Author: Tyran Grillo

Helena Tulve: Arboles lloran por lluvia (ECM New Series 2243)

| Tyran Grillo

Arboles lloran por lluvia

Helena Tulve
Arboles lloran por lluvia

Arianna Savall soprano, triple harp
Taniel Kirikal countertenor
Charles Barbier countertenor
Riivo Kallasmaa oboe
Marco Ambrosini nyckelharpa
NYYD Quartet
Helena Tulve glasses, wind chimes
Vox Clamantis
Ensemble Hortus Musicus
Jaan-Eik Tulve conductor
Estonian National Symphony Orchestra
Olari Elts conductor
Reyah hadas ‘ala recorded October 2009 at St. Nicholas Church, Tallinn
Extinction des choses vues recorded May 2010 at Estonia Concert Hall, Tallinn
Engineer: Maido Maadik
Editing: Maido Maadik and Margo Kõlar
Produced by Estonian Public Broadcasting
silences/larmes, L’Équinoxe de l’âme and Arboles lloran por lluvia recorded August and September 2010 at Church of the Transfiguration of Our Lord, Tallinn
Engineer: Igor Kirkwood
Editing: Igor Kirkwood and Margo Kõlar
Recording supervision: Helena Tulve
Album produced by Manfred Eicher

You are with us and all the while not with us.
You are the soul and that is why you do not make yourself visible.

Arboles lloran por lluvia (Trees Cry for Rain) is ECM’s second album dedicated to the music of Estonian composer Helena Tulve, whose Lijnen sailed the label’s waters in 2008. This European-only release proves that sometimes the greatest treasures are worth seeking. If you care at all about contemporary music, you’ll want to obtain this one at all costs. Not only because Tulve’s compositional voice is more assured than ever, but also because that voice contains so many others, whose constitutions now step forward like memories by lure of hypnosis.

Tulve
(Photo credit: Tarvo Hanno Varres)

Each of the five compositions featured on this program takes root in a text or theme that predates us even as it feels instantaneously born. Reyah hadas ’ala (The Perfume of the Myrtle Rises), for instance, may be scored for voices and early music consort, but its churning intimacy is fresh as fallen snow. The poem from which the piece gets its name is by Shalom Shabazi, a mystical Yemenite of the 17th century, who describes being awoken at midnight by an angelic vision. The performances of countertenors Charles Barbier and Taniel Kirikal, along with Vox Clamantis and Ensemble Hortus Musicus, make this scene—which would seem to demand much of its interpreters—feel as organic as breathing. Just as the poem allows us to imagine a light obscured by branches in the frayed edges of half-sleep, so too does Tulve’s setting thereof reveal by obfuscation. The text is its enzyme, but finishes as an alchemical transformation—or transfiguration, if you will—from word into flesh. The voices and strings intensify, becoming denser, but keep returning to an underlying pause. Cells of plainchant move in arcs so that we might better understand the straighter lines they frame. The oboe-like bombard is powerful to hear in this context, crying like a single beam of language that can only be understood through meditation. Images fade as quickly as they appear, as if inhaling light.

silences/larmes (silences/tears) nestles a handful of shorter poems by Mother Immaculata Astre, Abbess of Le Pesquié (a Benedictine nunnery in the south of France). Soprano Arianna Savall, oboist Riivo Kallasmaa, and Tulve herself (playing glasses and wind chimes) make for a crystalline skeleton to animate these verses, each a burst of pollen. There is a cautious, faunal quality to the emergence of voice and oboe, although the atmosphere is far from bucolic. After the performers recede into whispers (at which point they describe the brush of a night moth’s wings), the resurgent song becomes almost unsettling, for it emphasizes the messy biology that enables even the most basic sound to be produced.

L’Équinoxe de l’âme (The Equinox of the Soul) features Savall on voice and triple harp, joined by the NYYD String Quartet. Here the text is by 12th-century Sufi mystic Shabab al-Din Suhrawardi, and sung in a French translation from the Persian by Henry Corbin. It is dappled with parables from the Safir-i-Simurgh (The Calling of the Simurgh), and from them protrude spidery legs of awakening. As harp notes fall among seeds from laden branches, Savall navigates the text as if it were a gesture of divine scope. Suhrawardi’s messages are urgently cryptic, their answers revealed in the omnipresence of things. If, in each of these compositions, performers seem to be bonded by deeply microbial connections, in this context they are of the same body.

The album’s title composition is performed by Vox Clamantis, backing Savall and Kirikal as vocal soloists and Marco Ambrosini on the nyckelharpa. This time, Tulve turns her attention to a traditional Ladino (Sephardic) poem, for which the nyckelharpa’s muted pizzicati are an evocative treasure. Amid these raindrops, voices sing broken syllabus before more visions, now earthly, take focus. The Kirikal-Savall helix betrays the nervousness of wings, of leaves trembling beneath the weight of water, of the anticipation of physical union. Tonal changes add restorative brushstrokes to a decaying landscape, leaving Ambrosini in the hush of a sigh.

