Author: Tyran Grillo

Christina Rauh Fishburne: The Bridge That Would Not Burn – A Pardonsburg Novella (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

In the Washington, DC, of 1880, the past has rented a room upstairs. It descends into the parlor bearing the countenance of a former Confederate soldier, and Charlotte Worthington must decide how much of its troubled eloquence she will admit into her life. Christina Rauh Fishburne’s The Bridge That Would Not Burn makes historical fiction an intimate predicament: preservation acquires a voice, then addresses a woman whose own words rarely survive her hearth. Between them, the distance separating an event from its aftermath begins to buckle. For readers today, accustomed to encountering the past as an argument already furnished with conclusions, such proximity offers a useful discomposure. We enter a room where the consequences are still taking shape. First issued in installments and now fully illustrated, this novella occupies a passage between A Pardonsburg Songbook (Sabr Tooth Tiger Press, 2026) and the as-yet-unpublished Ballad, carrying its unfinished human reckonings into a larger imaginative country.

Charlotte is someone who consigns her words to flames, pressing ink into page but never capitulating to the allure of permanence. There is a curious sovereignty in this practice. Her thoughts may exist without becoming evidence against her, and the fire grants her a privacy that the social world would scarcely know how to honor. She tolerates the hobnobbery of that world only by the skin of her teeth, enduring it for the company of her sole friend. Beneath that impatience resides the difficulty of possessing an inward life while being perpetually available for outward appraisal. Charlotte represents a consciousness trying to reserve some portion of itself from the arrangements made on its behalf. At a magic show, she is taken into new directions of self-inquiry by a diversion beyond the stage: Lieutenant Thomas Atchison, an associate of her father and the lodger upstairs, whose enigmatic presence has landed within orbit more often than she would wish. The performance lends an apt frame to an acquaintance in which attention itself becomes a questionable art.

Not long after, she encounters him reading a book in her home’s parlor, where their conversation assumes the potentially fatal tapdance of predator and prey feeling each other out. Charlotte is both intrigued and severely put off by his countenance. Her misgivings have a bodily intelligence; curiosity, meanwhile, advances with the mortifying confidence of an uninvited guest who already knows where the silver is kept. As she talks to him more, those machinations of interest begin to loosen their hold. Fishburne attends to this yielding without rendering Charlotte’s resistance foolish. The very effort of interpreting Atchison brings her into closer acquaintance with her own desires, whose obscurity may be as vexing as his. Atchison’s speech and mannerisms are just as tactile as Charlotte’s, bringing vivid color to the novella’s already-rich atmosphere. Their exchanges give thought a surface upon which it can bruise.

Little by little, Atchison picks up shards of his traumatic war experiences, turns them in his mind’s hands, and reveals them to Charlotte. His unnamed illness lends further uncertainty to a presence whose legendary past has already preceded him into the room. Yet legend is a poor vessel for the broken particularity of memory. The man Charlotte privately calls the Mysterious Irritant carries experiences that resist the finish of a well-told anecdote, and his revelations disturb the composure with which the household might otherwise accommodate him. His Confederate past gives this intimacy an uneasy historical weight. Sympathy encounters a moral stumbling block here: suffering may invite tenderness while leaving the cause in whose service it was endured answerable to judgment. Atchison can thus be read as an embodiment of history’s troublesome persistence within private affection. Through him, the old war reaches into Charlotte’s present, asking for a response she cannot borrow from the etiquette of the parlor.

Some parts of her hold on to indifference, while others fling themselves into surrender. At one point, we are told, “She tried to read his face, but she never did have an eye or ear for other languages.” The remark catches the strangeness of an intimacy conducted in a tongue neither participant can confidently translate. As Charlotte finds herself knee-deeper in the muck of social propriety, especially during a pivotal Christmas party, the sheer, overwhelming familiarity of her life grows into a massive entity of ennui that threatens to consume her. One imagines its enormous body folded impossibly into the room, feeding upon every gesture that has been performed before. When she shares a dance with Atchison, that life takes on a newness she had previously caught only in glimpses. The movement affords her a momentary experience of possibility, though the question of what that possibility will cost remains suspended between them.

