Classical

Thomas Larcher: Naunz (ECM New Series 1747)

| Tyran Grillo

Naunz

Thomas Larcher
Naunz

Thomas Larcher piano
Thomas Demenga cello
Erich Höbarth violin
Recorded November 1999, Europahaus Mayrhofen, Austria
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher

Austrian pianist Thomas Larcher, previously known to ECM New Series aficionados as a tactful interpreter of contemporary music, with Naunz shows his colors as a composer of the same. That Larcher is a close associate of Heinz Holliger, another musician-composer of immense talent, should come as no surprise: both compose as if through a microscope. Yet while Holliger tends to languish in protracted gazes at what lies beneath his cover slides, Larcher is more interested in compressions and calms before storms—in the message of the medium. The laser-precise title piece, written 1989 for piano, evokes a particular brain chemistry and cellular dysfunction…yet also a fractured, spatial sort of harmony. Its thirteen-and-a-half-minute duration holds a broad technical spectrum on the tongue: metallurgical hammerings, bright pops, and bluesy accents trade places in carousel fashion. Every note drips like a love-sworn face, open-mouthed, a scabbard without a sword.

Thomas Demenga pushes these images deeper into the fire in Vier Seiten (1998), throwing himself into jaggedly brushed scenery. Larcher’s trust in Demenga is obvious, for even the most challenging passages flow effortlessly at the cellist’s virtuosic touch. Ley lines crack in a symphony of such intimate proportions that the piece stabilizes, settling into meditative fog curls, a muscle torn to infinity. Further bowings are put on hold for the duration of two more piano pieces. The fractured yet resonant Noodivihik (1992) works at an even more cellular level. With scientific attention, Larcher expounds its polyphony in monosyllables while moments of clarity rub up against those of murky discomfort. Not every piece, however, is so overtly disjointed, for in such a piece as Klavierstück 1986 (the collection’s earliest composition) there is overt color-bleeding, punctuated by moments of insistence that fade into bodiless reflections.

Larcher

The autobiographically inflected Kraken (1994-1997), a fascinating trio, revives Demenga and adds the violin of Erich Höbarth. In the latter’s playing is an Ysaÿe-like exuberance told yet in a language Larcher’s own, distinct for its obsessions. The entrance of piano after Höbarth’s pliant introduction lends a morose, titanic feeling of sunkenness. Violin lines evoke ghostly strangers from the wreckage, cleaving water and sky in kind. As a unit the trio forms a methodical braid, ponytail of a slumbering warrior. Larcher brings a percussive sound to his part, treading water in a marriage of staccato and legato impulses. The Holliger connection deepens as Demenga and Höbarth embark on a journey eerily reminiscent of his Duo for Violin and Cello before fragility and gnarled woodwork bring closure. Also bringing closure is the concluding Antennen-Requiem für H. (1999), an elusive piano piece that flirts with audibility by way of various extended techniques. Hands on the strings turn the instrument into a fast-forwarded film. It is a diegesis, an awakening, a genetic table setting loosed from its horizontal plane.

Larcher’s music is the equivalent of a postmortem. With a meticulousness that can only come out of self-discipline, he scours every body for clues of its demise. In so doing, he creates new life. Every helix begins a story.

<< Charlie Haden/Egberto Gismonti: In Montreal (ECM 1746)
>> Eberhard Weber: Endless Days (ECM 1748)

Heino Eller: Neenia (ECM New Series 1745)

| Tyran Grillo

Neenia

Heino Eller
Neenia

Tallinn Chamber Orchestra
Tõnu Kaljuste conductor
Recorded August 1999, Estonia Concert Hall, Tallinn
Engineer: Teije van Geest
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The word “trauma” comes from the Greek, meaning “wound.” The derivation seems apt: a wound leaves one prone to infection from invisible forces, while from it exudes the very stuff that keeps us alive. According to classical Freudian psychoanalysis, a healthy Ego redirects traumatic influence, thereby protecting us from overstimulation. Otherwise, the trauma festers within. Either way, the subject is spared the pain of being consciously aware of the affliction in question. Music, however, inflects this view somewhat differently. In that of Estonian composer Heino Eller (1887-1970), a distinctly autobiographical impulse floods us neither with catharsis nor with a working-through. It is, rather, a fullness of life that sees death not as non-existence but as one of many equal facets.