Although the final piece of the program, Extinction des choses vues (The Extinction of the Things Seen), features no vocalists, it is still rooted in a text: Jesuit thinker Michel de Certeau’s Extase blanche (White Ecstasy). Like Tulve’s later output, it traces a threshold between worlds. One can hear the influence of her illustrious teacher, Erkki-Sven Tüür. clearest in its fractal respiration and percussive skin, and in the distinctly threnody-like quality of this piece. Its mouth is a spiral, and the tongue that rests within is a nebula.

Arboles lloran por lluvia confirms in Tulve a voice and temperament comparable to Kaija Saariaho in that it looks beyond the label of “spectral” into a face, as of certain paintings, that is always staring back at you no matter where in the room you stand. If this music were a window, it would mourn the loss of light, drunk to the last drop by the leaves beyond its brow. It is perhaps in this spirit that the album bears dedication to Montserrat Figueras. The mother of Savall, her spirit is palpable in the recording, nodding and smiling throughout. Tulve thus attends to the ghosts between words and weaves them into a husk of dreams. Within them, she composes a world of movement without form.

Just as the trees cry for rain, so does the rain cry for trees.

Hildegard von Bingen: Ordo Virtutum (ECM New Series 2219)

| Tyran Grillo

Ordo Virtutum

Hildegard von Bingen
Ordo Virtutum

Ensemble Belcanto
Andrea Baader soprano
Edith Murasov mezzo-soprano
Rica Rauch alto
Martina Scharstein soprano
Dietburg Spohr mezzo-soprano

Benjamin Cromme speaker
Lilith Reid speaker
Selina Drews girl soprano
Recorded October 2010, Festeburgkirche, Frankfurt am Main
Engineer: Markus Heiland
An ECM Production

Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) is without parallel. She has been called by biographer Fiona Maddocks “The Woman of Her Age” and, elsewhere, “a Renaissance woman several centuries before the Renaissance.” We know very little about von Bingen, except that she certainly recognized the theological import of music, if not also the musical import of theology. As a composer, von Bingen came to popular prominence in the mid-1990s, when interpretations of her works by such landmark ensembles as Sequentia rode a wave of Gregorian chant and other recordings of medieval music to great success. Her Ordo Virtutum of circa 1150 is a quasi-liturgical mystery play that walks a textual path (modeled after the Song of Songs, Isaiah, and the Revelation of St. John) into what Gerhard R. Koch in his refreshing liner notes calls a “psychodrama” between the virtuous and the satanic. Koch rightly cautions those of us who think we appreciate von Bingen’s music, when really we adore the beautification of it. (Sequentia’s recording of the Ordo, in fact, set a precedent by adding instruments where none exist in the essentially monophonic score.) Indeed, how many of us have actually read her works, sat with her mystical visions and followed their many threads of light? The phenomenally talented singers of Ensemble Belcanto, led by mezzo-soprano Dietburg Spohr, have on this recording responded with a reading of their own—one in which divine impulses speak in earthly languages, and far from the adornments so much in vogue in early-music practice. “The presumption of uniformly executed solemnity,” Koch reminds, “induces at least ideological suspicion of a narcotic, lulling ideal of the Middle Ages.” Taking this suspicion to heart, Belcanto pays deepest respect to von Bingen’s vision by kneading shadows into its glow.

“Who are these, who seem like clouds?” So ask the patriarchs and prophets of the play’s opening scene. Such words speak to an overarching (and subterranean) theme of dual relationships: between internal and external, emotional and physical, present and historical moments. Already the recording is such that we feel a part of the singing circle, forgoing the reverberant cathedral space for an intimate experience: this is not the reflection of vaulted stone but the absorption of ancient wood. There is a solemnity, to be sure, but it comes from a feeling of sharing in a fearlessness of interpretation rather than from some unverifiable, hermetic fantasy. Here the voices interlock, shape one another in real time, and forge their own pathos like a barrier against the flames of Hell itself.

Belcanto’s immediately recognizable sound lends a familiarity to this narrative of struggle. The arrangement of “Querela Animarum in came positarum” (Lament of embodied Souls) is especially moving in its nervous tutti singing, and in the way its lowest voices extend to a self-aware ripple. Dissonances add willing integrity, while gasping, birdlike calls and responses and whistling motifs indicate the half-physicality of the titular Virtues and their eternal questioning. They are, in fact, given the most varied palette, much in contrast to the children’s voices speaking the Devil’s words out of sync. And while there are beauties (such as Charity’s introduction) to be found, the brevity of each section allows us to move on, and folk elements to spring Pagan-like from the grasslands. Spohr’s arrangements thus speak to the unspeakable: singing on inhales as Faith, breathing gravel as Discipline, and keening as fragile Mercy. What sparse instrumentation there is—a beaten drum for Victory, bells for Chastity—ignores the trappings of note value and goes straight for the viscera.

The final procession feels closest to plainchant, its core opening to the light of salvation. “So now, all you people,” it is sung, “bend your knees to the Father, that he may reach you his hand.” It is one possible realization of von Bingen’s ideal: that any and all voices should magnify the same faith. And despite the array of “modern” techniques employed to get there, we can be sure that Belcanto is not making the music new but rather fortifying its antiquity. The end result is among the more fascinating albums in the entire New Series catalogue, and as such asks only the same devotion of attention that went into its creation. Because the booklet provides no translation, you will want to have one in front of you while listening (one is available here). Only then will you appreciate the sheer level of embodiment taking place in every word.

