Classical

Heiner Goebbels: Walden (ECM New Series 2878)

| Tyran Grillo

Heiner Goebbels
Walden

Ensemble Modern Orchestra
Peter Eötvös conductor
Bob Rutman voice
Recorded November 1998
at Philharmonie Köln and Alte Oper Frankfurt
Engineer: Udo Wüstendörfer
Recording engineer: Wolfgang Packeiser
Cover photo: Gérald Minkoff
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: June 6, 2026

A cabin can become a machine for myth. Once built, it gathers meanings faster than wind and rain can darken its boards. The small house Henry David Thoreau raised beside Walden Pond in 1845 no longer exists solely as a physical structure. It has become a subheading under the cultural imagination, a place to which each generation returns carrying its own fatigue. Yet its apparent simplicity conceals privileged contradictions and dependencies. Its solitude was never absolute, its wilderness never untouched. Walden Pond lay close to Concord. The railroad cut audibly across the surrounding landscape, and Thoreau’s retreat unfolded on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The woods were not another world but a temporary clearing inside this one.

That permeability matters because Walden exceeds both a hymn to nature and a manual for abandoning civilization. Its solitude is crossed as much by steam whistles as by birdsong, by axes and distant human voices. Thoreau withdraws from the town, yet the town continues to arrive acoustically. Its presence enters without knocking, carried through the air. John Cage, for whom Thoreau’s perception of the world became a lasting source of inspiration, recognized in this radical attentiveness a music preceding composition: “Thoreau was a great musician, not because he played the flute, but because he didn’t need to go to Boston to hear a symphony orchestra… His sensitivity to the sounds of nature was probably greater than that of most performing musicians…” The symphony is already taking place; the difficult art is learning how to receive it.

Heiner Goebbels’s Walden emerges from this expanded idea of music. The composer’s modest description of the work as a series of musical sketches inspired by Thoreau’s book is accurate only insofar as a map indicates a location while withholding the effects of erosion and the sensation of becoming lost in the undergrowth. Written in 1998, the score expands the orchestra around a speaker and unconventional instruments. Goebbels releases Thoreau’s ideas into a different millennium, in which the 19th-century woods reappear as a haunted acoustic terrain where memory tangles with machinery and imagination.

Despite Cage’s suggestion that Thoreau required no orchestra, Goebbels returns him to one. Its traditional borders have been loosened to include samplers and keyboards alongside electric guitars. The cimbalom rubs against didgeridoo; koto and harmonium sound against African percussion. Several of Bob Rutman’s steel cellos and bow chimes enlarge the metallic anatomy of the ensemble. Table guitars of Fred Frith’s design lie flat like workbenches for the manufacture of unfamiliar resonances. The daxophone, devised by Hans Reichel, draws creaks and cries from a length of wood, some of them nearly human. These instruments reshape the conventional body and change what it can imagine itself to be.

The Ensemble Modern Orchestra, under Peter Eötvös, accordingly becomes an acoustic habitat. Its openness mirrors the permeability of Thoreau’s cabin, an enclosure that never entirely excludes the surrounding landscape. Within this enlarged body, the contradiction of Waldenbecomes audible. Sampled rhythms and distorted percussion scatter hard metallic light through the orchestral canopy, while horns bend and wail as if carrying the nocturnal breath of a city from somewhere beyond the pond. Goebbels avoids a clean opposition between nature and civilization, allowing them to stain one another.

Rutman commands this unsettled landscape, reciting Thoreau with an oracular force that justifies amplification. His voice travels through the music rather than riding above it. At one moment it emerges like a human figure from fog; at another it hardens into sounding matter. He trades roles with instrument and environment until it becomes difficult to say who is speaking and what is being spoken through.

“Where I Lived, and What I Lived For (Simplify, Simplify!)” acts as a prelude, opening with drones drawn from metal and wood threaded with wire. They ferret out inner voices, which the older folktales understood far better than their modern Disneyfied counterparts. Those voices are inherently dark. The tangle of horns and multiphonics draws out an inward knowledge we fear to express openly: human thought naturally tilts negative. Thoreau’s asceticism reflects an awareness that we are filthy inside, as expressed by the sounds of rattling bottles and other detritus of life under the banner of technology, turned over and shaken until all our loose change falls out.

This slinks into the jazzier depths of “The House,” where Rutman’s narration, with its enchanting Herzogian lilt, breaks down the walls of the collective unconscious. A slinky guitar and restless trombone widen the emotional register, their exchange revealing Goebbels’s microscopic care for color.

In “The Ponds,” Goebbels entwines plugged and unplugged technology with a strange hopefulness. The croaking of giant toads and lyrical strings trade places with plucked piano innards and bending electric guitar. The water’s surface is frighteningly evoked like a distant, exotic thing, dirty in today’s parlance yet all the more alluring for its nostalgic whiff. As Rutman interacts with the amphibiousness of his own soul, splashed through the netting of Thoreau’s masticatable prose, we emerge worn and suspended in wonder.

Drop it! he then commands in “Reading,” a movement built on less imperative forms of communication. Atmospheric mystery and noir-ish smoke gather as the music saunters through city streets, recalling a vanished possibility before the trees threw down their arms and scooped our souls up ahead of the flood. Hammered dulcimer and slick drums reflect a social mirth that outlives them.

History has altered the charge of “The Ice List” (a title that resonates far differently in today’s sociopolitical climate), in which Thoreau describes the commercial ice harvesting operations on Walden Pond. His account of hundreds of laborers cutting and shipping thousands of tons of ice to the American South and India turns commerce into a meditation on human intellect and the enduring purity of nature. Goebbels adds touches of faraway climates to show us what places seem to those who have never actually been there. Through them, the colonial gaze embedded in that commerce gradually surfaces while the music retains its ambiguity.