With multiple potential suitors in view, Charlotte has a war of her own to wage across the battlefield of her stubborn heart. Her eventual verbal showdown with Atchison takes on a Bennet-Darcy-esque tit for tat, although the pleasure of their antagonism rests upon more than verbal agility. Each risks allowing the other’s interpretation to become authoritative. Charlotte’s tenacity protects her against that surrender even as it complicates her pursuit of understanding. Emotions continue to stew within as divisions take shape without, until a series of dramatic events, the rollercoaster of which I will leave for the reader to ride, changes the game significantly for both parties and beyond. The widening consequences prevent their courtship, if courtship it is, from becoming a sealed chamber whose occupants can mistake their feelings for the whole world.

The chimney sweep girl accused of stealing from the Worthington home is especially consequential to that widening. Her precarious place beside Charlotte’s more sheltered uncertainty brings questions of credibility into the same house as questions of desire. Who receives the leisure of being furtive? Whose obscurity becomes grounds for accusation? Such disparities lend the historical setting a pressure that readers today can readily recognize, particularly when reputation is allowed to stand in for knowledge. As Charlotte seeks to untangle secrets in the shadows of the world she thought she knew, she begins to realize her place in it. Troubles gather there with arms coiled and ready to strike, serpents inhabiting the dark recesses of an accustomed dwelling. The vagaries of human folly, in some of its most wicked and deceptive forms, leave us wondering what might have been. That speculation also exposes how much of anyone’s life depends upon the stories others have the power to make credible.

Fishburne’s gift for language seems almost to have arrived from another time. Her words follow the discipline of a fine recipe, balancing umami and proper mouthfeel with the utmost attention to the reader’s palate. The pleasure has substance: the texture of a phrase can make an inward hesitation perceptible before even its speaker has understood it. Historical fiction acquires its relevance through just such acts of attention, restoring uncertainty to lives that hindsight is forever threatening to simplify. Charlotte’s burning pages offer a final, stranger consideration. We ask the past to yield its testimony, yet she claims the right to withdraw hers; her little furnace unsettles our appetite for possession. Perhaps a bridge that would not burn must bear something beyond the weight of remembrance. It might carry the permission to cease repeating what has been inherited, leading toward a country whose absence from every map is its first promise: a future in which our descendants owe us nothing.

Steve Reich: Recordings on ECM (ECM New Series 2890)

| Tyran Grillo

In Steve Reich’s music, repetition is a method of survival. A phrase returns carrying the microscopic damage of having been heard, while attention acquires an unfamiliar capacity for desire. Recordings on ECM brings that reciprocal transformation back to vinyl, gathering the three albums ECM released between 1978 and 1982. Revisiting the collection issued on CD in 2016, this three-LP edition arrives on October 2, 2026, one day shy of the composer’s 90th birthday. Sourced from the original analogue master tapes, the records reproduce their original sleeves; archival photographs accompany Paul Griffiths’s liner notes. Inside the music, strict procedures open improbable apertures, and counting becomes a form of surrender.

The history behind these recordings retains its own dissonance. Reich had developed an unmistakable musical language before the recording industry found a durable place for it. Manfred Eicher brought Music for 18 Musicians, recorded for Deutsche Grammophon but left unreleased, into circulation through ECM in 1978. His intervention gave a public address to an imagination exceeding the available categories. Across the collection, gestures migrate between works, acquiring unfamiliar consequences in changed surroundings. What initially registers as an insistent surface gradually admits depth, until the ear discovers a staircase folded into a single step.

Music for 18 Musicians establishes this permeability with extraordinary clarity. Its opening cycle of eleven chords provides the harmonic material that subsequent sections expand, and the eventual return closes an immense parenthesis. Pianos and mallet instruments sustain a continuous pulse while voices and winds measure phrases through the limits of breath. The mechanical subdivision of time meets the lung’s finite generosity, allowing rigor to develop a vulnerable interior. Wordless singing moves through the instrumental fabric with translucent tenderness; clarinets continue its contours until the boundary between body and instrument becomes difficult to locate. The ensemble’s collective alertness supplies much of the recording’s emotional force. A shifting accent redirects a passage without disturbing its pulse, while the vibraphone’s cues turn communication into audible structure. Individual timbres retain their grain within a beautifully concentrated field. During the work’s nearly hour-long span, our sense of succession loosens. The clock has entered its own reflection and found soil there to grow roots.

