenbilder Fairy Tale Pictures), op. 113, although arrival proves too stable a word. Its vignettes emerge from Kurtág’s afterimage, each microscopically tuned to affection.

Keith Jarrett’s traversal of Händel’s keyboard suites (ECM New Series 1530) offers a lucid counterweight. The recitative-shaped opening of Suite No. 2 in F Major, HWV 427 carries the vocal Händel in embryonic form before the Fuga opens its intricate gates. The pianist’s telescoped dynamics give ornament ethical weight, as every flourish answers to proportion. Federico Mompou’s Música Callada (ECM New Series 1523), represented here by three selections in Herbert Henck’s grave illumination, carries inwardness past the edge of utterance. Mompou’s “silent music” inhabits the soul’s inner ear, where sound waits inside solitude for the touch that will give it contour. Henck allows the notes to hover at the fringe of incarnation.

Sacred language assumes more labyrinthine form in Christopher Bowers-Broadbent’s reading of Messiaen’s Méditations Sur Le Mystère De La Sainte Trinité (ECM New Series 1494). The French composer’s communicable language encodes Aquinas into the organ, converting theology into an audible grammar whose meaning remains partly sealed. Part VII places density in the upper register, where sin becomes molecular and descends through imagined soil. The Hilliard Ensemble’s Codex Speciálník (ECM New Series 1504) approaches inscription from another century. In natali domini advances in luminous block chords touched by chromatic ornament, while Pulcherrima Rosa unfurls a melodic current whose anonymity feels sovereign. The Prague manuscript becomes a living archive under these voices, crossing five centuries without surrendering its obscurity.

Giya Kancheli occupies the anthology’s most desolate interior. In Exil (ECM New Series 1535), the Paul Celan setting Einmal rises from an alto flute invocation that arrests the heart before Maacha Deubner’s unaffected soprano enters. Tapped bows and glassy harmonics place enormous force inside a nearly vacant field. The related Abii ne viderem (ECM New Series 1510) expands this monastic material into orchestral mass. Staccato eruptions are joined by abysses of silence until a full statement arrives, weighted by the piano’s pulse.

The cello works on Patrick Demenga and Thomas Demenga’s 12 Hommages A Paul Sacher (ECM New Series 1520-21) transform a patron’s name into generative code. The Sacher hexachord is an alphabet evolving into timbre. Henri Dutilleux’s 3 Strophes sur le nom de Sacher gives the dedication a tensile intimacy, with conflict touching agreement within one speaking body. Luciano Berio’s Les Mots Sont Allés opens modest notes into fractal agency, language departing only to discover further chambers inside the instrument. A different dialogue animates Robyn Schulkowsky and Nils Petter Molvær’s Hastening Westward (ECM New Series 1564). In “Pier And Ocean II,” foregrounded cymbals create an aerial plane for Molvær’s trumpet, while deeper impacts lend the scene sanctity freed from doctrine. Percussion supplies a shifting anatomy; trumpet becomes the consciousness passing through it, visible to itself for one impossible instant.

A program dedicated entirely to Sándor Veress (ECM New Series 1555), performed by Camerata Bern with Heinz Holliger, is another homage. Veress taught Kurtág and wrote the Passacaglia Concertante for Holliger, so inheritance here passes in genuine form. A plucked string drops an idea into depth, and viola-rich currents carry its consequences outward as Holliger’s oboe burns through the structure with intimate authority. His own Beiseit/Alb-Chehr (ECM New Series 1540) divides that authority between folklore and verbal fracture. Alb-Chehr recounts a cowherd’s ghostly encounter through playful color shadowed by fatal knowledge, while Beiseit lets Robert Walser’s words dictate their own arrhythmias. Countertenor, clarinet, accordion, and double bass inhabit an intimacy sharpened by the recording site, a psychiatric institute whose walls seem to have retained every unsounded syllable. Und ging briefly turns lyrical, yet lyricism here bears the delicate unease of a door found open in a room no one remembers entering.

Across this rare compilation, the New Series ideal emerges as an art of attunement to what has not fully entered the world. ECM’s celebrated spaciousness consequently feels less acoustic than ontological. These recordings suggest that consciousness may itself be a form of chamber music, each self sounding only because another presence has drawn a bow across its silence.

Special thanks to Bernhard Liebenberg for bringing this disc to my attention.

ECM New Releases Autumn 2012

| Tyran Grillo

This double-disc promotional sampler appears to be the only one explicitly devoted to both ECM proper and its classical New Series imprint, making it one of the label’s most consummate yearly portraits. Its two halves suggest adjoining chambers within the same heart. Since the ECM disc was also issued individually as ECM Music & Words: Autumn 2012 for the Italian magazine Musica Jazz (see my review here), our attention turns to the New Series side.

Johann Sebastian Bach provides the foundation through András Schiff’s recording of The Well-Tempered Clavier (ECM New Series 2270-73). The work is an origin story written in the grammar of recurrence, and Schiff’s total avoidance of pedal makes its restraint a potent expressive tool. In Book I’s C major Prelude, the timeless arpeggios acquire linguistic pressure. Schiff transforms the piano into a syllabic organ, every tone carrying the faint memory of a mouth. By the fugue, Bach’s nerves have made their way into a river’s flow.

From that immense design, the sampler contracts into the charged particles of György Kurtág’s Signs, Games and Messages, as heard on Kurtág/Ligeti: Music for Viola (ECM New Series 2240), as performed by Kim Kashkashian. In “Panaszos Nóta” (“Plaintive Tune”), the violist’s exaggerated vibrato lends a metallic vulnerability, as notes negotiate their own survival before withdrawing into the instrument’s wooden dark.

John Cage’s The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, from As It Is (ECM New Series 2268), offers another form of divination through Alexei Lubimov and Natalia Pschenitschnikova. Language hovers near semantic collapse while Lubimov turns the piano into a cabinet of knocks and intimations. Pschenitschnikova allows James Joyce’s words to shed meaning without surrendering their magnetic charge. Although this track also appeared on the above-mentioned standalone sampler with Paul Hindemith’s Ragtime, the present collection represents Anna Gourari’s Canto Oscuro (ECM New Series 2255) through Busoni’s transcription of Bach’s “Ich ruf’ zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ.” Beneath her hands, melody ascends as a thought trying to remember the mind that first contained it.

Valery Afanassiev enters a different temporal fissure through Franz Schubert’s Moments musicaux (ECM New Series 2215). These late works sustain an unstable exchange between ebullience and melancholy, of which the Allegro moderato inhabits that brink with childlike wonder, jumping into the muddy puddles of the heart and discovering that their reflections lead downward.

Valentin Silvestrov’s Sacred Songs (ECM New Series 2279) further loosens chronology with the Songs for Vespers of 2006, of which “Come, Let Us Worship” draws a single thread through two millennia, its shifting harmonies washing radiance in shadow before releasing it into the ear. The Alleluja-Tropus from Arvo Pärt’s Adam’s Lament (ECM New Series 2225) sets liturgical words devoted to St. Nicholas of Myra. In this music, the body is time’s most temporary form of handwriting.

Elsewhere, an orchard is being cultivated for instruments that have not yet been invented. Tiny tuning forks ripen on its branches while snow falls upward into a sleepless moon. The silence tastes faintly of iron and pears, and the only image we have left is that which shows us as we are.

Special thanks to David Wakeham for bringing this rarity to my attention.