Jon Balke: Magnetic Works 1993-2001 (ECM 2182/83)

| Tyran Grillo

Magnetic Works

Jon Balke
Magnetic Works 1993-2001

Jens Petter Antonsen trumpet
Per Jørgensen trumpet, vocals
Arve Henriksen trumpet, vocals
Morten Halle alto saxophone, flute
Tore Brunborg tenor and soprano saxophones
Gertrud Økland violin
Trond Villa viola
Jonas Franke-Blom violoncello
Svante Henryson violoncello
Cikada String Quartet
Henrik Hannisdal violin
Odd Hannisdal violin
Marek Konstantynowicz viola
Morten Hannisdal violoncello
Jon Balke piano, keyboards, percussion, electronics
Anders Jormin double-bass
Marilyn Mazur percussion
Audun Kleive drums
Recorded 1993 (Further) and 2001 (Kyanos) at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Solarized recorded 1998 at Audiopol, Skien
Engineer: Audun Kleive
and Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Compilation by Jon Balke
An ECM Production

Magnetic Works confirms keyboardist and composer Jon Balke as one of the most important and eclectic voices of Norwegian jazz. Collecting tracks from two ECM albums and nine of ten tracks from the long out-of-print Solarized (originally released in 1999 on the EmArcy label), this 2-CD set is an instant archival gem. In his liner note for the compilation, Balke describes the music he played with his influential Magnetic North Orchestra as having been “written to allow the individual musicians to enter an optimal playground for their expressivity.” Achieving this was no small feat, but listening to these musicians negotiate their personalities by way of the group’s collective distribution promises fascination for the Balke fan and newcomer alike. Although anyone who owns Further and Kyanos will find nothing new among the selections from those albums, hearing them shuffled in the present context is sure to bring about new relationships and nuances.

Further

Released in 1994, Further was the MNO’s label debut. “Departure” opens both album and compilation with an incantation of reed and brass. It’s a full-throated welcoming into a space abundant in elemental colors. The swinging undercurrent of “Changing Song” is picked up by strings and Per Jørgensen’s distinctive vocals, while drummer Audun Kleive and percussionist Marilyn Mazur flesh out the ecosystem of its unfolding. Balke, meanwhile, emotes at the piano through this lush climate with all the freedom of a bird. In this vein, “Flying Thing” expands on the percussive delicacies at hand, bassist Anders Jormin laddering down into the gears of a most intimate machine. Balke then leads a Brazilian-inspired groove, gliding just under the radar of the horns. “Horizontal Song” is a nostalgic piece of heaven. The string section relays pizzicato accents and arco trails while the horns and percussion flock to bass like wings of shadow to a flame. “Moving Carpet” is another rhythmic standout. So open yet so fully plumed, it boasts a soaring turn from saxophonist Tore Brunborg. “Taraf,” with its lovely altoism from Morten Halle, could very well be a Michael Mantler elegy. The ascending bass line of “Shaded Place” most clearly evokes its title. Like a napping stranger whose dreams are visible in a hovering cloud, it turns but does not wake. Balke and Jormin dig deep for emotional treasure and come up with handfuls.

Kyanos

Kyanos, from 2002, is a far more biologically minded album—not only because of the track names, but also because of the intensely miniscule palette on which Balke and his musicians draw throughout. A seemingly omnipresent breath of electronics sets it apart from other MNO records, as does its prioritized roster, only minimally adorned by strings. The title track is quintessential in its pairing of trumpet and droning wave. Like the tracks “Katabolic” and “Mutatio” that precede it, it has caught something mournful in its net and can only contemplate whether to throw it back or consume it. In this sense, Balke’s role is far more physiological than melodic, as demonstrated by the pianistic surgery of “Plica.” The fertility-laden “In Vitro” and “Zygotos” enrich the microscopy of every snake and ladder, breaking skin at last in the exploratory “Karyon.”

Solarized

Solarized sits between these two abridged albums, finishing Disc 1 and beginning Disc 2, as if it were somehow too expansive to contain in full. The rolling snare of “Present Position” ushers us into a substantial sound. Jormin’s bassing is weighty and, in this outing at least, indeed the most magnetic force within the group. Balke follows a linear, faceless figure through catacombs of spontaneity, mapped by the string players as Jørgensen’s trumpet lights every torch in the castle. The title track switches above ground. Through-composed beginnings lead to some beautiful leaps from Halle, who reaches catharsis with a hard-hitting altissimo. A phenomenal exercise in rewarded patience. Jormin glows again in “Dark And Slow,” in which trumpeter Arve Henriksen exhales his way through those oaken walls with ease. Like a heartbeat made manifest, “In Degrees” emotes in the name of survival and ends with a satisfying growl.

Because Balke is never one for being longwinded, at nearly eight minutes “Curve” might seem gargantuan were it not for the smoothness of its contours. This is such a visual track, with streets and pedestrians clearly discernible through the fog. The looping “Circular” is a steady but varied groove, Kleive leading all the way. Trumpet and violin double one another in “Vertical,” a short track that feels like a scene in a novel you once read and forgot about. “Encoded” sports an upbeat piano trio vibe. And just as there is nothing cryptic about it, neither is “Elusive Song” difficult to grasp. You can hear the wiping of strings along the piano’s edges, and the trumpet’s swan song touching a hand to the window.