The next album changes the proportions of this experience. Music for a Large Ensemble distributes its activity across a broader instrumental field, maintaining remarkable buoyancy amid the layered motion. Strings contribute a vibrating tension; trumpet chords open luminous pockets above the pulse. The vibraphone’s resonance gives the surrounding activity a polished edge without draining its tactile life. Apparent abundance rests on meticulous relationships, allowing the smallest adjustment to alter the lung capacity of the whole. Every entrance renews the agreement holding this intricate structure together, making consistency an active expression of shared musical purpose.

Violin Phase concentrates the inquiry into a more abrasive intimacy. Its repeated figure slips out of alignment with its doubles, generating patterns through the resulting weave. Shem Guibbory’s bow retains a palpable friction, giving the process an embodied urgency. Reiteration rubs the phrase against itself until hidden contours become audible; an interval opens its mouth, and another melody steps through. Where attention lands determines the shape of the encounter. Octet introduces a delicacy of articulation that feels newly spacious. The flute illuminates the texture from within, while clarinet lines give its motion a supple underside. Its abrupt ending leaves the ear suspended, still furnishing a room from which the walls have vanished.

With Tehillim, the voice assumes the authority of language. Reich’s engagement with his Jewish heritage places Hebrew psalm texts at the composition’s center, allowing their rhythms to determine melodic movement. Meaning inhabits the pulse as an ancestral presence. The opening interplay of singing and percussion has a searching energy, and the unfolding canons give that energy increasingly intricate dimensions. Through the work’s four parts, exhilaration gathers a contemplative gravity; the slower third part suspends the forward impulse without extinguishing its inner motion. The performance gives each carefully shaped phrase an edge of discovery. In the closing hallelujahs, praise becomes bodily expenditure, a word passing through the throat until its syllables seem capable of bearing the singer aloft.

Returning to these performances, I continue to hear excess within the supposedly minimal. Reich makes limited materials sustain an astonishing density of experience, and his musicians give that density a human scale. This vinyl edition offers a renewed occasion to inhabit their concentration. Even the necessary interruptions sharpen awareness of what persists after the sound stops. The mind follows a process until following becomes participation; the body answers before interpretation has finished assembling its credentials. Eventually, a pulse reaches some unlit interior of the listener and finds that it has been expected. Within the groove, the future rehearses its first breath.

Paul Griffiths: let me tell you / let me go on

| Tyran Grillo

“She is like the rest of us; we all have no more than the words that come to us in the play.
We go on with these words. We have to.”

In let me tell you, Paul Griffiths gives Ophelia what Hamlet scarcely allows: a childhood, a family, and a love whose end we already know. He makes this life from the 481 distinct words Shakespeare allotted her. Whereas Hamlet can ask whether to be, Ophelia is given “I shall obey” and must discover whether its “I” can survive the command. What sounds like literary engineering becomes the intimate difficulty of making a life in language inherited from others. A word first spoken in obedience returns as doubt. A flower that delights a child already carries an omen for the reader. Nothing is added to her vocabulary, yet a person takes shape within it.

Memory obeys no firmer rule. Rosemary is for remembrance, but to remember here is also to re-member, to gather a semblance of self from words that once belonged to other people. Ophelia cannot place her upbringing beside its telling and decide where one gives way to the other. She has only the events as they come to her now, through words spoken before and after them. Each return changes what those words can hold, and with them the person who speaks.

This New York Review Books edition pairs the novel with let me go on. Beyond the ending Shakespeare gave her, Ophelia enters a fantastical realm among figures from his other plays. An exit becomes an entrance, and death fails to settle the final scene. If the first book asks how much of a life a limited language can hold, the second asks what becomes of that life when even its ending gives way. Going on offers no simple freedom. She carries the voices that formed her into each encounter, where new voices may yet remake her.

