Classical

Gianluigi Trovesi/Gianni Coscia: Round About Weill (ECM 1907)

| Tyran Grillo

Round About Weill

Round About Weill

Gianluigi Trovesi piccolo and alto clarinets
Gianni Coscia accordion
Recorded July 2004, Radio Studio DRS, Zurich
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Master clarinetist Gianluigi Trovesi and kindred accordionist Gianni Coscia pick up where they left off on Round about Offenbach, this time giving Kurt Weill (1900-1950) a treatment such as only they can realize. The two friends make Weill their own. Or, more precisely, they make their own Weill, stirring the pot until flavors become one delicious amalgamation. Their doing so is not without precedent. Weill himself found, and forged, art wherever he went, caring not for petty distinctions between the raw and the cooked. From Berlin to Broadway, to borrow from the title of Foster Hirsch’s biography, Weill left a vivid trail of reinvigoration. Yet Trovesi and Coscia do more than pick up the pieces left in his wake, adding as they do a slurry of original counterparts along the way. The latter, in fact, strut with as much panache as the one in whose name they were fashioned.

Turning to the duo’s contributions first, we find the playful romp—replete with harrumphing bellows and Trovesi’s nimble steps—of “Dov’è la città?” setting a tone of variation and complexity. Like so much of what follows, it is a constantly evolving organism, wearing and casting off styles like quick-change artists. Moods range from the profundity of a Górecki string quartet (“Improvvisamente”) and exploratory fugue of “Ein Taifun! … Tifone? No, pioggerella!” to the provocative slants of “Boxen” and the bifurcated title homage. Trovesi manages to navigate every maze-like turn Coscia mortars into being. As with seasoned actors, not a single gesture is out of place in their comportment, as each trades lines with the other in a match of wits so even that it would go on forever without the limits of human attention cutting away the edges.

That said, this is really Coscia’s album through and through. He activates the air as a film projector lights a screen, pulling the dead into life and the living into dreams. Whether riding the effortless wave of “Tango Ballade” (from The Beggar’s Opera) or flipping the coin of excitement and reverie that is “Alabama Song,” his elaborations sing like new. Yet the alpha and omega of the program, and of the duo’s performance thereof, is Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Like the fugitives with which the satirical opera concerns itself, the music herein is resourceful, self-confident, and always heading toward pandemonium. In these scenes, Trovesi and Coscia swap places with telepathic ease, mapping gypsy jazz motifs as comfortably as balladic impulses. Like the album’s penultimate interlude, which bonds “Cumparsita Maggiorata” (by tango pioneer Gerardo Matos Rodríguez) with the traditional “Tristezze di Fra’ Martino,” these instrumental thespians dip into nostalgia only sparingly, so that the dramaturgy at hand can spring forth as if for the first time.

John Holloway: Veracini Sonatas (ECM New Series 1889)

| Tyran Grillo

Veracini Sonatas

Veracini Sonatas

John Holloway violin
Jaap ter Linden cello
Lars Ulrik Mortensen cembalo
Recorded September 2003, Propstei St. Gerold
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Executive Producer: Manfred Eicher

Francesco Maria Veracini (1690-1768) is the subject of John Holloway’s fourth ECM traversal of Baroque violin repertoire. Joined now by cellist Jaap ter Linden and harpsichordist Lars Ulrik Mortensen, who together comprise a formidable continuo, Holloway mines the ore of yet another underrepresented violinist-composer, this one an iconoclast to the last: showman, itinerant solo artist, and experimenter. The variety of his contributions to the sonata canon of the time—in both its four- and five-movement incarnations—is expertly represented on this disc. Through them all runs a deep mineral vein of melodic and atmospheric sensitivity.

The Sonata No. 1 in g minor, composed in 1721, comes from the composer’s Opus 1. Its pentagonal structure flies effortlessly from Holloway’s bow, by which he elicits a tone so organic that one hardly notices the trills and mordents of his interpretive genius—some of the most artful to be found in the world of Baroque violining. Whether by the leaping Allegros or the darker, quasi-operatic turns, Holloway and friends mark the passage of this music with instruments as cartographic as they are sonorous.

One quickly notices an airiness to this music that, while charming, is never paltry. This is due equally to the writing and to the playing, both of which work in lively, scintillating congruence. And even though Holloway occupies the spotlight, the interactions between cello and harpsichord are so integral—the former weaving comets through the latter’s pinpointed stars—that to imagine the music without them is to imagine a sky without clouds. The result is a sense of open space, whereby each sonata lends grandeur to even the airiest movements—to wit: the Largo that begins the Sonata No. 5 in C Major. Taken from the Sonate a violino, o flauto solo, e basso, a collection that predates the Opus 1 by five years yet which was published only posthumously, it sketches canvas with bolder ground lines. This renders the exuberant movements all the more emphatic, enacting balance between the violin’s flight paths and the bass lines entrenched below. The concluding Allegro emotes with bravado in a blush of call and response.

The date of composition of the Sonata No. 1 in D Major, from Veracini’s “dissertation” on Corelli’s Opus 5, is uncertain. Considering its programmatic brilliance, youth dominates the possibilities. The dual voicing in particular invokes the antennae of a butterfly fresh from the cocoon. The contrast of this sonata’s shadows and lights presage the maturity of narrative voice achieved in the Sonata No. 6 in A Major, from Veracini’s Opus 2, the Sonate accademiche. Written in 1744, its sweep and drama are on par with Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. The brief Siciliana that opens betrays nothing of the variety about to ensue. This one has it all: tearful beauty and folk-like revelry in equal measure. At its center is a memorable Andante, in which we are treated to a lute-registered harpsichord, while pizzicato cello and muted strings from the violin touch hands in a most delicate choreography before funneling into a spirited Allegro assai to superb closure.