At just under 14 minutes, “Spring” is the gargantuan epicenter of this slow-motion sonic earthquake. Theremin-like tones and floating dissonances introduce a flanged sample of 80s-esque rhythm guitar. Cymbals and horns house creepy-crawly things, turning the season into a cage yearning to open and unleash itself upon an unready world. That sardonic promise curdles in Rutman’s recollections of cold and hardship, as “Winter Visitors” gives its plectrum-centered language over to a mind ready for self-destruction. A Shostakovich-like string quartet rears its deformed head, letting mice of circumstance run through the corridors of our hearts.

In “The Beanfield,” which throws an oboe onto a heap of discarded shopping carts and other unwanted vehicles of commercialism, reading becomes the surest way to reckon with oneself, precisely the task Thoreau avoided at first during his stay. This music threatens to take us away from the flesh, as embodied by the drum machine. The final movement, “The White Pond,” presents a glassine mirror disturbed by little more than a breath exhaled in fitful sleep. The drone returns, and Rutman’s animalistic onomatopoeia offers the sole indication that human hands ever touched the ground on which we stand.

Recorded during the work’s November 1998 premiere performances at the Philharmonie Köln and Frankfurt’s Alte Oper, the album preserves its elusiveness as an event. Thoreau becomes a living disturbance in Goebbels’s hands, his text producing new forms long after its world has disappeared. Perhaps we return to the woods because distance sharpens buried frequencies. Goebbels leads us toward that imagined clearing, then fractures it beyond recognition, crowding it with pieces of the very civilization it was built to resist.

And so, American Transcendentalism acquires material weight, a heavy-laden basket filled with the unfinished stories that make up our lives.

Duo Gazzana: Prokofiev/Pärt/Schnittke (ECM New Series 2854)

| Tyran Grillo

Duo Gazzana
Prokofiev/Pärt/Schnittke

Natascia Gazzana violin
Raffaella Gazzana piano
Recorded February 2025, Reitstadel Neumarkt
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Mixed September 2025
by Manfred Eicher and Michael Hinreiner (engineer)
Cover photo: Michael Kenna
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: April 17, 2026

Since 2011, Duo Gazzana have occupied a rarefied space within the ECM New Series realm, where sound is uncovered as a relic from beneath layers of listening. Across their previous recordings, the sisters Natascia and Raffaella have cultivated a language of intimacy that resists spectacle, drawing the ear inward, toward a threshold where precision meets vulnerability. Their artistry thrives not on assertion but on trust, a quiet confidence that what is essential will endure without artifice.

This latest album extends that ethos while threading it through a program shaped by endurance, fracture, and the fragile grace of survival. The chosen composers speak across time not through stylistic unity but through shared confrontation with hardship. As Stefano Carucci observes in his booklet essay, these figures, despite their divergent origins and trajectories, all encountered forms of sociopolitical suffering that threatened to silence them, and yet found in music a passageway beyond constraint. What emerges, then, is not merely a collection of works but a meditation on resilience. Each piece becomes a chamber where pressure resonates.

Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953)
Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 in f minor, op. 80

Written under the oppressive weight of the Stalinist regime, interrupted by war, and completed in 1946, this sonata bears the imprint of a mind navigating both external censorship and internal unrest. The opening Andante assai does not so much begin as seep into being. The piano murmurs from its lower depths, a shadowed resonance that seems to remember something it cannot name. The violin responds with a tremor, not quite a voice yet no longer silenced. Their exchange unfolds like a fragile correspondence between distant selves, each phrase arriving slightly worn by travel.

Textures accumulate slowly, their friction almost tactile. One senses thought grinding against itself. Then, unexpectedly, a glint of irony surfaces, a crooked smile glimpsed through fog. The piano drifts into an impressionistic shimmer, while the violin traces an erratic line above, a figure balancing along a fence that refuses stability. A final whisper of pizzicato settles the air before the Allegro brusco asserts its presence, not with brute force but with a taut clarity that holds its ground. The Gazzanas render this movement with astonishing poise, maintaining a paradoxical separation. It feels as though violin and piano inhabit parallel rooms, their dialogue conducted through walls that neither obstruct nor reveal entirely.

The subsequent Andante opens a window. A stream appears, modest and unassuming, its flow uninterrupted by spectacle. Yet even here, unease lingers beneath the surface. The music twists subtly, its beauty edged with something watchful. By the time the Allegrissimo erupts, the earlier calm reveals itself as prelude rather than respite. Motion accelerates into a language of leaps and surges, returning to earlier motifs not as closure but as transformation. The ending resists finality. It suggests continuation beyond hearing, as though the sonata persists in some unseen dimension, spiraling outward long after the last vibration fades.

After such intensity, the arrival of Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel feels like stepping into a space where time loosens its grip. This work, among the first articulations of Pärt’s tintinnabuli style, invites a relinquishing of self. The performers become vessels rather than agents, their gestures stripped of excess until only essence remains. The piano’s arpeggios unfold with crystalline patience, while the violin sustains a line that seems to hover between presence and absence.

In this interpretation, the Gazzanas uncover a depth that resists articulation. The music breathes within a threshold where the physical dissolves into the ineffable. It carries the faint suggestion of something sacred, not declared but intimated. Each note appears as if reflected in another, a mirror that does not duplicate but reveals hidden dimensions. The simplicity is deceptive. Beneath it lies an infinite regress, each tone containing the seed of another, extending endlessly into silence.

Prokofiev
Five Melodies, op. 35a

Originally conceived as vocalises for soprano and piano in 1920 and later transcribed for violin, these miniatures form a bridge between tradition and innovation. They are concise yet expansive, each piece a self-contained world that flickers into being and vanishes before it can be fully grasped. The Gazzanas approach them with a sensitivity that honors their dual nature.