The care and wit of these books deserve more than praise for an ingenious rule. To describe them while spending words Ophelia was never given would leave the wager untested. And so, let the register shift now…

The King rises. His play is brief; the words are not. His command would have the daughter dead and gone, but the lady hath more than an end. A home is made, and a lord and a brother have breath there. The play denied them this day, but what was meant as nothing becomes something. We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

A lord is here, and a brother. The daughter would have the lord with love in his heart. “Do you doubt that?” Indeed. Memory is no watchman of what was true. What the mind would keep as true may be false, but what it would call false hath a sweet fashion. The home was there, but no words will restore it as it was. The daughter cannot ask a day to tell what it meant.

A lady will sing, and then be still. The daughter will mark a tongue, a breath, a countenance, but what the lady would keep in the heart is not given to speech. Love is there. The lord hath a merry show for the brother and daughter, but the show hath more than a lesson in it. What the eye would mark is not all that the heart would know. The lady is gone, then here again. What is held without honour will not come again as it was.

There is a mountain with white snow, and flowers on the ground. Here beauty is given a day without an end. Rosemary for remembrance, pansies for thoughts, rue for grace. In the arm the flowers are sweet, but they have the cold ground in them. The daughter with flowers is not the daughter that will tell of them. No key will restore that day. Beauty hath better commerce with what is gone than with what is held. 

Madam hath words that make the daughter believe, then doubt what the heart did believe. Many have affection for the daughter. The lord hath no say in this. Is it love to make a heart believe what is false? Deceived then, it is deceived again in remembrance. The brother hath love for Madam. The daughter would have the lady gone. To him there is love. To the daughter, doubt. At home the two are not of a mind. What was denied is more than what Madam will tell.

Hamlet hath affection for the daughter, and love and fear are there for him. He goes, then is here again. His words are an oath and an affrighted show. The daughter would mark them and doubt what they meant. The lord, the brother, Hamlet: all would have the daughter obey. No lord could know what the daughter would think when the play is still. A command is given, but the heart does not obey it. Love is here. No vows will keep it as it was.

There is a wish to God. Where is the good lord when heaven hath no words? The pansies are gone, and memory cannot make them again. The daughter is gone. Hamlet does not come. The lord and brother weep. The King hath words for this: no remembrance. A heart still hath breath in words, but the play denied it length.

O is no more than O, and may be gone. But O is a wheel, and how the wheel becomes it! The King would have an end, and the play must obey. When it is here again, the dead lady hath breath. The mark is brief, but the lady made of it is not. The King will know a courtier’s countenance, not what the daughter is when words come without him.

But O goes on. There is almost a wish to know what they do without the lady, but no eye will mark that day. The brother is in the heart. A wish for him to be well is all love will have. Then white on white: no mountain, no snow, no ground for words. No play will tell what is here. The mind is two, and no right fashion will make it a mind again. The daughter is here and gone. Words have breath, barefaced and keen. Is this what was overthrown?

He is here. His eye is not where his countenance would have it. He will call, but no call will tell what he means. There is a holy wish in the call, and a hard day in him. The daughter will know him in words, but not all that the heart would keep. No eye will make his countenance still.

In a hamlet (ha!) a lady will have speech. The lady will tell of a “Master.” The daughter would have him as a lord, belike as God. But the lady will say love. What was lordship is affection, and no key is given for where he will be. Then “O.” The mark is brief, but it is the heart of the lady and of the daughter. The lady hath love, but the daughter hath doubt. To know the mark is not to command what it means.

The lady will tell of holy vows and the wish for all to be of a mind. The daughter would have that grace, but remembrance rises unbraced: was the heart true in the vows? Did the daughter choose? Did a lord command what the heart would believe? What was honesty then may be fear here.

The soldier’s mind would have a lesson with a good end. A lady will sing and tell; the lesson is brief, the speech long. It goes to the lord, to love, to the daughter. He would know what it means, but no words will tell him in the fashion he would choose. He would keep the show locked. Speech will not obey. Was it a play? Is this the play? No key will make doubt a lesson. A play with no end is better than a lesson with no doubt.