Where some composers have left only breadcrumbs for future listeners to follow in the wake of paltry imitations, this benchmark recording offers loaves of sonic goodness that are as warm and nourishing as the days they were first baked. The mastery of their realization is matched only by the engineering, which captures details from a respectable distance. Yet another essential document of 18th-century repertoire from those who know its secrets best.

Leonidas Kavakos/Péter Nagy: Stravinsky/Bach (ECM New Series 1855)

| Tyran Grillo

Stravinsky:Bach

Stravinsky/Bach

Leonidas Kavakos violin
Péter Nagy piano
Recorded October 2002, Radio Studio DRS, Zurich
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) and Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). Mirrors or two sides of the same coin? This electrifying album by Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos and Hungarian pianist Péter Nagy answers the question: neither. Stravinsky was indebted to Bach, as so many who put pen to staves ever will be, and explored the Baroque master’s architectures to the very end—even working, the story goes, on Bach transcriptions on his death bed. Yet the Russian iconoclast accomplished a remarkable something that set him apart. Unlike so many before him, he did not shine his light through Bach’s prism but rather shined Bach’s through his own.

Stravinsky’s crucible in this regard was at its hottest in the Duo concertant (1931/32). One of two pieces written for violinist Samuel Dushkin (this for violin and piano, the other his 1931 Violin Concerto), it was not in a format the composer favored at the time but one he nonetheless reconciled through neoclassical rigor. Oscillating between the earthly and the mythological, the piece its composer called a “musical versification” finds unity in gradually joining the two. The first and last of its five movements—the Cantilène and the Dithyrambe—bear mysterious nomenclature. The one blossoms from a pianistic blush to an overpowering charge from the bow. The other drips with lachrymose quality, suspended high above Olympus casting threads to mortal hearts down below. Between them is another dyad, this of two “Epilogues” of friction and protraction in turn. And with them is the sprightly Gigue, one of Stravinsky’s finest moments, played here with integrity.

What sets Kavakos’s playing apart is his ability to be at once fluid and sharp, a quality that lends itself well to the above but also to the below, for in the Partita No. 1 in B minor that follows we hear exactly this contradiction at play. Although two centuries separate these works, Bach’s solo violin masterpiece feels remarkably present in this rendering. Kavakos gives the almighty Allemande a stately treatment, beginning with it a series of four movements and their faster “Doubles.” The first of the latter reveals barest tuning issues in Kavakos’s instrument, but these are quickly brushed away by the Corrente, which he plays with especial care, in the process exploiting the record’s engineering at full potential. The Sarabande likewise unfolds in its dance of blade and water toward the final Tempo di Borea and its Double, by which the music reaches a cavernous interior filled with stalagmites pontific.

The program returns to Stravinsky with the 1933 Suite Italienne for violin and piano. Based on his ballet Pulcinella, it proves the glistening counterpart to the Duo concertant, the spring to its thaw. The affirmation of its introductory motives barely hints at the fiery Tarantella which is the piece’s prime turn—a ball of yarn expertly unraveled. Kavakos’s hefty double stops nourish their flames on Nagy’s pointillist sparks. The folk-like Scherzino is another highlight and sets up the Minuet and Finale with authorial flourish.

From these concentrations we return once more to Bach, whose Sonata No. 1 in G minor reveals further affinity. From the cautious first half to the dawn-like awakening of the third movement and into the forward thinking of the final Presto, it develops itself like one long proclamation—slowed here and sped up there—until it glows.

Those thinking of buying this album for ECM’s treatment of the Bach will want to check out Holloway and Kremer’s versions first. In any event, the Sonatas and Partitas will always overshadow their interpreter. For the Stravinsky? Look no further.

Sylvie Courvoisier: Abaton (ECM 1838/39)

| Tyran Grillo

Abaton

Sylvie Courvoisier
Abaton

Sylvie Courvoisier piano
Mark Feldman violin
Erik Friedlander cello
Recorded September 2002 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The ancient Greek title of Abaton denotes, abstractly, an “inaccessible place” and, practically, a space believed to have curative properties when used for ritual sleep by those deemed worthy of its seclusion. It also names the trio performing here under its auspices. Born in Switzerland, pianist Courvoisier has lived and worked in New York City since 1998. This is her only ECM appearance thus far, but with it she makes a far-reaching splash. Violinist Mark Feldman, who after a string of successful releases with the John Abercrombie Quartet explores his classical foundations through the pianist’s evocative writing, and cellist Erik Friedlander, another New Yorker whose penchant for edges finds him in comfortably eclectic tenure, accompany her. Together they have forged something so realistic that it can only be enchanting. Indeed, what began as a recording exclusively of Courvoisier’s compositions, four of which comprise the first disc, turned into a double album at the behest of producer Manfred Eicher, who encouraged the musicians to improvise another disc’s worth of material once the initial recording was complete.

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“Ianicum,” with which the album begins, is also its postmodern statement par excellence. Courvoisier daubs the canvas with barest ash, producing an audible equivalent of the album’s cover art, while Feldman and Friedlander draw a winter moon’s halo around her. From these introductions coalesces a mirror structure: strings on one side, keyboard on the other. Direct plucking of piano strings signals tectonic movements, a breaking of surface that flirts with indecipherability even as it speaks clear as day to our mental sanctums. Courvoisier’s internalism is echoed by pizzicati, prompting Friedlander to own the shadows of interpretive duty for a spell. Into this dynamic context wanders Feldman, who leaves a trail of breadcrumbs both familiar and newly inspired. The pianism of “Orodruin,” by contrast lights the cello’s fuses in an asymptotic dance between the macabre and material reality. Unisons somehow make it through, angelic and suspended in the glow of afterlife. The title composition is also for the trio. In it, linguistic affinities abound, dialecting over time as voices become protracted and distinct.

