Classical

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

| Tyran Grillo

Johannes Brahms
András Schiff
Klavierstücke

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Samuel Beckett: Stirrings Still (ECM New Series 2801)

| Tyran Grillo

Samuel Beckett
Trevor Bača
Stirrings Still

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.