The second melody stands out in particular. Its opening pizzicato gestures evoke a tactile immediacy, as though the music were being plucked directly from the air. The flowing ostinato that follows transforms this grounded beginning into something buoyant, almost dance-like. Yet the energy never settles into predictability. It shifts, folds inward, then reemerges with altered contours. The final Andante non troppo balances restraint and exuberance, its voice alternating between whisper and exclamation. The conclusion does not resolve so much as dissolve into a state of luminous equilibrium.

Alfred Schnittke (1934–1998)
Gratulationsrondo

Schnittke’s polystylistic language introduces a different kind of tension. Here, contrasts are not reconciled but allowed to coexist in uneasy proximity. Familiar gestures are tinged with unease, while dissonance acquires an unexpected radiance. The Gazzanas navigate this terrain with a delicacy that reveals the work’s inner vulnerability. Beneath its shifting surfaces lies a candid exposure, as though the music has shed its defenses and stands unguarded before the listener.

What ultimately defines Duo Gazzana’s performance throughout this album is a quality that might be called bareness, though the term hardly captures its fullness. Their playing does not impose meaning. It creates space for meaning to emerge. Each phrase feels unencumbered by expectation, as if the music were discovering itself in real time. Their sisterly connection is evident, yet it is not the focal point. Rather, it is the organic foundation upon which a more profound dialogue unfolds.

And perhaps this is where the album leaves us. Not with answers, nor even with questions, but with a shift in how we attend to sound itself. These works, shaped by hardship and carried forward through fragile persistence, remind us that music is not merely an object of listening. It is a mode of being, a way in which experience transforms into something that can be shared without being diminished. In the end, what lingers is not the echo of suffering but the realization that even in silence, something continues to resonate. Whether we call it memory, spirit, or simply presence, it carries us forward with hope.

Heinz Holliger/Marie-Lise Schüpbach: con slancio (ECM New Series 2807)

| Tyran Grillo

Heinz Holliger
Marie-Lise Schüpbach
con slancio

Heinz Holliger oboe, English horn, Sprechstimme
Marie-Lise Schüpbach English horn, oboe
Recorded July/August 2020
Radiostudio DRS Zürich
Engineer: Andreas Werner
Cover photo: Jean-Marc Dellac
An ECM Production
Release date: February 6, 2026

“I don’t want to communicate something definite, something concrete. I find music entirely unsuited for that.”
–Heinz Holliger

This latest recording for ECM New Series by Heinz Holliger and Marie-Lise Schüpbach, who last appeared together on 2019’s Zwiegespräche, feels less like a recital than an extended meditation on the tremor that precedes orality. Across its span, the oboe becomes a site where language approaches, falters, and reconstitutes itself. Holliger’s return to composing for the instrument after decades of reticence gives the album its emotional and philosophical axis. In the booklet interview with Michael Kunkel, he speaks of Klangrede, a kind of sonic declamation in which music thinks aloud without becoming discourse. Rhythm for him is not a law but a mood. “Only in strict moments do I use a rigid framework,” he admits, “otherwise, I simply can’t bear it.” One hears in this a deeper suspicion of any language that hardens into doctrine. Music, he insists, is abused when reduced to a message. There is no lesson here, only a soul seeking its acoustical climate. With the oboe, that climate is paradoxical, what he calls “speaking with a closed mouth.” The entire program plays with this idea, as if testing how much meaning can survive in the face of a written score.

Holliger’s own con slancio from 2018 opens the project like a gasp before a sentence. Played by him alone, it begins with a leaping gesture that keeps missing its metrical footing. Fluttering figures scatter upward into brief star-flecks of multiphonics before dissolving into a luminous fade. Rather than announcing a theme, the piece performs hesitation itself. This sense of suspended utterance returns in his Ständchen für Rosemarie, where the English horn spars with its own desire to communicate, turning inward midway to reveal dreams that feel both candid and concealed. The two duo pieces from 2019, Spiegel – LIED and LIED mit Gegenüber (contr’air), place melody inside a hall of distorting mirrors. In the first, microtonal inflections make each phrase mishear itself, whereas the second builds nested dialogues in which the instruments appear to listen to their own thoughts while voicing them. The later works Fangis (fang mich) and à deux – Adieu, both from 2020, entwine play and specter, quick verbal-like exchanges interrupted by haunted multiphonics that sound like syllables losing their jobs.

Around these pieces gathers a constellation of works written for Holliger over decades, each treating the oboe as a dialect in danger of dissolving. Toshio Hosokawa’s Musubi from 2019, for oboe and English horn, knots the two players together only to let them unravel again. The instruments align in heart yet retain separate bodies, inventing a private grammar of crane-like calls that shed purpose precisely by insisting on it. As articulation softens, the music sinks into a subliminal murmuring. Jürg Wyttenbach’s Sonate für Oboe solo from 1961 is an entire idiom compressed into four movements. The opening juxtaposes public proclamation with whispered aside, while the second turns inward like a language translating itself into secrecy. The third becomes a virtuosic thicket in which Holliger’s upper register fractures into glittering particles before the epilogue lets the instrument split its tongue into a dance that evaporates into silence.

Jacques Wildberger’s Rondeau für Oboe solo from 1962 begins with disarming lightness, a kind of conversational sparkle that slowly acquires gravity. Higher registers awaken like excited vowels, yet beneath them lingers the anxiety that too much thought can make flight impossible. György Kurtág’s con slancio, largamente from 2019, played on English horn, answers this with austere brevity. An opening octave plunges downward into the instrument’s dark interior, brushing past a fleeting memory of Bach before collapsing into aphorism, and aphorism into an empty shell. Rudolf Kelterborn’s Duett für Oboe und Englischhorn from 2017 initially speaks in whispers but soon weaves an intricate web of gestures, a conversation that proves restraint can be the most baroque form of eloquence.

