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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zehetmair Quartett
Beethoven/Bruckner/Hartmann/Holliger

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

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

(Photo credit: Keith Pattison)

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

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

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

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

John Holloway
Pavans and Fantasies from the Age of Dowland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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