It’s just as well that the seventh track of Solarized, “Linear,” should be left out, for there is nothing linear about the goings on documented here. Balke and his cohorts are champions of neglected songs, and this set ensures those songs will never be neglected again.

Ketil Bjørnstad: Vinding’s Music – Songs From The Alder Thicket (ECM 2170/71)

| Tyran Grillo

Vinding's Music

Ketil Bjørnstad
Vinding’s Music – Songs From The Alder Thicket

Ketil Bjørnstad piano
Gunilla Süssman piano
Jie Zhang piano
Norwegian Radio Orchestra
Christian Eggen conductor, piano
CD 1
Recorded December 2009, Pettersens Kolonial Lydstudio, Hønefoss, Norway
Engineer: Espen Amundsen
CD 2
Recorded March 2009, Store Studio, NRK, Oslo, Norway
Engineers: Morten Hermansen and Jan-Erik Tørmoen
Recording producer: Geoff Miles
An ECM production, in collaboration with Aschehoug and Suhrkamp

While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.
2 Corinthians 4:18

Pianist and composer Ketil Bjørnstad will be familiar to ECM listeners for his contributions to the label in many contexts, though perhaps most notably in his “Sea” duology (ECMs 1545 and 1633) with cellist David Darling, guitarist Terje Rypdal, and drummer Jon Christensen. With Vinding’s Music, he moves to the realm of the trilogy—specifically, his three-volume collection of novels that begins with To Music, continues with The River, and concludes with The Lady In The Valley. Despite being highly praised as an author in his native Norway, as of this review only To Music has been translated into English. Nevertheless, there has always been something of the written word in his craft, each phrase sculpted like a polished sentence in search of something otherwise inexpressible. The dimmer corners of the human psyche seem always to have been a primary interest of Bjørnstad, who mines his fictional genealogy for this double album of associations and impressions.

Bjørnstad’s trilogy follows the life of a young piano student, Aksel Vinding, whose experiences mirror Bjørnstad’s own as a budding musician and composer in the Oslo of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Vinding suffers the premature death of his mother, whose absence haunts him as he faces corruptions of the living, all while trying to enhance his musicianship with nourishing growth. To achieve this, he climbs through his mounting grief and regret, marking the way with music that is important to him. In March of 2009, Bjørnstad assembled those same pieces into a concert, thereby yielding this album’s second disc.

Although it is music we have heard before, it is duly inflected by the knowledge of Bjørnstad’s concept. As Christian Eggen conducts the Norwegian Radio Orchestra and plays the Adagio from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 to start, we might very well imagine Vinding himself feeding his shadow into the composer’s scintillating machine in the hopes that something between the two might result from the friction. The piano, then, ceases to be a solo instrument, for it exists only by the grace of others, known and unknown.

Gunilla Süssmann takes on the guise of Bjørnstad’s thinly veiled protagonist in an account of Debussy’s Clair de lune that is anything but. It is, rather, naked with lucidity. Süssmann also offers her take on the Adagio from Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and the final movement of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 30. The former’s oceanic patterning is clearer than ever, while the latter’s epic tumult lends voice to Vinding’s own. Jie Zhang offers her renditions of Chopin’s waltzing, glorious Ballade No. 1 in g minor, 23 and the Adagio from Ravel’s Piano Concerto, which drips from her fingertips with melancholy. Fadeout comes with the prayerful solitude of Barber’s Adagio for strings.

With the aftereffects of the Oslo performance still in his mind, Bjørnstad was invited in December of that same year to try out a new recording studio and its Bechstein grand piano, where and on which he worked through latent expressions of suffering. Hence the first disc, which documents Bjørnstad’s wintry improvisations. Not only is it refreshing to hear Bjørnstad at last on his own after so many years of collaboration on ECM; it is also proof positive of the novels’ thematic connection between suffering and art. In the spontaneous gesture he captures feelings of his characters, to be sure, but more importantly of himself. This is a diary, the travelogue of a soul.

Titles are at once retrospective and inherent. Each references a line, image, or idea from the trilogy and inspires pieces as long as nearly 11 minutes (“So Far, So Hidden”) and as short as three (“Evening Voices”). There is a yearning quality to their arc, which follows Bjørnstad’s dear protagonist toward creative refuge. At the beginning of the program, grief is still a bad dream, lit beyond recognition like constellations by sunrise. As the progression becomes clearer, we find that Vinding’s memory is a storehouse of remorse and missed opportunities. He broods over major harmonies, which sound like minor blips of land on an otherwise level waterline. Conversations from the past return in that half-dream state in which the dead may live again, speaking as they once did. But these are ephemeral comforts. Indeed, the more dance-like the motif (“Promise” is one example), the more withdrawn Vinding becomes. For the most part, melodies steep themselves in those forever-unknowns of which no grieving soul can be dispossessed, leaving only the churning ocean of “Remembrance” to show for their having ever existed.