Courvoisier is absent for “Poco a poco,” making for a slicker, more chameleonic experience. The effect is celebratory at heart and delineates a realm where nostalgia for 20th-century chamber music blends motifs with assurance. Feldman and Friedlander are an intuitive pair in a tertiary drama.

Each of the 19 improvisations that follow is a vignette of eclectic power. Confronted with titles such as “Icaria” (of which there are three versions) and “Clio” (Greek muse of history), one can’t help but read mythological impulses behind these ad hoc constructions. Words and images fall short of their affective spectrum, dancing among the shadows across the wall of Plato’s allegorical cave. These figures haunt themselves, stepping into their own dreams as if through water.

As fascinating as the trio’s full-on interactivity can be (cf. “Archaos”), it is in the program’s solo portions where brilliance truly crystallizes. Feldman draws the most mournful bow through “Imke’s,” a candle flame in sound that holds on to wick like life itself and draws melody from oxygen. Friedlander is not far behind in “Turoine” and “Ava’s,” walking a tightrope between regret and resolve. Yet it is Courvoisier, tracing an arc from “The Scar of Lotte” through the organic preparations of “Brobdingnag” and lastly to “Narnia,” who houses the album’s spirit with most of its wing fibers intact. Her notes become indistinguishable from the snowflakes beyond the wardrobe, reminding us that quietude sits on the throne of this castle.

The relationship between these two halves—the predetermined and indeterminate—is hardly conversational. It instead forms a palindrome of intention, meeting in the silent middle between disc changes: the album’s very own abaton, waiting to make divided listeners whole again.

John Surman: The Spaces In Between (ECM 1956)

| Tyran Grillo

The Spaces In Between

John Surman
The Spaces In Between

John Surman soprano and baritone saxophones, bass clarinet
Chris Laurence double-bass
Rita Manning violin
Patrick Kiernan violin
Bill Hawkes viola
Nick Cooper cello
Recorded February 2006, Propstei St. Gerold
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

When reedman John Surman first collaborated with bassist Chris Laurence and an ad hoc string quartet on 2000’s Coruscating, the end result was a cause for beginnings. Unlikely surprising to the veteran Surman listener yet fresh as sun-dried sheets, the music of that debut opened a chapter in his compositional thinking now fleshed out to the depth of a novel on The Spaces In Between. Indeed, despite the wealth of fine performances all around, it’s the writing that makes this album such a notable entry in Surman’s expansive discography. The folk-infused melodies, and the means by which they are elucidated, shine through translucent curtains of improvisation, at which the bow-wielders now more forthrightly try their hands.

Balances abound. At the larger level, the album works in two halves, spit at the fulcrum of the title track. This playful sojourn for solo violin, brought to evocative fruition by quartet leader Rita Manning, upgrades the album’s wingspan from butterfly to bird, flitting from limb to limb in search of emerging buds. Before this, the set list steeps itself in winter, interlacing embraces and lettings go. Surman etch-a-sketches his own branches in “Moonlighter,” his methodical figurations seeming to describe a return from hard labor. In them is a sense of tragedy, with bass acting as narrator and strings as chorus. More nuanced balances follow. There is the diurnal contrast of bass clarinet (which under his fingers sings incarnate) and soprano saxophone. The latter doesn’t so much add to as emerge from the strings, drawing out warmth of heart from “Wayfarers All” and the crisper “Winter Wish.” As for those strings, they speak in pastoral dialects, their home a hearth among the ice.

Spring abounds on the other side of the album’s titular spaces, with “Now See!” setting tone in bucolic tracings. Only this and “Where Fortune Smiles” rely on the soprano’s inherent buoyancy to speak its own accord, favoring instead the baritone’s relatively challenging bounce. “Mimosa” (originally written for, but never included on, Thimar) elicits the jazziest inflections in this regard, that low reed moving jaggedly yet surely across the plains. This leaves only “Leaving The Harrow,” a song of drifting, of chemical reactions, of moving on.

Although its mise-en-scène is minimal, the emotional complexities of The Spaces In Between reach far and wide. Like the skies above, they welcome every change in weather, rain or shine, as if it were the first.

Gianluigi Trovesi All’opera: Profumo di Violetta (ECM 2068)

| Tyran Grillo

Profumo

Gianluigi Trovesi All’opera
Profumo di Violetta

Gianluigi Trovesi piccolo and alto clarinets, alto saxophone
Marco Remondini violoncello, electronics
Stefano Bertoli drums, percussion
Filarmonica Mousiké Orchestra winds and percussion
Savino Acquaviva conductor
Recorded September 2006, Teatro Serassi, Villa d’Almè, Bergamo
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Assistant: Giulio Gallo
Edited and mixed by Gianluigi Trovesi, Manfred Eicher, Savino Acquaviva, Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The mind of multi-reedist Gianluigi Trovesi is a storehouse of refraction, the lens of a human kaleidoscope in whose turning we can see many zeitgeists, each gushing with its own color. For Profumo di Violetta, Trovesi dives headlong into a sea of operatic favorites, treading waters at once romantic and troubled. With sources ranging from Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo to Puccini’s Tosca, his meta-commentary manages to draw fresh catch from an overfished pond. Buoyed by a wind and percussion orchestra in the grand “banda” tradition of his native Italy, Trovesi taps his memories as a boy growing up around these ad hoc configurations and from them coaxes shoots of ingenious contrast.