Eller’s stamp on Estonian concert music cannot be overstated: his was the spark that set a revolution aflame. His influence pulses on in the work of his many students. Arvo Pärt, for one, fondly remembers his composition teacher as a noble human being who nurtured an open and personal approach, as the founder of Estonia’s professional music scene, and above all as a musician of “strict logic.” Yet Eller’s personal life was also indelibly marked by a strictly illogical act: the murder of his wife, Anna, at the hands of occupying Nazis. It was during this period that his Lüüriline Süit (Lyric Suite, 1945), originally composed for piano but heard here in an orchestral reworking, came to fruition. The heartrending physicality of its mortal undercurrents breathes with the ache of living—a sound as only the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra under Tõnu Kaljuste’s direction could elicit without need for the background sketched above. Each of its six movements is corporeally minded, a ballet of actors on a sociopolitical stage. In the final movement especially one notices the rhythmic sensibilities inherited by such progenitors as Erkki-Sven Tüür, only here they pick at a scab that will never heal. The depth of landscape is masterful, its contrasts of texture and time, of heaven and hell, indicative of all that follows.

The 1928 title composition is a memorial to friend Johannes Arro (1865-1928). A tone poem of majestic emotional depth, it undergoes constant color changes, each continuing the gloomy dramaturgy of the opening suite. The Five Pieces for String Orchestra (1953)—of which “Homeland Song,” says Pärt, is the Estonian equivalent of Sibelius’s Finlandia—unfolds in a more fragmentary, though no less organic, sense of architecture. Like that of Antonio Gaudi, straight lines are rare and there is a beginning at every end. Densities also vary: a solo violin draws a silver thread through the occasional needle, pocking the clouds with patches of sky. From lively dances to saturnine dips, the overall effect is stirring and reminds us that home is never far away, so long as one can find a song to share.

The concluding works of the program embrace the spectrum of Eller’s craft. The Sümfonietta (Sinfonietta, 1965-67), his last major composition, speaks in a language of catch and release. Every time it seems to tip, something swoops in to steady it. Agitations in the lower strings draw a screen as translucent as rice paper yet as impenetrable as an iron fortress as we are moved through a vast unraveling into the final dance, the spirit alive and forthcoming with its light. The promise of that light is realized in Eleegia (Elegy, 1931) for string orchestra and harp. Written in memory of another musical friend, Peeter Ramul (1881-1931), its lachrymose reflections turn into titanic hope, drifting through joyful memories to get there. All of which brings us full circle to the knowledge with which we began: namely, that something of our lives, whether given or taken away, persists beyond the measure of all the grief in the world.

The listener will be hard-pressed to locate a single abrasive maneuver in Eller’s compositions. Each is a coherent entity. There is feeling that the music will go on without ever resolving itself, but that in that lack of closure time becomes its own mirror. We may never understand the persistence of violence, but at least it may be temporarily diluted by the draw of a bow.

<< Trygve Seim: Different Rivers (ECM 1744)
>> Charlie Haden/Egberto Gismonti: In Montreal (ECM 1746)

Iva Bittová: s/t (ECM 2275)

| Tyran Grillo

Iva Bittová

Iva Bittová

Iva Bittová voilin, voice, kalimba
Recorded February 2012, Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Characterizing the music of Iva Bittová as resistant to definition both describes it perfectly and does it a disservice. The former, because her minimal tools of violin and voice elicit a museum’s worth of colors, moods, and brushstrokes. The latter, because every listener will emerge from that museum with a unique image in mind that is anything but indefinable. Despite her many creative personalities—which encompass acting, performing, and composing—she has achieved notoriety by no small feats of expression. Still, don’t be mistaken: this is no “avant-garde” artist. She’s not upsetting paradigms, but deepening their self-awareness.