Finally, Robert Suter’s Oh Boe für Oboe solo from 1999 becomes the album’s most openly linguistic experiment. Holliger adds Sprechstimme for this recording, a personal gloss absent from the score. The spoken fragments stumble between playfulness and severity, nonsense and revelation, as if caught in a productive net of aphasia. Directions trip, recombine, and disintegrate, scattering meaning across the floor for the listener to collect, knowing that some syllables will forever be missing.

Taken together, these pieces create a cartography of inaudibility. Breath functions as syntax, timbre as grammar, silence as punctuation. The oboe emerges not merely as an instrument but as a fragile throat, perpetually on the brink of forgetting how to talk and therefore speaking all the more urgently. Music here does not replace language, nor does language dominate music. Instead, both hover in a trembling middle space where saying and sounding keep mistranslating each other.

By the album’s close, one senses that meaning survives only by remaining porous. Every phrase feels as though it might dissolve before finishing itself, and that very instability is what keeps it alive. Speech does not end in sound, sound does not end in speech. They circle one another like letters afraid of becoming words.

Wu Wei/Martin Stegner/Janne Saksala: Pur ti miro (ECM New Series 2843)

| Tyran Grillo

Wu Wei
Martin Stegner
Janne Saksala
Pur ti miro

Wu Wei sheng
Martin Stegner viola
Janne Saksala double bass
Recorded October 2022
Teldex Studio Berlin
Cover: Fidel Sclavo
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: November 21, 2025

Pur ti miro represents one of those rare convergences in classical music when disparate lineages find themselves speaking, almost accidentally at first, a common language. It begins with curiosity, as violist Martin Stegner and double bassist Janne Saksala, both members of the Berlin Philharmonic, step beyond their usual orchestral frame to meet Wu Wei, master of the sheng. His instrument—an ancient Chinese mouth organ whose history predates all the works played here—has been modified with keys for the modern ear, capable of whispering like breath against glass or expanding in a cathedral-like radiance. When Stegner encountered Wei in 2009, as he recounts in the album’s liner note, he felt something akin to recognition, as if this millennia-old voice, rendered anew, had been waiting patiently to show him a corner of the musical universe he had not yet visited.

Their collaboration began with long improvisations that felt like conversations between strangers who, little by little, discover that they share the same dreams. But the true spark arrived one day when Wei, without announcement or expectation, introduced Claudio Monteverdi’s Sì dolce è’l tormento to the group. The sheng’s timbre, at once reed-like and celestial, enfolded the melody in a new kind of vulnerability. Early music, that echo of distant rooms and candlelit courts, suddenly breathed with a startling immediacy. Hearing it was nothing short of a revelation for Stegner.

From this moment, a desire for a project to nurture that revelation without taming it grew. The idea of a trio emerged: sheng, viola, and cello. Yet Stegner wondered what might happen if the music’s lower roots reached even farther into the earth. And so, the cello was replaced in the imagination by a double bass, and eventually in reality by Janne Saksala, whose warm resonance, playful experimentation, and architectural sensibility offered the perfect counterweight to the sheng’s shimmering glow. What began as an artistic experiment became a living portrait of three musicians drawn together by curiosity, humility, and a willingness to let go of what they thought they knew.

The recording opens, fittingly, with Sì dolce è’l tormento, and one feels immediately the trust between them. The strings do not accompany the sheng, nor does the sheng simply ornament the strings; instead, they dissolve into one another, forming a single instrument with three voices. The mournfulness of Monteverdi’s melody gains new terrain. It feels less like lament and more like a story we have heard so many times in languages we do not speak, whose meanings we may sense only in the pauses between syllables. Here, at last, someone translates them for us in real time.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s Organ Trio Sonata No. 1 in E-flat major follows, and with it an architectural shift. The lively outer movements float and spin with a measured buoyancy, but it is the Adagio that becomes the trio’s proving ground. In that slow movement, the muted viola curls around the bright woodiness of the sheng, while the double bass expands the room so we may step inside the harmony itself. Bach’s geometries reveal themselves as bodies in motion, human-shaped and breathing. The Andante from the Organ Trio Sonata No. 4 in e minor deepens the sense of natural inevitability, a landscape in sound. The sheng is a waterfall glimpsed from afar, the viola a lone bird carving patterns into a gray sky, and the bass the mist that holds all of it in gentle cohesion. And when the title piece from L’incoronazione di Poppea at last appears, we recognize the sensation it carries: that life is forever repeating its own small operas, and we are simply pilgrims passing through the middle of one that has been running since long before we arrived.

At the center of the album sits Vivaldi’s La Follia, a theme-and-variation playground that allows the musicians to stretch not only their technique but their imaginative reach. Here, Wei’s sheng sounds at times like an accordion leaning into a waltz, at others like a human voice. Meanwhile, Saksala’s bass dances with kinetic clarity. When the trio slips unexpectedly into jazz-tinged territory, we catch a glimpse of what they can do when the score becomes a suggestion rather than a command. Echoes of Gianluigi Trovesi and Gianni Coscia drift through, blooming into a finale that approaches the exuberance of a Romanian folk dance.

Thus, it makes poetic sense to end with a folk song proper: Bruremarsj frå Beiarn, a Norwegian bridal march. The trio plays it with both reverence and wonder. There is a hint of sadness at the beginning, that ache of separation inherent in every union, the leaving of one home to build another. The sheng’s accordion-like hum traces a path between joy and nostalgia. In its gentle call, the future becomes something familiar, while the past turns mysterious and soft-edged, retreating into obscurity.

Throughout the album, even in the most composed selections, a spirit of improvisation remains. The players listen more than they declare. They treat each phrase not as a given but as a question waiting to be answered. And because none of the instruments carries an aggressively sharp tone, the ensemble moves within a spectrum of shadow rather than light. The absence of a violin removes any temptation toward brilliance for its own sake.