It’s easy to appreciate the boldness of this project, which spreads the melodramatic jam of tragedy across hunks of improvisatory bread. In the latter vein, Trovesi is very much the Mad Hatter, altering familiar motifs as might a furniture restorer strip a bench to expose long-neglected grain. In the process, however, one comes to realize that his penchant for humor is not without its serious edge. Take, for instance, his rendition of the famous “Largo al factotum,” which turns a tongue-tying chain of Figaros into a field of dots connected by the fuzz of a heavily distorted electric guitar. A far cry from the tuxedo-and-evening-gown aria, it nevertheless boils over with intuition. Such brilliant grandiosity is part and parcel of the album’s sweep.

Bookended by a Prologue and Epilogue, Profumo unfolds across wild stretches of the imagination. The program proper is broken into six sub-suites, of which “Il Mito” (The myth) drops us into the path of Orpheus. Here Trovesi binds a Toccata and Ritornello of Monteverdi with his own compositional veining, so that the sonority of the old touchstones and the whimsy of the new may interlock in flight. In this regard, the butterfly kisses of “Musa” massage away the fatigue of interpretation, allowing Trovesi’s taunting clarinet in “Euridice” to work its way like sugar through the nervous system. His height of range on the instrument is piercing, tickling the clouds until they loose jazzier droplets.

From the underworld to the overdressed, Trovesi and his cohorts escort us to “Il Ballo,” for a dance that is as grand as it is brief. This leads further into “Il Gioco Delle Seduzioni” (The game of seduction), a triptych of early Baroque and contemporary transparencies. From the convivial to the parodic, Trovesi navigates its burrows with eyes closed and whiskers extended, playing with feet aflame while maintaining control of his dance at every bend.

“L’innamoramento” houses the two-part title piece. Trovesi’s homage to Verdi’s doomed La Traviata heroine belies its love through melodic time travel. Here the emotional overload of opera is compressed to diamond clarity. “Il Saltellar Gioioso” features album highlight “Salterellando.” Anchored by snare and cymbal, and threaded by Trovesi’s grungy altoism, it sets off a ripple effect that lingers long into the spiraling “La Gelosia” (Jealousy).

The performance ends with “Così, Tosca,” which for all its eclecticism breathes with consistency. Trovesi’s soulful pitch-bending traces every contour of an underlying drone with care. A subtle harrumph in the brass only serves to brighten the felicitous interweaving of breath and sonority that is his reverie, diving headlong into an incendiary finish that grovels with profound favor. Indeed, the album might just as well be called “Profondità di Violetta,” for all its depth of thought, arrangement, and execution.

Bravissimo.

(To hear samples of Profumo di Violetta, click here.)

Jon Balke/Amina Alaoui: SIWAN (ECM 2042)

| Tyran Grillo

Siwan

SIWAN

Amina Alaoui vocal
Jon Hassell trumpet, electronics
Kheir Eddine M’Kachiche violin
Jon Balke keyboards, conductor
Helge Andreas Norbakken percussion
Pedram Khavar Zamini zarb
Barokksolistene
Bjarte Eike leader
Recorded September 2007 and March 2008 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineers: Jan Erik Kongshaug and Peer Espen Ursfjord
Mixed September 2008 by Manfred Eicher, Jon Balke, Amina Alaoui, and Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher and Jon Balke

“Siwan” connotes equilibrium. This album of the same name achieves equilibrium through many meetings and intersections: of Norwegian pianist Jon Balke and Moroccan singer Amina Alaoui (in her first ECM appearance), of Baroque and Andalusian musical idioms, of Sufi poetry and Christian mysticism, of dark ages and burning inquisitions. For this studio recording of resolutely live music, Balke doubles as keyboardist and conductor for a veritably intergalactic ensemble that includes Algerian violinist Kheir Eddine M’Kachiche, American trumpeter Jon Hassell, and Norwegian violinist Bjarte Eike’s period group Barokksolistene.

Like Alaoui’s seminal Arco Iris, this project is not a fusion of traditions. It is, rather, a deepening of common ground between them. A work of stunning originality, blending geographies into a single airborne continent, its ecosystem runs on ether. Like the solo violin buoyed by strings in the program’s introductory “Tuchia,” the whole flexes and ornaments itself organically. In that violin is a heartbreaking softness that conforms itself to all manner of densities in what follows. After such a fecund inauguration, it is no wonder that the first proper song, “O Andalusin,” should extol the natural wonders of Al-Andalus. Elegiacally described by poet Ibrahim Ibn Khafaja (1058-1139) as “the Eden of the chosen,” the paradisiacal wonders of its landscape shine forth. Harpsichord claws burrow into ocean floor even as Alaoui unfurls sails, hang-gliders, and other disembodied wings to catch every possible current. From burrowing to dislocation, traveler Abu Abdallah Al-Homai’di (1029-1095) yearns for that “faraway homeland” in his poem “Jadwa.” A filigree of percussion and lute illuminates the night as would gold leaf a sacred manuscript, audible tethers each between body and home. Alaoui’s voice wanders but holds its resolve so tightly to bosom that it slips into the ribcage, where it swings on a perch of belonging. She is positively flute-like in wordless moments, touching off M’Kachiche’s elliptical storytelling against a tense ostinato.

The words of Al-Mu’tamid Ibn Abbad (1040-1095), poet-king of Seville, strangely echo the deposition that would incarcerate him for the last five years of his life. “Ya Safwati” is a romantic verse, a profession of utter surrender to that universal captor known as love. This song fronts Jon Hassell’s signature vocality and falls like a curtain to reveal a bevy of percussion carrying Alaoui like a Sherpa across mountains of history. “Itimad” names the wife of Al-Mu’tamid Ibn Abbad, to whom he slipped this poem through the bars of the neighboring cell. “I am untamable yet you dominate me,” he professes, again echoing the power of emotion to conquer in soul what can never be conquered in flesh. Alaoui moves like a bow and finds herself accompanied by that very object, animated and free, across a burial ground of song. Troubador Martín Codax (13/14th century) is similarly lovestruck in his “Ondas do mar de Vigo,” only here the poet embodies a proto-female who laments the consignment of her loved ones to the Sea of Vigo, whose waves took many in the crusades.