Elsewhere, as in “Outside Skoog,” Bjørnstad’s fingers move as if they were legs toward some silent rapture, whereby the body grows weaker with every step, in proportion to the heart’s resolve. Revolving arpeggios in the left hand leave the right to unhinge every window in a childhood home and let the air of adulthood flow through the empty rooms. “The Stones, The River” is likely to sound the most familiar to Bjørnstad admirers for the regularity of its breath (the recording is clear enough to capture him respiring through the keys) and its stark, hymnal quality. If optimism is anywhere, it is in the final “New Morning,” which despite its moving on touches lips to scars and inhales their moral lessons. Like stepping onto freshly harvested land, it must acknowledge the decay that feeds new growth.

This is music that sings because it must.

Anouar Brahem: Vague (ECM 1881)

| Tyran Grillo

Vague

Anouar Brahem
Vague

Anouar Brahem oud
Béchir Selmi violin
Lassad Hosni bendir, darbouka
John Surman bass clarinet, soprano saxophone
Dave Holland bass
Jan Garbarek soprano saxophone
François Couturier piano, synthesizer
Jean-Louis Matinier accordion
Kudsi Erguner ney
Jean-Marc Larché soprano saxophone
Palle Danielsson bass
Jon Christensen drums
Barbaros Erköse clarinet
Richard Gálliano accordion
Recorded 1990-2001
Produced by Manfred EIcher

This conspectus of Tunisian oud master Anouar Brahem, exclusively released in France and Belgium in 2003, might have flown under most radars, but considering that its tracks are taken from pre-existing ECM albums, there’s nothing lost in skipping this one. For those new to Brahem, however, this is a worthy place to begin the journey. Spanning a decade of work for the label, the program builds off two selections from Brahem’s 1991 debut, Barzakh, beginning with the solo “Ronda.” Being an early piece, it is more overtly expressive of the verve that moves him (compare, for example, the restraint of more recent ensemble pieces like Souvenance). And yet, even at his most animated he is sensitive to silence. He carves his themes like the rosette of his very instrument, leaving behind a design of grand yet intimate beauty through which the timelessness of his music flows.

AB

This album is as much a portrait of Brahem’s supremely gifted associates as of their prodigious leader. In “Parfume de gitane” he is joined by violinist Béchir Selmi and Lassad Hosni on the frame drum, longtime friends whose points and lines magnify one of ECM’s most original voices. There is even “Bou Naouara,” a goblet drum solo by Hosni, to cleanse the palette along the way. “La nuit des yeux” finishes the compilation proper with another solo, in which one can almost feel the night opening its palm and inviting us to dance into places not even the moon can reach.

Before getting to that ending, we are treated to a shuffled assortment of projects, including one of his most outstanding in the form of 1998’s Thimar. In that trio with multi-reedist John Surman and bassist Dave Holland, he created something unforgettable. On “Houdouth,” Surman’s bass clarinet is the rough to Holland’s smooth, and together with Brahem’s lilting undercurrent contributes to three most evocative dimensions. For “Mazad” Surman switches to soprano in a classically shaped tune, played with such intuition by this unprecedented (and unrepeated) combination. Although Brahem composes nearly everything on Vague, “Hulmu Rabia” reveals yet another motivation behind its assemblage: Brahem as composer. For here the oudist is nowhere in sight, but everywhere in sound as Surman and Holland navigate a mournful tune on their own.

From Conte de l’incroyable amour we get two tunes. Brahem’s second ECM album, released a year after his first, furthers his relationship with Hosni and introduces ney virtuoso Kudsi Erguner for “Diversion.” Erguner’s playing is so genuinely sandy that you might as well give up on trying to knock every last grain from your shoes. With a tone that could charm the charmer, he lifts the curtain of exoticism and floods the stage with life, patient and serene. “Le chien sur les genoux de la devineresse” is a third oud solo, which sounds like a troubadour’s lute before a fluttering plectrum announces more distant roots.

“Sebika” is the only track to make it from 1994’s Madar, pairing him here with Jan Garbarek, in whose presence the oudist becomes a tactile springboard for the Norwegian saxophonist’s parabolic improvisations. There has always been something of the shawm in Garbarek’s tone, and it finds a natural place in such a context. My only minor disappointment is that a personal favorite, Le pas du chat noir, only gets one nod as well. Thankfully, it is such a well-cut gem in Brahem’s discography that any facet of it will do, and “Leïla au pays du caroussel, variation” is a suitably nuanced ambassador. It is the second of his magical combinations: oud, piano (François Couturier), and accordion (Jean-Louis Matinier).

The latter combination was somewhat foreshadowed in “E la nave va,” in which bassist Palle Danielsson, Couturier on piano, and accordionist Richard Gálliano, who barely whispers over the field abandoned by Brahem, introduce a handful of selections from Khomsa. This 1995 album was a major turning point in Brahem’s compositional output, mining old connections while also building new ones. “Comme une absence” is uniquely scored for synthesizer (played by Couturier), Selmi’s violin, and Jean-Marc Larché’s soprano saxophone, with Danielsson and drummer Jon Christensen caressing the horizons on either side of their passage. This compilation’s title track also comes from the same album, a duet between Gálliano and Couturier that works a cinematic, Philip Glass-like progression by splicing DNA into discernible scenes. “Claquent les voiles” is also a duet, this time between Brahem and Danielsson, and features strummed chords for a more rustic sound. This one even hints at the atmospheres of Thimar.