Two have words of a lord and a King. A lady would know Hamlet; a lady will have no speech of him. They do not think as the daughter would. No command will make them of a mind. A lord is a King at home. A King is no lord in love. Majesty will make a show, but cannot know a daughter by command. His words tell of a daughter. The words of the daughter tell of him. What do they know when the play is gone? No King will tell the heart what it is.

The brother is here. He would know the daughter, but his words cannot restore home. A wrist is held, and then he is gone. What he would keep and what the daughter would keep are true, but the two will not tell it as it was. Love is in what he would know and what he cannot know. A lady made of words is not held still. The brother cannot restore that day.

Do you know yourself? The King hath a daughter for a brief show. The heart hath more than a show. What was is here, and what is here is more than a mark. All have words, but no lord will tell all. The play is brief; what it means hath no end.

Anthony Baldino: CONVEYOR

| Tyran Grillo

Anthony Baldino’s music seems to emerge from two adjoining rooms whose shared wall has become susceptible to the mold of determination. In one, he designs sound and programs synthesizers for Ludwig Göransson on projects including Venom, Tenet, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. In the other, he sits alone among modular systems and vintage machines, teaching private grief to speak through oscillators. Each practice contaminates the other productively. Blockbuster precision enters his independent work, while the freedoms of Los Angeles’ electronic underground haunt his commercial craft. Across his second solo album, CONVEYOR, sound becomes a substance caught between sculpture and combustion, carrying dread before language can domesticate it.

The album began with an image made unbearable by its clarity: Baldino’s mother standing on a conveyor belt traveling toward death while he remains powerless to stop it. The vision gathered force amid his grandfather’s passing, his dog’s death, anxiety surrounding his parents’ mortality, and the suspicion that the world had entered a terminal corridor. Anguish becomes the imperceptible mechanism beneath the day, moving everyone we love toward an absence the mind cannot inhabit. Baldino built these pieces around his Eurorack system and Deckard’s Dream, adding outmoded synthesizers while threading recordings of his grandfather and dog through music informed by IDM, industrial music, metal, and film scores. Released into the circuitry, their voices become unstable presences, fragments of affection wandering between frequencies, close enough to disturb the current yet too distant to hold.

Within the record’s implied world, a nameless protagonist wakes beneath the failing lights of a city abandoned by chronology. Streets advertise pleasures whose consumers have vanished. Towers burn with corporate insignia while elevators ascend without passengers. Screens sell eternity to the dead. “For Death To Come” opens the blinds on this exhausted metropolis, its rolling bass carrying the patience of a verdict already delivered. Fractured transmissions cross the horizon while raw tones scrape silence into finer forms of silence. Outside, a crimson glow divides the skyline. Time has frozen without becoming merciful: debris hangs above an avenue while an explosion waits inside its unfinished flower. Movement belongs only to the solitary figure walking through the galactic pause before some unseen hand restarts the catastrophe. Baldino’s synths turn escape into a spiritual problem. Survival promises only another conscious mile.

“Leave The Reminder” appears farther on as a district of radiant keys and nervous percussion, where memory stutters under the weight of being carried forward. The central figure enters a club beneath a ruined transit station. No bodies occupy the floor, although automated light and bass keep the room dancing. Chord swells preserve an era when listening required no public evidence and a song could live entirely within its recipient. Disembodied impulses gather into a hymn for the unborn, moving without witnesses or the tribunal of visibility. Inside the rhythm, a tender, damaged recording surfaces, then dissolves before identity fastens around it. Remembrance cannot retrieve the lost, the traveler realizes. It gives absence a nervous system, which Baldino crafts from gleaming abrasion.

Beyond the station lies the technological undertow of “Dark As Sleep,” a void generated by machines seeking release from matter. The city thins into scorched plains threaded with fiber-optic roots. Satellites drag broken halos through orbit; buried servers dream on behalf of a species that misplaced its future. As the traveler crosses, inner and outer life collapse. Angels rise with ash in their mouths, demons descend carrying instruments of impossible mercy, and their encounter opens a passage between rival eternities. To dream here is to live on one’s own terms, yet freedom exacts a toll. Each step requires surrendering a former self, leaving translucent skins behind. Metallic convulsions suggest that perseverance becomes another machine when pain is merely outrun. Baldino refuses easy deliverance. His traveler presses onward while facing every discarded version of the person they once believed they had to be.