Lope de Vega (1562-1635), a star poet of the Spanish golden age, delights with the phonetic play of “A la dina dana.” Here Alaoui parts the clouds by way of golden, celebratory light, setting up the instrumental contrasts of “Zahori” (featuring lyrical recorder playing in place of text), flowing with all the threat of a poisonous serpent, minus the fangs. The lute’s cross-cultural pedigree comes through most readily and beckons the singing of “Ashiyin Raïqin.” Penned by Abu Abdallah Ibn Ghalib Al-Rusafi (d. 1177), who in her liner notes Alaoui describes as a hedonistic writer, this painterly song indeed strips pleasure of its sin. “How lucky we are to find this spot for our sojourn / with doves cooing for our greater delight”: a sentiment within a sentiment, planted in a garden of mirrors.

Persian-born Sufi mystic Husayn Mansur Al-Hallaj (857-922), who suffered martyrdom on the cross for his profession of godliness and who was a beacon of inspiration for Rumi, outlines the manifold path to what Alaoui calls “a ceaseless transformation through vital alternation.” It is a state of fluctuating being in which the contemplation of silence, if not the silence of contemplation, gives way to discovery. A “stripping bare,” as the poet phrases it, an instinct without a door.

“Thulâthiyat” features Alaoui in narrative mode. She lays her speech on the sands like dry bones of an augury for the here and now. Caring neither for past nor for future, she drinks them for the illusions they are and expels them along with the sweat of the midday heat. Sunlit, too, is the verse-chain “Toda ciencia trascendiendo” (Rising beyond all science) of San Juan de la Cruz (1542-1591). This concluding piece is, in Alaoui’s estimation, one of the finest examples of Christian mysticism. Even without knowledge of text and translation, the present arrangement would have us know its secrets. Here there is a door, forged not of wood-flesh but of heart-mind, an analysis of slumber illuminated from within that records its footsteps for posterity before they are buried by wind and dust.

Alaoui’s melodic settings of these lyrics are so intuitive, it’s as if the notes preceded the words. In combination with the astonishing forces gathered around her, every turning of the tongue unspools a thread into the soul.

One of ECM’s finest releases. Ever.

(To hear samples of Siwan, click here.)

Dobrinka Tabakova: String Paths (ECM New Series 2239)

| Tyran Grillo

String Paths

Dobrinka Tabakova
String Paths

Kristina Blaumane violoncello
Maxim Rysanov viola, conductor
Janine Jansen violin
Roman Mints violin
Julia-Maria Kretz violin
Amihai Grosz viola
Torleif Thedéen violoncello
Boris Andrianov violoncello
Raimondas Sviackevičius accordion
Vaiva Eidukaitytė-Storastienė harpsichord
Stacey Watton double bass
Donatas Bagurskas double bass
Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra
Recorded March/April 2011 at National Philharmonic Hall, Vilnius by Laura Jurgelionyté and Valdemaras Kiršys, Studija Aurea in Vilnius
Such different paths recorded June 2011 at Jesus-Christus-Kirche Dahlem, Berlin by Markus Heiland
Mixed and mastered at Rainbow Studio in Oslo by Jan Erik Kongshaug, Manfred Eicher and Dobrinka Tabakova
Produced by Manfred Eicher

When art promises to be revelatory, it may become something to fear. Such is the case of String Paths, the first conspectus of music by Dobrinka Tabakova. Fear, in this sense, is close to awe, for before hearing a single note one knows its details will seep into places to which few others have traveled. Fear, because the trust and intimacy required of such an act is what the composer’s life is all about: she fills staves with glyphs so that anyone with an open heart might encounter their fleeting interpretations and become part of their accretion. Indeed, many factors go into the creation of a single instrumental line, incalculably magnified by its interaction with others. Fear, then, is closer still to love.

Born in 1980, Tabakova moved at age 11 from her Bulgarian hometown of Plovdiv to London, where she went on to study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Her career began in earnest after winning an international competition at 14, since which time she has developed a voice that is refreshingly full and melodious. Such a biographical sketch, despite its prodigious overtones, does little to set Tabakova apart from her contemporaries. Recognition is one thing; experience is another. The coloring of imagination sustained in this timely album’s program, the whole of its corporeal sensibilities, can only come across when its water fills a listener’s cup.

Ukrainian violist-conductor Maxim Rysanov, notable proponent of Kancheli and other composers of our time, has become one of Tabakova’s strongest advocates. It was, in fact, his performance of the Suite in Old Style (written 2006 for solo viola, harpsichord and strings) at the prestigious Lockenhaus Festival that first caught ECM producer Manfred Eicher’s ear and led him to propose the present disc. As the album’s seed, it shelters refugees of the surrounding works. In amending a practice established by such visionaries as Górecki, Schnittke, Eller, and others who have mined elder idioms as a means of looking forward, Tabakova might be placed squarely in an ongoing tradition. She, however, prefers to trace the piece’s genealogy back to Rameau by way of Respighi. Given its descriptive edge, we might link it further to the great Baroque mimeticists—Farina, Biber, Muffat, Schmelzer, and Vivaldi—who were less interested in imitating each other (although some intertextuality was to be expected) than they were in describing nature and circumstance. In this respect, Tabakova’s triptych interfaces a variety of signatures, from which her own stands boldest.