Astrakan café, released in 2000, places the oud among Barbaros Erköse’s clarinet and Hosni’s goblet drum on both of the chosen tracks. “Nihawend lunga” is composed by Jamil Bey and arranged by Brahem. Its balancing of light and dark elicits likeminded virtuosity from Brahem. An alternate version of the album’s title track, on the other hand, fronts the two melodizers while the drum barely taps its way beneath.

Brahem is a non-invasive force whose former music has equal footing in our world and another of its own making, whereas now he has abandoned the dreamlike cast of his net and settled into the wonders (and bafflements) of reality. If anything, Vague chronicles the awakening of an artist whose vision has become greater than the sum of its parts and has yet countless paths to cross.

Alternate Vague
Alternate cover

Marcin Wasilewski Trio w/Joakim Milder: Spark Of Life (ECM 2400)

| Tyran Grillo

2400 X

Marcin Wasilewski Trio w/Joakim Milder
Spark Of Life

Marcin Wasilewski piano
Slawomir Kurkiewicz double bass
Michal Miskiewicz drums
Joakim Milder tenor saxophone
Recorded March 2014, Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Still warm from a session with Jacob Young, Polish pianist Marcin Wasilewski’s landmark trio turns from guest to host, welcoming to its fourth ECM outing Swedish tenorist Joakim Milder for an otherwise characteristically eclectic mix of originals, outliers, and nonstandard standards. While the addition of a reed may at first seem unnecessary, emphasizing as much composed material as it does improvised, and leaving its mark on only about half of the set list, its role is crucial to not only the album’s development, but also to the trio’s own as it lengthens its reach.

MW

Even before Milder’s entrance by way of the Wasilewski original “Sudovian Dance,” the trio’s evolutionary prowess is in full evidence on “Austin.” Being the album’s opener and also by Wasilewski, it makes a definitive statement about the musicians’ enduring patience and fortitude in kind. As drummer Michal Miskiewicz airbrushes his way into frame and bassist Slawomir Kurkiewicz drops plumb lines into the bodies of water that emerge from every melodic cell, the band’s smoothness arises not from its playing alone but more so from the mutual understanding that drives that playing to fruition. In this track especially, Wasilewski emotes at the keyboard in a way not heard since Tord Gustavsen on Being There. His minor inflections are especially savory and add to the expansion of vision. That being said, and despite the big-sky country feel, the title is meant to evoke not Texas but Austin Peralta, the prodigious multi-instrumentalist who died in 2012 at the tragic age of 22. “Three Reflections” is another trio example, and along with the arcing title track and its concluding variation caps the bandleader’s pen for this round. In all of these, Kurkiewicz tends to the flame, while Wasilewski and Miskiewicz push their interactive skills to new depths.

Milder’s contributions are most acutely felt in his own composition “Still,” which frames an urban setting with robust punctuations, and in his repeat of Krzysztof Komeda’s “Sleep Safe And Warm” (originally written for the film Rosemary’s Baby and last heard at Milder’s lips on Tomasz Stańko’s Litania). The saxophonist’s improvisations are as integral as they are caressing, ever focused more on the atmospheric potential of melody than the melodic potential of atmosphere for its own sake. Miskiewicz meanwhile proves phenomenally articulate on cymbals, while Wasilewski carries us over one horizon toward the next.

MWT
(Studio photos by Gildas Boclé)

Other covers include “Do Rycerzy, Do Szlachty, Do Mieszczan” (For the Knights, the Nobility, and the Burghers), a sunlit arrangement of an already luminescent song by Polish rock favorites Hey, and “Message In A Bottle,” a throwback to Sting’s days with The Police. The latter indeed scrawls its concept of time across a curl of paper. Tossed into the ocean along with it, we feel the motion of the waves, their storms and slumbers. These and more we can read into a solo from Kurkiewicz, who digs even deeper for the interlocking groove of Herbie Hancock’s “Actual Proof,” in which distantly recorded drums blend in a psychedelic hue. Completing this album’s puzzle is the “Largo” from Grazyna Bacewicz’s 1963 Sonata No. 2 for piano. In the bassist’s arrangement, it shadows a river’s flow like the night follows noon.

The Japanese use a word, komorebi (木漏れ日), to describe the play of sunlight through trees. The term describes Spark Of Life to a T. Milder is the light, the trio its leaves and branches, and together they are a glade whose forest, one can hope, will continue to grow.

(To hear samples of Spark Of Life, you may watch the album trailer above or click here.)

Robert Schumann/Heinz Holliger: Aschenmusik (ECM New Series 2395)

| Tyran Grillo

Aschenmusik

Robert Schumann
Heinz Holliger
Aschenmusik

Heinz Holliger oboe, oboe d’amore
Anita Leuzinger violoncello
Anton Kernjak piano
Recorded July 2012 and November 2013, Radio Studio Zürich
Engineer: Andreas Werner
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
An ECM/SRF2 Kultur co-production
Executive producer (SRF): Roland Wächter

The solar system of Swiss oboist and composer Heinz Holliger has always thrived in a clockwork universe of innovation, but Aschenmusik may just be his most super nova yet. This second major ECM reckoning with the legacy of his much-admired Robert Schumann not only follows in the footsteps of Romancendres but also retreads them with finer shoes. By paying homage to Schumann’s Five Romances of 1853, forever lost to flames by wife Clara’s own consignment, Holliger works through personal frustrations over unrecoverable music by fleshing out the body of its ghostly narrative—the only indication that remains of its certain brilliance.