It seems no coincidence that Pur ti miro translates to “I gaze upon you.” Listening to this album, one feels watched, not with scrutiny but with tenderness. The music looks at us the way a friend might look across a quiet table, curious about what we will say next. It regards us openly, lovingly, holding its breath just long enough for us to understand that we, too, are part of this conversation.

Sokratis Sinopoulos/Yann Keerim: Topos (ECM 2847)

| Tyran Grillo

Sokratis Sinopoulos
Yann Keerim
Topos

Sokratis Sinopoulos lyra
Yann Keerim piano
Recorded February 2024
Sierra Studios, Athens
Engineer: Giorgos Kariotis
Cover photo: Jean-Marc Dellac
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 17, 2025

There is nothing quite like the sound of the lyra when Sokratis Sinopoulos takes it in hand. The instrument exhales an ancient soul into the modern air, and few musicians draw from its strings such a fusion of myth and immediacy. From his quartet recordings, Eight Winds and Metamodal, this more intimate duo with pianist Yann Keerim distills their chemistry into an even deeper alchemy of tone and silence. Their collaboration of nearly twenty years has ripened into an art of pure intuition, where melody and freedom speak the same language.

At the album’s heart lies Béla Bartók, whose Romanian Folk Dances serve as both axis and atmosphere. Yet it is in “Vlachia,” one of four original pieces inspired by the Hungarian composer, where their vision truly unfolds, as melancholy and art relate like light through water. The piano’s chords rock gently, a cradle of memory, while the lyra hovers between waking and dreaming, resisting the lull of its own tenderness. “Valley,” by contrast, opens like a watercolor, the soul of the landscape awakening at dawn, when even the smallest stones remember their own luminosity. Between the modally inflected interlude “Mountain Path,” with its blues-tinted horizons, and the quietly breathing “Forest Glade,” the musicians walk among elderly oak, beech, and elm, each exhaling the voices of forgotten peoples, their songs hanging in the air.

The Romanian Folk Dances themselves are reimagined here as meditations on time’s elasticity. “In One Spot,” normally brief and fleeting, becomes a slow unfurling, each phrase examined as though through a magnifying glass instead of a telescope. What was once a dance is now an act of remembrance, a transmission through hands, hearts, and breath. Keerim’s improvisations shimmer with restraint, unveiling the dance as a living organism rather than a set of steps. “Sash Dance” begins like a gift being unwrapped, its introduction a flowering reverie, before the familiar theme emerges, tender as an heirloom passed from parent to child. Sinopoulos’s harmonic touch is radiant, his bow tracing lines that dissolve as soon as they are drawn, while Keerim decorates with the grace of rain gathering on the edge of a leaf.

A solo lyra ushers us into “Dance from Bucsum,” its lament carrying the weight of centuries. Gradually, it finds vitality again, as if memory itself were relearning its steps. The piano’s entrance is light breaking through foliage. “Romanian Polka” delights in this interplay, its bowings and pluckings coaxing the piano into a rhythmic embrace. The music feels rooted in the soil, yet perpetually on the verge of flight. “Fast Dance” is not so much quickened as transfigured. What was once earthy now becomes spectral, its pulse sifted through the mesh between moments.

“Stick Dance” closes the circle, beginning in abstraction before broadening into a spacious terrain of inspiration. There is such reverence here that one hesitates to call it an ending at all. In returning to the first of Bartók’s dances, the album folds time in upon itself, reviving what it has just allowed to rest. It becomes not a conclusion, but a threshold, suggesting that each listening might return us to the beginning with altered ears.

As Sinopoulos and Keerim write in the album’s booklet:

“Our Topos is where tradition meets the present, the Balkan Mountains meet urban space, the music of the countryside meets contemporary creation. Our Topos is where we meet and interact, shaping our individual and common identities.”

Indeed, Topos is less a location than a living field, a place where listening itself becomes part of the composition. Between the lines of melody and silence, we, too, are invited to breathe, to dwell, to remember. And as the final tone recedes, one wonders whether the music has ended at all or merely crossed into another realm, where echoes continue to shape the clouds, unseen but never lost.

Meredith Monk: Cellular Songs (ECM New Series 2751)

| Tyran Grillo

Meredith Monk
Cellular Songs

Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble
Ellen Fisher
Katie Geissinger
Joanna Lynn-Jacobs
Meredith Monk
Allison Sniffin
John Hollenbeck
Recorded January-March 2022 / March 2024
Power Station Studios, New York
Engineers: Kevin Killen (2022), Eli Walker (2024)
Assistant: Matthew Soares
Mixing: Eli Walker, Alexann Markus (assistant)
Cover photo: Julieta Cervantes
Recording producers: Meredith Monk and Allison Sniffin with John Hollenbeck
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 17, 2025

All too often, women have been mythologically depicted as vindictive creatures who exist only to distract and destroy. Whether in the Sirens of the ancient Greeks or Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott, they sing, weave, and create in isolation, forbidden the pleasures of love, peace, and community. And while the work of singer and composer Meredith Monk has always been concerned with questions of agency, it was never made so clear to me as when the boxed set of her collected ECM recordings materialized in 2022. As the first album to appear since that watershed release, Cellular Songs doesn’t so much continue the journey as fold in upon itself, so that by the end, the listener is left with a compact flower of such potent expressivity that it seems capable of leading one’s ears in directions never thought possible yet which sound intimately familiar, as if remembered from a dream that preceded language.