The first movement is a triptych unto itself. Beginning with a Prelude marked “Fanfare from the balconies,” proceeding to “Back from hunting,” and on to “Through mirrored corridors,” already one can note Tabakova’s special affinity for space and place. A rich and delightful piece of prosody, its syncopations feel like ballet, a joyous dance of fit bodies. The viola leaps while the harpsichord adds tactile diacritics to Rysanov’s slippery alphabet. The transcendent centerpiece, entitled “The rose garden by moonlight,” is a shiver down the spine in slow motion, a season at once born and dying. The harpsichord elicits brief exaltations, pushing its wordless song into snowdrift, even as intimations of spring exchange glances with those of autumn. The quasi-Italian filigree of “Riddle of the barrel-organ player” and the Postlude (“Hunting and Finale”) fosters a nostalgic air of antique tracings, bearing yin and yang with plenty of drama to spare.

Insight (2002) for string trio opens the program with exactly that. Played by its dedicatees (Rysanov, Russian violinist Roman Mints, and Latvian-born Kristina Blaumane, principal cellist of the London Philharmonic), it unfolds in dense streams. For Tabakova the trio breathes as one, as might the moving parts of some singing, bellowed engine. The trio thus becomes something else entirely (a phenomenon achieved via the same configuration perhaps only by Górecki in his Genesis I). Moments of shining vibrato add pulse and skin. Glissandi also play an important role in establishing a smooth, coherent fable. The violin’s harmonics are glassine, somehow vulnerable. Indications of dances hold hands with jagged flames. Hints of a free spirit shine through the cracks. A decorated return to the theme looses a bird from an open palm, watching it fly until its song grows too faint to hear.

The 2008 Concerto for Cello and Strings, written for and featuring Blaumane as soloist, moves in three phases, the names of which recall the designations of John Adams. The music, too, may remind one of the American humanist, singing as it does with a likeminded breadth of inflection. The first movement (“Turbulent, tense”) unfolds in pulsing energy. Like a spirit coursing through the sky, it searches the heavens, lantern in hand, for earthly connection. The spirit casts a longing gaze across the oceans, leaping from continent to continent, harming not a single blade of grass by her step. The cello thus takes up the opening theme like a haul from the deep, letting all creatures slip through its fingers to hold the one treasure it seeks by their tips. In that box: a beating heart, one that seeks its own undoing by virtue of its discovery. It is a story revived in countless historical tragedies. The orchestra flowers around the soloist, carrying equilibrium as might a parent cradle a sickly child, laying her down on the altar where the opening motif may reach. The slow movement, marked “Longing,” thus revives that body, spinning from the treasure’s contents a trail she might follow back toward breath. With her resurrection come also the fears that killed her: the conflicts of a warring state, the ideals of a corrupt ruler, the confusion of a hopeless citizenry. The kingdom no longer smiles beneath the sun but weeps by moonlight. Chromatic lilts keep those tears in check, holding them true to form: as vast internal calligraphies whose tails find purchase only on composition paper. Echoes appear and remain. Blaumane’s rich, singing tone conveys all of this and more, never letting go of its full-bodied emotion. The softness of the final stretch turns charcoal into pastel, cloud into dusk, star into supernova. It is therefore tempting to read resolution into the final movement (“Radiant”). From its icy opening harmonics, it seems to beg for the cello’s appearance, which in spite of its jaggedness never bleeds into forceful suggestion. For whenever it verges on puncture, it reconnects to the surrounding orchestral flow, from which it was born and to which it always returns for recharge. Its blasting high sends a message: I am fallen that I might rise again.

Frozen River Flows (2005) is scored for violin, accordion and double bass. Intended to evoke water beneath ice, it expresses two states of the same substance yet so much more. It encompasses the snowy banks, the laden trees, the footprints left beneath them. It imparts glimpses of those who wandered through here not long ago, whose warmth still lingers like a puff of exhaled breath. The violin takes on a vocal lilt, the accordion a windy rasp, the double bass a gestural vocabulary—all of which ends as if beginning.

Such different paths (2008) for string septet ends the program. Dedicated to Dutch violinist Janine Jansen, it ushers in a full, chromatic sound. There is a feeling of constant movement here that is duly organic: in one sense as flow, in another as melodic variety. There is, again, a rocking quality, as if the music always rests on some sort of fulcrum. A quiet passage that deals with the barbs lifted to our eyes. It ends in transcendent wash, a bleed of dye in cloth.

The performances on this finely produced disc are as gorgeous as they come, even more so under the purview of such attentive engineering. This is not music we simply listen to, but music that also listens to us.

It is in precisely this spirit of mutual listening that I participated in an e-mail interview with Ms. Tabakova, who kindly answered the following questions from this enamored soul…

Dobrinka Tabakova

Tyran Grillo: In the String Paths CD booklet, your mention of a powerful first encounter with Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert makes me recall my own. I felt as if that music had always existed beyond time, but that somehow Jarrett’s performance gave us the means to hear it at mortal speed. Because improvisation is, of course, vital to the compositional act, do you feel this way about your own music (i.e., that you funnel it from the ether), or do you see it emerging entirely from within, by your own design?

Dobrinka Tabakova: Longfellow said that “music is the universal language of mankind,” and I think this is what happens when you “meet” a work of music for the first time and it speaks in a way that you understand and/or it resonates with you. The time-old abstract dilemma of where music comes from, in this case, could be discussed under the larger topic of “how do we communicate.” Of course there is inspiration, and I hope the process of how that sparks the beginning of a new work will remain the wonderful mystery that it is. But that spark gets refracted through the artist’s own prism, made up of the experiences around, exposure to different musics, aesthetic preference… With composition we have the added layer of not working in real time and being able to work at the form and structure of a piece of music far longer than it will take to listen to it. Mendeleev imagined the periodic table in a dream, and the same is sometimes said of compositions, but that dream can only be the beginning, I think. It is a responsibility to capture it in the best possible way, and make it speak.

TG: As a listener who has been moved by your music, I see it as a gift. What has your music given you?