Romancendres is written for the same combination of cello and piano, and in this expanded version opens the ears to further allusions and cryptographies. Both instruments push their harmonic boundaries, thereby revealing—if not also reveling in—Holliger’s inner turmoil over the loss of Schumann’s score. Cellist Anita Leuzinger walks a tightrope, which like an electrical line through pruned trees carries energy powerful enough to kill. The cello’s vocal qualities and the piano’s percussive are magnified to the point of vulnerability, as emphasized in the fractures and tremors of the latter movements. Yet none of it approaches the masterstroke of the tensile second, in which pianist Anton Kernjak tinkers with a vessel that is constantly being broken by the Leuzinger’s need for sailing. The underlying now becomes the overlying and spins the globe not on an axis of poles but equator. In this decidedly rhythmic piece the piano is beaten, struck, and plucked while the cello ascends microscopic ladders and leaves only water-drop pizzicati to show for its swan dive.

Surrounding this modern morsel are some of Schumann’s latest and greatest, of which the Six Studies in Canonic Form, Op. 56, are a delight to hear in such fine company. Holliger, who here plays the violin part on the reedier oboe d’amore along with Leuzinger and Kernjak, makes a convincing case for these neglected masterworks. More than studies, they are fully matured bodies of exceptional beauty and proportion that effortlessly shine Baroque counterpoint through the foliage of Romanticism. Some are more playful and have an air of the salon, while others are gravid, tonic. Still others are more bucolic, but ever aware of the physical relationships between instruments. The marching fifth receives a particularly artful navigation of pianistic harmonies and rhythm changes, while the elegiac sixth ends on a sigh.

The Three Romances for oboe and piano, Op. 94, showcase Holliger’s peerless tone on the oboe. In these pieces he navigates an ocean swell of piano, its tidal differences yielding the wreckage of a crumbling mind. The insistent, even desperate, quality of the music speaks of an unrequited love that yearns to jump across vast stretches of barren landscape and straight into the heart of one who decomposes beneath it. The final movement unfolds like a map to a very different territory, leaving two shadows for every ray of light.

The second movement of the F-A-E Sonata, excised from a four-part exercise written in collaboration with Johannes Brahms and student Albert Dietrich, is an extant Romance. In this arrangement for oboe (originally violin) and piano, its lilting poetry serves as a bridge into Schumann’s First Violin Sonata, Op. 105, played here on cello. Yet even the glorious first and final movements can do little to conceal the darkness encroaching on Schumann’s cells. Such dynamic realism is not a fight against fantasy but an acknowledgment of its necessity. The central Allegretto follows an arc-like text, which the musicians read with such fluency and through which they relay objective punctuation and subjective expression.

True to the music, in which depth is to be found within the score, not around it, engineer Andreas Werner foregoes studio ornaments in favor of something less mitigated. Having deftly centered Holliger’s oboe on Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis and allowed the violin of Thomas Zehetmair and viola of Ruth Killius to reach out with so much of their spirits intact, Werner was an ideal choice for the present recording. Schumann’s art proves its centrality, activating as it does so much of what makes us live, even when we are no longer around to be aware of living.

(To hear samples of Aschenmusik, click here.)

Eleni Karaindrou: Medea (ECM 2376)

| Tyran Grillo

Medea

Eleni Karaindrou
Medea

Socratis Sinopoulos Constantinople lute & lyra
Haris Lambrakis ney
Nikos Guinos clarinet
Marie-Cécile Boulard clarinet
Alexandros Katsigiannis clarinet
Giorgos Kaloudis violoncello
Andreas Katsigiannis santouri
Andreas Papas bendir
Eleni Karaindrou voice
Choir directed by Antonis Kontogeorgiou
Recorded June 2011 at Studio Sierra, Athens
Recording engineer: Giorgos Karyotis
Edited and mixed June 2013 by Manfred Eicher and Giorgos Karyotis
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Backwards to their sources the sacred rivers return,
Justice and the whole world are born once again…

Medea is the powerful follow-up release to 2001’s Trojan Women, which similarly arose out of a collaboration between composer Eleni Karaindrou and stage director Antonis Antypas. Scored for an intimate ensemble of instruments and 15-voice choir of women’s voices, it also features the composer herself singing a maternal role. The text is an adaptation into modern Greek by Giorgos Cheimonas and begs reading along even for those already familiar with the Euripides play.