Cellular Songs is the second part of a trilogy that began with On Behalf Of Nature, a work exploring our global ecosystem from a molecular vantage point. For Monk, the title names what is fundamental not only to life but to all of creation. “What is going on in the cell is so complex,” she writes, “and it’s a prototype of the possibility of what a society could be if you take those same principles and expand them.” As Bonnie Marranca suggests in her liner notes, composing and contemplation are synonymous, which makes Monk a meditator of worlds, one who reduces the act of communication to a microcosmic array of consonants, vowels, and blends. In this regard, it is difficult to imagine anything so biologically poetic as the opening “Click Song #3 Prologue,” in which Monk and her vocal ensemble (Ellen Fisher, Katie Geissinger, Joanna Lynn-Jacobs, Allison Sniffin, and Monk herself), with percussionist John Hollenbeck, get to the heart of things. Their tongue clicks are droplets in a distant cave, each carrying minerals and unfelt emotions until, over millennia, stalagmites rise as records of their passage. Like the three “Cell Trios” that follow, they constitute an internal code that locks into place. Flowing harmonies and dissonances encompass the breadth of life itself, a reality in which the voice is central, porous in its itinerant grace. 

Hollenbeck’s vibraphone appears organically in a handful of pieces, a trace element in the soil of this music. Whether documenting a universal grammar in the syllabically potent “Dyads,” playing alongside the piano in “Dive,” or bowing a glassy surface in “Melt,” it allies itself with the building blocks of existence, defying the horrific structures so often fashioned from them. It is the vein in every vocal leaf, seeking photosynthesis without flesh and treating entropy as the dissolution of time. Sniffin’s pianism is equally cathartic in “Lullaby for Lise,” where she joins Geissinger. Rather than leaning on lyricism to seek fantasy, it straddles the threshold between waking and dreaming, recognizing that lived experience is always a blend of both. I hear it as a song to a child not yet born, gestating and growing with all the possibilities of time in her blood and brain, opening her eyes at last in “Generation Dance.” Thus, she comes to know the vision of her mother and her mother’s mother, and as she exhales in “Breathstream,” Monk’s solo voice gives shape to inherited traumas, now able to be wielded in the name of healing.

In the unfolding of “Branching,” each voice becomes the first in an ever-multiplying lineage of wisdom. Speaking of rituals and sacrifices, their repetition serves not as comfort but as a catalyst born of a primeval, generative power. “Passing” finds those same figures trading off vocalizations with a precision that is open to nature’s chaos, while “Nyems” reveals the playfulness of communication for the ephemeral metaphor it truly is.

Given that nearly all of the work presented here is stripped of linguistic meaning, what a radical blessing to encounter the coherence of “Happy Woman.” Here, the feeling is one of transparency, yet also of quiet critique, an awareness of the many roles women inhabit, whether by choice or by force. The opening refrain and its variations (“I’m a happy woman,” “I’m a hungry woman,” “I’m a thinking woman,” etc.) are the stitches of a mother among mothers, quilting herself into the patchwork of history.

By the album’s end, the sacredness of vibration becomes paramount. From these humming atoms emerge animals, rivers, and clouds, leaving us to wonder where the so-called intellect fits into the larger picture. Because if a heartbeat is nothing without silence, then its divisions are where forgiveness begins.

Zehetmair Quartett: Johannes Brahms / op. 51 (ECM New Series 2765)

| Tyran Grillo

Zehetmair Quartett
Johannes Brahms / op. 51

Zehetmair Quartett
Thomas Zehetmair violin
Jakub Jakowicz violin
Ruth Killius viola
Christian Elliott violoncello
Recorded November 2021
Konzerthaus Blaibach
Engineer: Rainer Maillard
Recording supervision: Guido Gorna
Cover photo: Eberhard Ross
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 17, 2025

After much-lauded recordings of works by Hindemith, Bartók, and Schumann, among others, the peerless Zehetmair Quartett returns to ECM to interpret Op. 51 of Johannes Brahms (1833-1897). In his liner notes for the album, Wolfgang Stähr characterizes the German composer as one who “wrote both much and little.” Cases in point are his string quartets, of which he quilled over 20 in his youth but later destroyed, leaving only the two featured on this recording, plus a third. As Brahms once related to his biographer, Max Kalbeck, “The boxes with those old manuscripts stood in Hamburg for ages. When I was there two or three years ago, I sat on the floor—entire walls were beautifully decorated with my scores, even the ceiling. I only had to lie on my back to admire my sonatas and quartets. It looked rather good, actually. But I tore it all down—better I do it than someone else!—and burned the rest along with it.” Work on these survivors began in the mid-1860s, but it was only in 1873 that his perfectionism conceded to the decision to call them complete. And so, we are left with, at best, mere intimations of what came before, shattered and reworked into collages of a mind slightly more in tune with its self-inflicted wounds.

The String Quartet No. 1 in C minor blossoms into exuberant life from the start, its gentle lead-in masking an almost volcanic energy beneath. This declamatory statement is not the setting of a tone but the breaking of it, snapping us out of a painful reverie into something more immediate—a real crisis rather than the arbitrary melancholy with which we tend to surround ourselves. The constant vacillation between urgency and resignation renders these proceedings a masterful exercise in tension and release. The sheer level of rhythmic and melodic invention is dazzling to behold, evolving into something beyond incidental. The Zhehetmair Quartett navigates every twist and turn with the precision of a film director who nevertheless allows his actors to make every scene leap from the screen.

Such heroism, however, is destined to fall, for even the romantic gestures of the second movement are not offered in hopes of fulfillment but rather in expectation of being forgotten. This undermining is what separates Brahms from the gigantry of such predecessors as Beethoven. He is uninterested in staid forms and inherited expectations. He speaks and lets his sentiments carry the day, rather than deferring to baskets with pretty little labels and easily identifiable contents.

In the third movement, a subdued yet altogether lively Allegretto, he unveils another facet of determination, all the more powerful for being caught in a web of its own making. A particularly gorgeous moment occurs when the quartet coalesces into a pizzicato dandelion, then blows its seeds far and wide. But if anything is left to wander offscreen, it is brought right back into focus with the final Allegro. Here, the camera zooms in, revealing every detail. It is a stunning conclusion that declares itself undeclarable.