DT: The ability to express something through music has been the main focus of my life, and to have connected with someone is a privilege. That feeling is beyond words.

TG: I’ve always felt that music and literature are much alike: both are “written,” both “tell stories,” one has “movements” instead of “chapters,” etc. How do you envisage the relationship between the two?

DT: I am engrossed by literature, well-told stories, captivating multi-layered characters and, like you say, there are similarities with music in terms of form. But, at least for me, words and music occupy two very different worlds, and I am distracted to think too “literally” when composing. I don’t mean writing music to words—there is a relationship there, and this is when words become music.

TG: There is a seesawing quality to the opening and closing pieces of the program (Insight and Such different paths), as if they rest atop an unvoiced fulcrum and spin a melodic and chromatic equilibrium throughout. How do you visualize the structural nature of those two compositions?

DT: I am glad that you felt it this way and asked about this, because the structure of the album was an important part of the concept of the whole project. Although each of the pieces has its own structure, the feeling of an overarching symmetry to the structure of the album was important. The opening to Insight is almost deliberately aiming to make your ear search. The gradual development of the sounds from there, I feel, leads quite naturally and logically to the effect of the closing of Such different paths: having walked aurally through the album, reaching a kind of settled, calm sonic space.

TG: It’s easy to see your Suite in Old Style as continuing a trend among composers such as Górecki, Schnittke, Eller, and others who have leaned toward the past as a means of looking forward. Yet I wonder if what you have done in this marvelous piece is not more like the great Baroque mimetic composers—Farina, Biber, Muffat, Schmelzer, and Vivaldi—who seemed more interested in describing nature and action than in imitating each other.

DT: I think ultimately, I didn’t wish to try and sound like a composer from a certain time. The Suite is a bow to the music which inspired me and that I grew up hearing. Trying to capture that inspiration and present it through modern eyes/ears was at the heart of the concept of this work.

TG: Speaking of the same piece, your subsection titles have a very dramaturgical sheen to them.

DT: Yes, it helped me imagine being in this other time and also to emphasize the daily distance between then and now, but fundamentally hoping that the music would bridge the time gap.

TG: Insight is an appropriate way to open the program of String Paths. I particularly enjoy its horizontal energies, its balance of density and openness. Compared to the pieces that follow, it feels like a stream of consciousness that has undergone relatively little revision. Can you talk about its inception and unfolding throughout the process of composing it?

DT: I am glad you had that reaction—that it sounds like a stream of consciousness. I think at the start of most pieces, I have a general shape which I would like to achieve with a composition, so I am happy if it is perceived as a flowing unfolding. There are always edits and re-thinks, but I try to stick to the original shape. Also, having challenging parts for each voice makes the work dramatic which propels the motion of the piece.

TG: I am so fond of the little chromatic descending motifs in the second movement of your Concerto for Cello and Strings. They catch my attention every time like the teeth of a zipper locking together. How did this detail come to be in the piece?

DT:  The almost glissando motif came together with the melody—the two have always been inseparable. As I was imagining this to be the “human” section of the concerto (see my next answer), there is a desire to be particularly expressive and almost transform the cello to a singer.

TG: In relation to my earlier question regarding literature, I find the concerto to be especially vivid in its storytelling. What kinds of images does it bring to your mind?

DT: The overall shape of the concerto is an upward one—an ascent. As a student, my main thesis was about Music and Science, and while researching that I discovered the writing of Boethius, a 4th-century Roman philosopher who categorized music in three levels: musica instrumentalis, musica humana, and musica mundana. The first movement can be seen as an expression of musica instrumentalis—the “taming” of the instrument, challenging and stretching the performer and the instrument. Musica humana—believed to be the music of the soul, and everything that affects us as humans—is expressed in the second movement, while musica mundane—also known as music of the spheres—is our impression and hope for what may lie beyond our planet, which finds an expression in the final movement. I didn’t have a particular story in mind, more a shape, perhaps.

TG: Frozen River Flows, more than by virtue of its title, is a remarkably organic piece. The combination of instruments is intriguing. Did your decisions in this regard arise out of wanting to write for particular musicians or was there something about their admixture that spoke to you?

DT: Frozen River Flows was originally written for two conservatoire colleagues of mine, who formed an oboe-and-percussion duo called newnoise. Soon after I completed it, Roman Mints, who I also studied with at Guildhall, asked me if I could contribute a piece to a concert he was programming with violin, accordion, and double bass. This is how the unusual instrumentation came about.

TG: Such different paths is a piece of many layers. Where do you situate yourself among them?

DT: Perhaps, being the composer, I might situate myself at the foundation. But, in all seriousness, it is true, the septet is very layered and polyphonic/contrapuntal. This for me is the great pleasure in writing chamber music: one can have all these lines and give equal weight to each. The inter-relationships between parts can be very complex. Setting myself to this challenge—to have complexity within a clear structure and sound—was one of the first steps in the compositional process.

TG: Such different paths feels like an emblematic piece. What personal importance does it hold for you?

DT: I feel that way about all the pieces on the CD, to be honest. In each there are elements which build from previous ideas or thoughts, and since both the Cello Concerto and Such different paths are the latest compositions on the disk, I guess I’ve had more time to accumulate further thoughts when writing.

TG: Much of your music seems cyclical. Is this conscious?

DT: It really depends on the piece, I wouldn’t say that, for example, Such different paths is cyclical. But sometimes there is a satisfaction in hearing material in two contexts—without having a reference and after a certain development.

TG: Manfred Eicher has been a blessing to so many composers since beginning his New Series in the mid-80s. What does it mean for you to have worked with him and to see your music represented by an influential and prestigious venue?