Perhaps more than any other Karaindrou album, Medea feels like one seamless piece, if only because the tragedy of its unfolding is present from the beginning. Such foreshadowing prepares us for the play’s infamous infanticide while also drawing a line of empathy toward its subject, so that we might better understand the motivations of her unthinkable sacrifice. Essences of that sacrifice flow through a recurring clarinet-flute arpeggio over a landscape of windblown grass and weeping horses. The beginning, “Voyage,” is the end, and we must go backward through time in order to find the seed from which has grown the hanging tree. And as we join the “Ceremonial Procession,” lead by bendir (frame drum) and santouri (hammered dulcimer), the Constantinople lute bends its strings along the pathway as if it were walking among us. Much of what we encounter thereafter is built on a bed woven of drone, bane, and gold. Over this landscape walk individual instruments, each with a story to tell. Whether in the cello of “On The Way To Exile” and “An Unbearable Song” or the forlorn ney of “Loss,” in the turmoil-laden santouri of “A Sinister Decision” or Karaindrou’s own voice in two iterations of “Medea’s Lament,” a wick of heartbreak burns the candle of Medea’s story from both ends.

Gluing chapters together are the five choruses. With titles such as “Do not Kill Your Children” and “Silence,” their transformation from admonishment to resignation clearly mirrors Medea’s own. The rhythmic undercurrents of these portions speak like a genetic revival, a calling of cells from within, an audible manifestation of the otherwise unknowable forces that drive souls into ruin and resurrection in kind. In these choruses, too, is the hub of Medea’s emotional circuitry, which through misted curtains guides the eyelids into closure with the strangely steady hands of grief.

Minimal in form yet epic in scope, as Karaindrou at her finest always is, Medea can only be a skeleton of itself, for bones are all we are left with by tale’s end. And while one may certainly listen to it for the music alone, even without knowledge of its storyline the feeling of remorse is overwhelming. This is music that asks us not to mourn, but to realize that the thirst of mourning is better slaked by drinking from the fountain of love, not power.

(To hear samples of Medea, click here.)

Meredith Monk: Piano Songs (ECM New Series 2374)

| Tyran Grillo

Piano Songs

Meredith Monk
Piano Songs

Ursula Oppens piano
Bruce Brubaker piano
Recorded April 2012 at Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory, Boston, Massachusetts
Recording and editing engineer: Jody Elff
Assistant engineer: Jeremy Sarna
Project coordination: Peter Sciscioli
Score preparation: Allison Sniffin
Mastering: Christoph Stickel
Produced by Meredith Monk and Allison Sniffin

This 2014 release marks the third instance of “songs” in a Meredith Monk ECM album title, following Songs of Ascension and Volcano Songs. And yet, aside from the occasional rhythmic chant, you will find no voices here. Even so, these pieces for one and two pianos sing with as much viscereal power as any of Monk’s more well-known ensemble projects.

Representing a 35-year period from 1971 to 2006, the program seems to ask: What does a song embody? The root of the word is incantation, and the magical, ritualistic functions that meaning implies. And certainly, few descriptors could describe Monk’s output (and input) so well. Hers is a continent of generative design, an environmentally aware space in which the tactility of melody fades in deference to its intangible worlding. The real question is, then: What does a song disembody?

According to Ursula Oppens and Bruce Brubaker: everything.

Monk session

Piano Songs is an album in the second person. It tells the story of your lives and mine, of anyone willing to join Monk’s sacred circle and hear the sonority of a biography unfold. In this respect, “Paris” (1972) is a highlight, for it represents the composer’s return to the piano after an intense period of concentration on the human voice. It begins innocently enough but throws canvases from windows and watches them crash to the streets below, thus breaking through an amnesic barrier toward the shedding of earthly possessions. It’s one of two solo pieces played by Oppens, who for contrast navigates the snowy streets of “St. Petersburg Waltz” (1993) as might a bird its most familiar patch of bramble. Brubaker plays two solos of his own. The 1981 “Railroad (Travel Song)” is among the more overtly programmatic selections. You can feel the metronome of the tracks beneath you. “Window in 7’s” (1986), on the other hand, is a nowhere-specific tessellation of heptatonic arpeggios.

Among the pieces written for two pianos, 1996’s “Obsolete Objects” makes for an evenly balanced introduction to this skeletal yet emotionally multifaceted soundscape. “Ellis Island” (1981) is another descriptive wonder, in which properties of water and hints of ocean brine shake the global web of personal histories as if it were an instrument. Here is the terrible yet beautiful mystery of it all, where the only life preserver you have left is the wreath of memories around your neck. “Folkdance” (1996) digs to the base of the self, clapping and chanting as if to confirm the illusion that is your body. And so, you stomp your feet on the ground, bridging traditions of an untouchable past and the immanence of an unknowable future.

And then there are three pieces arranged for two pianos by Brubaker: further transformations of impulse into form. From the triangle-turned-pyramid that is “urban march (shadow)” (2001) through the pagoda of “Tower” (1971) and on to the intimate “Parlour Games” (1988), each brings you face to face with open interpretations, each a picture connected to the next until together they mimic reality like a film.

Part of the appeal of Piano Songs is that its titles are virtually interchangeable. Not because they all sound the same, but because there is something of each in the other. For example, the synchronicities of “totentanz” (2006) might work just as well under the title of “Phantom Waltz” (1989), while the latter’s dissonance might likewise signal a dance of death. Whatever we may choose to call them, they are fragments of Monk’s soul, spun from essence to object, and from object to open breath.

If you are new to Monk, I would suggest that you start with Dolmen Music and Book of Days, if only because it is good to first love the soil, so that the diamonds will seem but one of its infinite treasures.

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