While these quartets are quite violin-forward, as proven by the leading voices of Thomas Zehetmair and relative newcomer Jakub Jakowicz, violist Ruth Killius deserves admiration for providing the rudder that steers both vessels. Her sinewy strength is astonishingly present in the String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, of which the opening movement lets her sing with unbridled lyricism. The same must be said of cellist Christian Elliott, for whom this would be his last recording with the quartet before his untimely death earlier this year. His depth of color and texture is felt throughout, especially in the two central movements, where the instrument’s endurance is revealed in tonal breadth, muscular leaps of intuition, and smooth layers of binding energy.

In the finale, all signatures come to the fore, each a piece in a larger puzzle upon which light continues to fall. The violins are once again declamatory without feeling desperate, pointing instead to inspirations deeply internal and chaotic, funneled into a sound as interlocking as it is yearning to be free of its own design. Thus, the music leaves us behind, not with a sense of closure but of an ongoing trajectory, an arrow still in light. For in Brahms’s hands, drama has no fixed abode, only the upheavals of time itself, to which we all must ultimately succumb and from which, through performances such as this, we momentarily rise again.

Dobrinka Tabakova: Sun Triptych (ECM New Series 2670)

| Tyran Grillo

Dobrinka Tabakova
Sun Triptych

Maxim Rysanov viola
Dasol Kim piano
Roman Mints violin, hurdy-gurdy
Kristina Blaumane violoncello
BBC Concert Orchestra
Dobrinka Tabakova conductor
Fantasy Homage to Schubert, Organum Light, Sun Triptych
Recorded July 2021 at Watford Colosseum
Engineer: Neil Varley
Assistant engineer: Joe Yon
Whispered Lullaby, Suite in Jazz Style, Spinning a Yarn
Recorded August 2020 at Meistersaal, Berlin
Engineer: Rainer Maillard
Mixed January 2025 by Manfred Eicher, Dobrinka Tabakova, and Michael Hinreiner (engineer) at Bavaria Musikstudios München
Cover: Fidel Sclavo
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 26, 2025

British-Bulgarian composer Dobrinka Tabakova returns to ECM with her second full program, following String Paths. That 2013 debut left an indelible mark, establishing her voice among many new listeners as one of immense humility intertwined with fortitude. Selections from the album were even included in the films Adieu au langage (Goodbye to Language) and Le livred’image (The Image Book), both directed by longtime ECM affiliate Jean-Luc Godard. But beyond these connections, it was clear that Tabakova was creating a world unto itself, a parallel dimension of sorts where chance operations and heartfelt intentions danced with graceful strength. All of which leaves someone in my position with the not-so-graceful task of trying to capture the breadth of her sound in the confines of the screen you are reading now. Not coincidentally, she begins her liner note for the present recording as follows: “Writing music and writing about music are distant cousins at best.” And yet, her melodies have a way of bridging the gulf between them with purposeful unfolding.

Violist Maxim Rysanov and pianist Dasol Kim open with two distinct chamber pieces. From the indrawn breath of Whispered Lullaby (2005), the viola opens its octave as a pathway into the piano’s flowering spirit. What starts as a whisper, however, develops into a robust expression of lucidity. Having been originally written for a children’s opera titled Midsummer Magic, it takes on that feeling of an incantation—a clue, perhaps, into its evocative intensity. Suite in Jazz Style (2009) represents the third suite written for Rysanov, following Pirin and Suite in Old Style, the latter of which appeared on String Paths. It’s also a natural homecoming, if you will, for a composer who started her journey as a child improvising on the piano. Its tripartite structure begins with “Talk,” a prime showcase for Rysanov’s mastery that proves him to be one of Tabakova’s most fervent interpreters, having known her since their shared time as students of the Guildhall School. There is a delightful freedom to the interpretation, which, despite its precision (if not because of it), makes the proceedings feel spontaneous. In the interplay between him and Kim, listening and speaking become one in the same.

After this upbeat introduction, “Nocturnal” spreads the charcoal dust of its balladry in thicker strokes. There is, nevertheless, a continuation of that same playfulness, a wry smile in the viola that is self-aware, if now a touch mournful. As the bow travels between sul ponticello and sul tasto gradations, it opens itself to fresh meanings in the piano’s embrace. Kim is the ever-attentive partner, rendering context as faithfully as a saxophonist wandering the streets of a rainy city after a gig. And in “Dance,” which eases into eartshot with percussive tapping, the impulse to move takes on a desire of its own to love and be loved. There is a vibrant microtonal approach here that feels sinewy and thoroughly connected, stepping into folkish territory one moment as easily as it leaps into modernism the next. Rysanov navigates these gymnastics with a rooted sense of architecture, swaying with every tectonic movement to protect the structural integrity at hand.

The Fantasy Homage to Schubert (2005) for strings presents a recontextualization of Schubert’s Fantasy in C major for violin and piano, transfigured and otherworldly. The metaphor is not arbitrarily chosen, either. One could easily imagine it as a lost soundtrack selection from 2001: A Space Odyssey, each shift of light and celestial body revealing both the alien and the familiar. Tempting as it is, I hesitate to call this “haunting,” as this would imply there was someone around to be haunted. Rather, it feels disembodied, having nowhere to go but outward, forever echoing into the depths of the universe. And yet, somehow, we are privy to its secrets. The appearance of violin and cello (soloists Nathaiel Anderson-Frank and Benjamin Hughes, respectively) is a slow-motion transmission from an extinct Earth finding its way to us in hypersleep.

Organum Light (2000), also for strings, places Tabakova at the helm of the BBC Concert Orchestra. Originally for five singers, it takes its inspiration from the viol consort pieces of Gibbons and Purcell. Despite a deep, rich pulse, sliding harmonics in the strings open our hearts to its truths.