“The violin accompanies me all the time,” says Bittová of an instrument that has centered her musical life since the early 1980s. “It is a mirror reflecting my dreams and imagination.” Yet she is, above all, a singer. Whether through vocal folds, bow, or physical gesture, her voice strikes flint to stone and blows a tangle of weed until it glows. So potent is said voice that it inspired fellow Czech composer Vladimír Godár’s Mater (documented most recently in a 2007 release for ECM New Series), a multilayered cantata on women-centered texts of which Bittová is both sun and satellite.

Iva

This self-titled solo album finds Bittová in her element in a series of 12 numbered “Fragments,” and because fragments imply a whole, it makes sense to speak of the album as such. Like a work of masterful anamorphosis, its image emerges only by submitting oneself to its perspective. Twelve is, of course, a mystical number. It defines the modern clock, marks the end of childhood, numbers the Bibical apostles, and zodiacally divides the heavens. Here it is a riddle that harbors many more.

The album begins and ends with her voice slaloming through the delicate signposts of a kalimba. Here and throughout there is harmony and tension, starlight and soil. At one moment, her voice and bow may unify. At another, her feet go their separate ways, divorced from body and destination. Pizzicato gestures seem to pluck hairs from the scalp of the night, while arco gestures get lost in mazes even as Bittová draws them. Sometimes: her voice alone, spoken and then sung, so that incantation becomes chant becomes lullaby in one fluid swing. Sometimes: the violin alone, crossing every bridge without ever touching feet to plank. Sometimes: a river’s flow through black forest, hints of love and travel.

To be sure, ghosts of a Slovakian heritage breach the fabric of time that veils her, but the freshness of her storytelling makes it all feel uncharted. For while she does adapt the music of Joaquín Rodrigo in Fragment VI and sings texts by Gertrude Stein and, notably, Chris Cutler in others (III and VII, respectively), she renders these sources personal and organic through her crafting. Words like “gypsy,” “folk,” and “tradition,” then, might as well be gusts of air, so intangible are they in her sound-world. That being said, her art is certainly rooted in a worldly sense of time and plays with that notion as would a hummingbird flirt with a backyard feeder. Her sound is resilient to climatic damage, for it has already absorbed so much of the oxidation that gives it character, and her tone is never brittle, even at its thinnest. In fact, the album’s strongest moments are to be found in her unaccompanied singing. From gentle cuckoo to shaman’s possession, her voice cycles through many (after)lives and makes this world of social details begin to feel other-cultural.

Here is an artist whose sense of architecture is wholly translucent, whose persona is her crucible, and whose music is an embodied practice, a mimesis personified to the point of healing.

(To hear samples of Iva Bittová, click here. See this review as it originally appeared in RootsWorld magazine.)

Michael Mantler: Hide and Seek (ECM 1738)

| Tyran Grillo

Hide and Seek

Michael Mantler
Hide and Seek

Robert Wyatt voice
Susi Hyldgaard voice, accordion
Roger Jannotta flute, oboe, clarinets
Michael Mantler trumpets
Martin Cholewa French horn
Vincent Nilsson trombone
Bjarne Roupé guitars
Tineke Noordhoek vibraphone, marimba
Per Salo piano
Marianne Sørensen violins
Mette Winther violas
Helle Sørensen cellos
Recorded and mixed February-Septemer 2000 at Danish Radio Studios, Copenhagen
Engineer: Lars Palsig
Vocals recorded April 2000 at Gallery Studios, London
Engineer: Jamie Johnson
Electronic percussion programmed by Michael Mantler, sounds realized at Subzonique
Produced by Michael Mantler

Michael Mantler is a force: not to be reckoned with, per se, but of reckoning itself. He is an artist of voices, one who, as the title of this operatic jewel attests, seeks them out from hiding. One of those, Robert Wyatt (long since found), is a singer with whom this album furthers a 25-year collaboration. Another is Susi Hyldgaard (also an accomplished accordionist), who first rose from within the Mantler fold in his masterwork The School of Understanding. Accompanying them is an expanded version of the composer’s loosely termed Chamber Music and Songs Ensemble, which opens its wings to include, on winds, Roger Jannotta (of Tom van der Geld’s elusive Children At Play) and Danish pianist Per Salo. Also (omni)present is Bjarne Roupé, a guitarist who has become an integral player in Mantler’s soundings. The most vital instrument of all, however, is the text by Paul Auster, an author on Mantler’s mind for years and whose eponymous short play lends itself starkly to the composer’s unmistakable brand of telepathy. The result is no mere setting, as Mantler takes his scissors (with the author’s approval) to its language with surgical care.

