Zehetmair Quartett
Beethoven/Bruckner/Hartmann/Holliger

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

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

(Photo credit: Keith Pattison)

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

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

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

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

John Holloway
Pavans and Fantasies from the Age of Dowland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boris Yoffe
Song of Songs

Rosamunde Quartett
Andreas Reiner violin
Diane Pascal violin
Helmut Nicolai viola
Anja Lechner violoncello
The Hilliard Ensemble
David James countertenor
Rogers Covey-Crump tenor
Steven Harrold tenor
Gordon Jones baritone
Recorded November 2009 at Propstei St. Gerold
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The limitations of words tend toward failure in expressing the breadth of any creative endeavor. Describing the music of Boris Yoffe is an exceptional case, for here words risk expressing too much. Yoffe himself has lived a life of cutting to the chase. He was born in St. Petersburg in 1968, where he composed and premiered his first works just shy of his 15th birthday. He emigrated to Tel Aviv, completing a degree in composition, and then to Karlsruhe, Germany to study with Wolfgang Rihm. Rihm was struck by Yoffe’s individuality from day one, and includes an affectionate note to that effect in the CD booklet: “His music has great beauty. Can it be misunderstood? Oh yes. But it doesn’t complain. Stays beautiful and giving. Unmisunderstandable. With time also hardened, pointed.”

Yoffe writes one string quartet a day (each just a page long), as if it were scriptural meditation. Of those culled for the present disc, he notes, “For me this recording is a handwritten collection of verse, in which the quartet poems are accompanied by the tenderly coloured miniatures of the sung pieces.” Yoffe’s scores are bereft of dynamics, tempi, and directions, and so the Rosamunde Quartett and Hilliard Ensemble are to be commended for tending to them with so much heart.

I sought him but I found him not introduces the program with ashen strings before the Hilliards’ voices, after a pause, break through the gloom with their palatial moonlight. So does their antiphon continue in meditative interaction with the Rosamundes, whose occasionally sharper gestures merely emphasize a fundamental contemplation. Both registers exist in mutual exclusion, bonded in a reality where contact and surface are one and the same, and the experience of language turns in on itself. My own vineyard I did not keep, by contrast, reflects a less syllogistic approach to text and melody. Brief chains of overlapping voices grow like a vine along brick: filigree to a hardened exterior.

Yoffe allows fragrance to waft through the lattice of his notecraft and opens its interstices to further interpretation. I sleep, but my heart waketh takes this philosophy furthest in a veritable calligraphy of air, born of flesh and thought yet writ large on the wind. Pizzicati in this quartet-only piece feel not plucked but pulled, as if by gravity into a watery hermitage. Death as transfiguration.

My head is filled with dew, my locks with drops of the night is a river run so long that it births a canyon. It is a particularly affecting vehicle for countertenor David James, in whose throat resides angelic hues. This is the most contemplative piece on the album. Its heartbeat folds into strings in My soul went forth when he spoke, for which the body’s connection to a life divine charts an altogether deeper anatomy, one of which veins and arteries are spun from the Word and through which the blood of deliverance dreams like a promise kissed into cognizance.

Yoffe’s elastic sense of proportion confirms the sentiments of Paul Griffiths, who in his liner text characterizes this recording as “a sampling of eternity.” The only possible end result is another beginning.

Witold Lutosławski
Béla Bartók
Musique funèbre

Hungarian Radio Children´s Choir
Stuttgarter Kammerorchester
Dennis Russell Davies conductor
Recorded May 2004 and February 2010, Liederhalle, Stuttgart
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher

Conductor Dennis Russell Davies leads the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra in a program of music by, and dedicated to, Béla Bartók. The disc opens in the latter vein with Witold Lutosławski’s Musique funèbre, composed between 1954 and 1958 for the 10th anniversary of Bartók’s death. The title, often erroneously translated as “Funeral music,” is better rendered as “Music of mourning,” and connotes homage to one of Lutosławski’s greatest inspirations, if not the greatest, for he never dedicated a work to another composer. Although the piece’s overarching development resembles Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, the opening cellos closely prefigure the robust, overlapping memorial of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, even if they do chart a vastly different geography, from collective to individual landing. That initial feeling of density and weight gives way to a dark airiness. Motives bend and sway—at moments pliant, at others sharply angled. Darting violins bring us closer to a sense of inner turmoil and bold reckoning. The Bartókian flavor is clear yet faged, and falls back where it began: in the solemn cellos. Ashes to ashes.

As Wolfgang Sandner observes in this album’s liner notes, for Bartók the music of Hungary’s peasants “was the source of a radical new musical system, not material for reverting to a nostalgic transfiguration of the original sounds.” In light of this, we might reckon his Romanian Folk Dances of 1917 not as an archival storehouse but, more like Estonian composer Veljo Tormis’s choral arrangements, as an experiment made fresh by extant impulses. While for me the reference recording by Midori and Robert McDonald (1992, Sony Classical) gets to the core of the music in ways I’ve not since heard, the Stuttgarters’ soaring performance of this 1937 arrangement for string orchestra by Arthur Willner articulates the orbits of its moons with surprising precision. A delicate piece of nevertheless sweeping proportions, it moves by a hand unseen. The solo violin stands out like a red rose among a field of black, its changes organic, even a touch mournful, in the present setting. As the mosaic evolves, it gives light to the translucent cells of its becoming. The flute-like strings in the enlivening finale give us reason to rejoice in the shadows.

So, too, does the Divertimento. Composed 1939 in dedication to Paul Sacher (who commissioned the work) and the Basler Kammerorchester, it achieves novel balance of spiritedness and restraint under Davies’s direction. Its unmistakable beginning lures with its insistent rhythm but would just as soon fragment into multiple galaxies of melodic thought. There is a smoothness of execution in the tutti passages and a paper-thin delicacy to the solo strings. While one might expect that energy to be sustained, it waxes and wanes in a most natural, thought-out-loud sort of way that lends especial insight into Bartók’s compositional process. The second movement proceeds slowly at first, but then, with the coming of dawn, stretches its gravity. The lower and higher strings forge an implicit harmony, an acknowledgment of the invisible forces connecting them both. The contrast between double basses and violins is one not of tone but of purpose: the lowers an unstable fundament, the uppers a firmament in turmoil. This chaos they share as if it were blood. The final movement returns the promise of that dance with wit. There are, of course, intensely lyrical and slow-moving parts, with the violin carving surface relief, but always returning with that whirlwind of fire.

In the wake of this dynamism, selections from Bartók’s 27 Two- and Three-Part Choruses (1935-41) come as something of a breather. They are not adaptations of folksongs, but were composed in such a style at the behest of Zoltán Kodály. With evocative titles like “Wandering,” “Bread-baking,” and “Jeering,” each is a vignette of imagined life. A snare drum pops its way through the choral textures, by turns martial and lyrical, adding colors of interest throughout. And while these pieces hardly hold a candle to his a capella choruses (the orchestral writing feels at points superfluous), they provide welcome contrast to the veils that precede it with gift of vision.

I’ve just written for Sequenza 21 a retrospective of ECM’s New Series in celebration of the imprint’s 30th year in 2014. Click the cover to read.