Spinning a Yarn (2011) for solo violin and hurdy-gurdy features its dedicatee, Roman Mints, on both instruments. A ligament between past and future, it leaves us to walk the present on the resulting tightrope. The playful unpredictability of the hurdy-gurdy provides a tactile foundation for the violin’s storytelling. All of it feels incidental to some scene from centuries ago brought to life in moving pictures. One can almost see the fields being planted, the animals being kept, the children being raised. It also has a rocking motion that makes its consonances sing all the more sweetly.

Last is the album’s title piece for violin, violoncello and string orchestra. Composed in 2007, it first took life as “Dawn,” which Tabakova wrote for the 10th anniversary of Kremerata Baltica and in celebration of Gidon Kremer’s 60th birthday, later adding two further movements. Mints is retained here alongside cellist Kristina Blaumane, fronting the BBC Concert Orchestra under the composer’s hand. The sheer depth of sonority is wondrous, at once frightening and comforting. “Day” is an arpeggiated crystal of which each facet reveals a slightly different perspective. A Philip Glass-like architecture opens itself to adventurous harmonies, ending in a hush that slides without pause into “Dusk.” Here, the mood is more meditative, stretched to reveal the spaces in between the notes. Even in slumber, it knows the sun will return to give life once again, even if there is no one around to enjoy it.

At the end of her liner note, Tabakova writes: “I’d like to think that in the silence that follows music, there may be a fleeting sense that the internal world has spoken – not in certainty, but in presence, however fragile or incomplete.” And if there is anything to be found in the silence that follows this album, it is surely the need to fill it once again with what we have just heard, lest the linearity of time remind us that, one day, we will all stop singing.

Arvo Pärt: And I heard a voice (ECM New Series 2780)

| Tyran Grillo

Arvo Pärt
And I heard a voice

Vox Clamantis
Jaan-Eik Tulve conductor
Recorded 2021/22
at Haapsalu Cathedral, Estonia
Engineer: Margo Kõlar
Cover: Fidel Sclavo
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 5, 2025

For we [are] strangers before thee, and sojourners, as [were] all our fathers: our days on the earth [are] as a shadow, and [there is] none abiding.
–1 Chronicles 29:15

Building on more than 25 years of working alongside Arvo Pärt (whose relationship with producer Manfred Eicher spans nearly twice that length), Vox Clamantis and conductor Jaan-Eik Tulve present a new recording of choral works drawn from sacred texts. Their last recording, The Deer’s Cry, was a watershed moment in the Estonian composer’s discography, as it simultaneously narrowed the frame and opened up wider possibilities of interpretation.

Although the program is varied in direction, it is wholly centered around a theme of humility, and nowhere more so than in the opening Nunc dimittis (2001). Its setting of Luke 2:29-32 tells the story of Simeon, who holds the baby Jesus in his arms, knowing that God’s promise to see Christ revealed before his death has been fulfilled. What begins as an intimate supplication, however, turns into a vast theological chordscape of meditations on the openness of God’s grace freely given to all. What is so striking about the voices is not only the shapes through which Pärt guides them in the score but also the depth of power in their fragility. When alone, they waver ever so slightly; when aligned with others, they fix their gazes heavenward. 

O Holy Father Nicholas (2021), taken from the Orthodox Prayer Book, was written for the opening of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church and National Shrine at Ground Zero in New York City. Like the Bible itself, its covers grow worn with time; words wear off from handling yet remain unchanged, living and without contradiction. In seeking intercession, the choir allows the light of forgiveness to shine upon human depravity. The singing walks two distinct paths, each passing through like a pilgrim to destinations promised yet unseen. Such tensions reveal the shape of our sin, beautiful from a distance but gnarled and festering at close inspection. This contrast is a sobering one that places life at the center of an infinitely complex structure, of which belief lays the cornerstones.

Each of the Sieben Magnificat-Antiphonen (1988), recently heard arranged for strings on Tractus, speaks to a different manifestation of Christ. From the tender “O Weisheit” (O Wisdom) to the highs of “O Schlüssel Davids” (O Key of David), a full range of vocal and incarnational possibilities is examined through the lens of sound. Buried among them is “O König aller Volker” (O King of All the People), in which rhythmic circles reveal caesurae for glory to slip through like a quiet legion of angels. The stepwise movements that characterized the Nunc dimittis are to be found here in denser but no less translucent configurations.

Für Jan van Eyck (2019) is a rendering of the liturgical Agnus Dei (Lamb of God) based on the same section of the Berliner Messe and written for the restoration of the altarpiece of the van Eyck brothers’ Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, which was reopened in the Ghent Cathedral. Accompanied by Ene Salumäe on organ, it allows us a spell of awe before the magnitude of Christ’s sacrifice. So begins a sequence of shorter yet no less rich works that continues with Kleine Litanei (2015), which pays respect to Irish Benedictine monk, theologian, and philosopher St. Virgil (c. 700-784). Its fragments of traditional prayers shift between harmony and dissonance, evoking the tension of seeking spiritual comfort in a secular world. Last is the album’s title composition, And I heard a voice… (2017). It is, so far, the only Scripture that Pärt has set in his mother tongue. Based on Revelation 14:13, it concludes appropriately on an eschatological note, where the promise of eternal rest—a life without pain and suffering—is offered amid the wrath of the end times, leaving us with a most undefiled sense of hope.

Faith is not determined by the strength of one’s convictions but rather by the truth and integrity of what it worships. We can assert all the faith in the world in thin ice, but it will inevitably crumble beneath our feet. By the same token, we can have little faith in thick ice, and it will hold as we make our way safely across. Much of that truth comes alive in this music. As Christ says in Luke 17:6, “If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye might say unto this sycamine tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you.” Let these choral works each be a mustard seed waiting to be watered by the listener’s tender regard.