DT: Manfred Eicher is inspirational, and it has been an unparalleled privilege to work with him and his team! It’s more than a dream to be part of such a catalogue of creativity. As a composer, it is a really great feeling to be able to feel that your music is understood and that those responsible for its delivery on record are concerned, above all, with the integrity and true nature of the music.

TG: On a related note, can you describe your involvement in the recording/mixing process and any insights Mr. Eicher imparted along the way?

DT: Well, my ability to navigate around a mixing desk would perhaps equal my ability to ice-skate, so I couldn’t have a detailed and technical conversation, as much as I may have liked. The process was very natural and dependent on what we were hearing, and at least my main point of reference was the feeling of being in the hall and experiencing the music as if it were played live.

TG: What currently excites you about being a composer? What currently excites you as a listener?

DT: I have a ton of research to get through for some upcoming projects, including one for the Shakespeare anniversary in 2016, and this is providing me with a well of inspiration and excitement. Being a Londoner excites me as a listener—with access to so many fantastic concerts and events as well as sounds.

TG: Generally speaking, how do you compose? Do you have a preferred space, environment, or atmosphere in which to do so?

DT: As long as I can have some quiet, a piano, and my notepad, I’m happy.

(See this article as it originally appeared in Sequenza 21. To hear samples of String Paths, please click here.)

Jan Garbarek/The Hilliard Ensemble: Officium Novum (ECM New Series 2125)

| Tyran Grillo

Officium Novum

Officium Novum

Jan Garbarek soprano and tenor saxophones
The Hilliard Ensemble
David James countertenor
Rogers Covey-Crump tenor
Steven Harrold tenor
Gordon Jones baritone
Recorded June 2009 at Propstei St. Gerold
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

A little farther
we will see the almond trees blossoming
the marble gleaming in the sun
the sea breaking into waves 

a little farther,
let us rise a little higher.
–Giorgos Seferis

Sometimes music bypasses all other faculties and journeys straight into our souls. It eschews intellectual games, removes the safety net from beneath critical acrobats, and seeks no justification for its effects. To say that Officium Novum is just such music would be as gross an understatement as is likely to drop from my brain. The achievements of the Hilliard Ensemble and saxophonist Jan Garbarek on this album’s predecessors, Officium and Mnemosyne, hardly need emphasis. They were nothing short of astonishing, blending presumably incongruous signatures in a sound of unparalleled parallels. Yet this third effort from the project stands out for its distinct separation of voices as it leads our ears and hearts more toward Eastern Europe, and farther to Armenia.

Hilliards Garbarek

In the latter vein, the multifaceted folk and liturgical arrangements of Komitas Vardapet (1869-1935)—whose music has elsewhere fallen within ECM’s purview on Kim Kashkashian’s Hayren—form the album’s central nervous system, although nowhere more so than in “Ov zarmanali,” a baptismal hymn that with Garbarek’s solo introduction marks the aforementioned separation as a running theme from first blush. In the rasp of his reed breathes a memory of nature, so that the Hilliards’ entrance spins a fantasy that can never gain traction in the here and now, confined as it is to wandering the past like a prisoner in his cell. Nevertheless, sanctity reigns, as prophesied by the third-century Byzantine chant, “Svjete tihij” (Gladsome light), which sacrifices its luminescence as it is sliced by the barred window. Its vocal blood later warms the body of Arvo Pärt’s “Most Holy Mother of God,” written for the Hilliards in 2003, thereby closing a divine circuit with its concluding dissonances.

Separations abound in other Komitas pieces as Garbarek carries the full chanting weight of “Surb, Surb” and skirts fields of dew in “Hays hark nviranats ukhti,” surpassed only once by countertenor David James in the “Sirt im sasani” (Hymn for Maundy Thursday). Like two wings joined to the same body, they are nominally separate but linked by thought, instinct, and action. Such notes of independence are implied also by the album’s cover photograph, which shows a lone outlier, back turned yet bridged to his fellows by light on the water. Even that reflection bears a horizontal rift of shadow: a cleft of nascent wave eating its way toward shore.

The lifeblood of Officium Novum courses through “Litany,” a three-chambered heart of Russian, Romanian, and anonymous sources. At its center is “Otche nash,” drawn from the Lipovan Old Believers tradition and sung alone by baritone Gordon Jones before Garbarek threads the backdrop of an anonymous “Dostoino est” in ways eerily similar to the first collaboration in 1993. Another anonymous relic, this of 16th century Spain, braces the architecture of “Tres morillas m’enamoran.” Heard on many a Renaissance record, the piece finds new life in the current rendering, seeming to reach for us from the future rather than out of the past. This is where the separations begin to soften, as Garbarek harmonizes more docilely at first before darting through and around the voices with bird-like grace. Breaths between verses lend a reflective, antiphonal quality, as they do also in Pérotin’s “Alleluia. Nativitas,” newly rendered since its appearance on Mnemosyne. It is joyous, almost incongruously so, among these monochromatic brethren, but gives a name to the light from which it fashions flesh for bone.

Two pieces by Jan Garbarek complete the musical share of the album. “Allting finns” (Everything there is) sets “Den döde” (The dead one), a poem by Swedish writer Pär Lagerkvist (1891-1974), into beautiful interpretive metalwork, filigreed by the composer’s alchemy of paramusical elements, while “We are the stars” (based on a Native American poem of the Passamaquoddy people) is here transformed from its last appearance on RITES into a fully embodied soul, whose words and bare coherences constitute a fabric unto itself. Garbarek’s playing is so respectful that it walks on water and leads us to Bruno Ganz’s reading of “Nur ein Weniges noch” by Giorgos Seferis (1900-1971), which ends the program. Both narrator and poet are recurring touch-points in the ECM corpus. By their virtue, we are left with a vastly intersectional view of the (im)material world and a single takeaway message that resounds, May you be blessed to be found.

(To hear samples of Officium Novum, click here.)