That reckoning leads to “A Sudden Crumbling Into Ruin,” where gunfire and corroded broadcasts collapse history into simultaneous debris. The wanderer enters a battlefield whose causes have been erased. Symbol-less flags remain; orders crackle from speakers whose armies became dust generations earlier. Fragmentary memories mingle with interrupted signals until private regret and public failure share a frequency. Unlaid plans accumulate as phantom roads promising destinations that disappeared before departure. Every route converges upon “Holding, Waiting,” an immense terminal built for an answer that may never arrive. Departure boards cycle through extinct alphabets, and benches hold the impressions of bodies absent for centuries. Beneath an artificial moon, broken politics washes into white noise, letting the heart redraw its coordinates with each beat. At the edge of perception, a wing flutters behind a sealed gate, carrying the final tremor of a love that never entered history.

Baldino makes this middle passage especially potent by resisting narrative comfort. The record’s machinery convulses with pangs of sorrow, yet never impersonates a human mourner. Its compassion emerges through other means. Dissonance excavates chambers beneath feeling, revealing that dread can contain awe without ceasing to be dread. CONVEYOR understands cinematic scale as an instrument of intimacy: the horizon expands until one remembered voice becomes its gravitational center. What initially resembles apocalypse gradually reveals itself as consciousness stripped of distraction, a psychic wasteland where mortality cannot be outsourced to abstraction. The protagonist’s journey therefore bends inward even as it continues across physical terrain. Every ruined structure is also a failed defense against impermanence. Every transmission asks whether love survives as memory or whether memory is simply the shape love takes after losing its object.

Then “Lifted From Lifetimes Away” alters the album’s gravity. The terminal ceiling opens onto a realm outside inherited time, and the traveler rises through it without triumph. Death recedes to a whisper on the lips of figures stranded beyond distant access points, but immortality has not arrived. What changes is the central figure’s relation to motion. Until this point, the conveyor has represented helpless passage, the mechanism carrying beloved bodies toward disappearance. From above, its belts form a vast script written across the wasteland, each line composed of lives migrating beside one another for brief intervals. No single rider can halt the system, though every touch changes what the next person carries. The traveler has searched for a refuge beyond loss and instead discovers continuity within contact: a hand steadied and an animal’s devotion translated into current. Mercy becomes less a pardon than a method of transmission.

“Live Forever” rises from a cloud of dissonance as the traveler returns to the surface. Synthesizers push through the haze until accumulated pain breaks into an electrified physical release. The title sheds its boastful armor. Living forever no longer means securing a permanent place on the leaderboard of recall. It names the instant when a finite life passes something tender into another finite life, accepting alteration as the cost of endurance. The traveler walks back through the city while time resumes around them. Debris completes its fall. The waiting explosion spends its force against the horizon. Screens dim while elevators stop; the underground club releases its final pulse into empty streets. None of this resembles restoration. The wasteland remains wounded, yet its wounds cease demanding an impossible cure. They become openings through which the dead continue to modify the living.

This is where Baldino’s technical discipline and private mourning align most closely. His machines do not conquer mortality. They translate its terrible rhythm into a helpless luminosity that never pretends to save us. The protagonist finally reaches the conveyor seen at the journey’s beginning and steps onto it willingly. Ahead stands the mother figure, still traveling beyond reach. Behind gather the grandfather and the dog beside innumerable strangers whose losses fed the city’s electrical veins. The traveler cannot move closer to any of them because the distances remain fixed. Yet beneath everyone’s feet, the belt carries more than bodies toward an ending. It carries gestures forward, including those too small to recognize themselves as inheritance.

The unexpected refuge of CONVEYOR lies in this reversal. Mortality, the thief stalking love, also provides the limit that permits love to be given, because a gift without an ending would never have to leave its giver. The lone figure opens an empty hand and discovers that emptiness is not proof of failure. It is evidence that something has been passed on. In the final illumination, solace becomes neither destination nor escape but the courage to serve as a temporary passage for what no one can own. The conveyor continues beneath the stars, bearing each life into darkness, while through the traveler moves a warmth shared by the dead but owned by no one.

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.