Holograms are constructed in such a way that if you cut them into pieces, each retains the entire image on a smaller scale. Such is the dynamic of Hide and Seek’s seventeen miniatures. Not one is fragmentary but rather contains elements of the whole. The purely instrumental “Unsaid” dots the program in six parts, the first of which opens. In them one encounters swarms of commentary, some more modest than others, around the guitar’s queen bee. In them are the agitations into which the play’s two characters are so reluctant to give. The balance is meticulous. It allows Wyatt and Hyldgaard to dance in their circles of comfort, breaking even in their seesawing between resignation and martyrdom even as the strings paint cracks in the glass above. Unsaid, yes, but not un-voiced.

“What did you say?”

These words introduce us to a drama of elliptical conversational elements. They cradle in their hands steaming plates of indecision, miscommunication, and vulnerability, which take the piece’s full duration to consume. Voices get caught up in their own vices, and in that process also take advantage of a few loopholes. Statements become facing mirrors lost in a mise-en-abyme of their own making. In their net the accordion occupies stage center, emotes without semantic limitations, while Mantler’s trumpet drips with guidance.

“What do you see?”
“Absolutely nothing”

Question and answer. Cloud and rain. Strings and footsteps. These comprise the core of Hide and Seek, their refrain a powerful marker of identity, or lack thereof, in which all traction is gilded, amplified. The tangled web of “What can we do?” features Mantler’s electronically programmed drums in a whirl of self-realization. It also poses the album’s most pertinent question, for which it has no answer but the melody of its asking.

“It all has to end sometime”

Closure by conjuring. An impending doom, so dark it is beautiful. In its shadows Wyatt and Hyldgaard make an emotionally foiled pair, especially in the final leg. They braid acceptance, parrying and thrusting their way toward the simple resolution of “I’m glad you’re glad.”

All of which culminates in two of Mantler’s most perfect shapes. The circling electric guitar of “Do you think we’ll ever find it?” marks a standout denouement, while “It makes no difference to me” sets speech atop a fulcrum of rocking strings. A return to the game, the accordion’s song passes through the door and on to the next chapter, as yet unwritten.

<< Vassilis Tsabropoulos: Akroasis (ECM 1737)
>> Ensemble Belcanto: Come un’ombra di luna (ECM 1739 NS)

Terje Rypdal: Melodic Warrior (ECM 2006)

| Tyran Grillo

2006 X

Terje Rypdal
Melodic Warrior

Terje Rypdal guitar
The Hilliard Ensemble
Bruckner Orchester Linz
Dennis Russell Davies conductor
Wroclaw Philharmonic Orchestra
Sebastian Perloswski conductor
Melodic Warrior recorded December 2003 at Brucknerhaus, Linz (ORF)
Recording engineer: Alice Ertlbauer-Camerer
Engineer: Alois Hummer
And The Sky Was Coloured… recorded November 2009 at Jazztopad Festival, Wrocław
Recording engineer: Maurycy Kin
Mixed at Rainbow Studio, Oslo by Jan Erik Kongshaug, Manfred Eicher and Terje Rypdal
Album produced by Manfred Eicher

…from the house made of mirage…
…the rainbow rose up with me…
…the rainbow returned with me…
…to the entrance of my house…
…from the house made of mirage…
–excerpted from a Navajo Night Chant

How does one review an album for which one has also written liner notes? This is the challenge I set before myself in the instance of Terje Rypdal’s astonishing Melodic Warrior. Pairing the gargantuan title piece with a younger sibling, it reveals yet another facet of the Norwegian guitarist’s compositional profile, one that has given us such wondrous reflective surfaces as Undisonus and his Lux Aeterna. Where those two works examined sonic temperatures across relatively expansive climates, here the lens cracks in an implosion of voices.

Of those voices we get four prominent stewards in the Hilliard Ensemble, who also commissioned Melodic Warrior from the very ether. Their singing burgeons in a selection of Native American poetry chosen by Rypdal, along with a sprinkle of original words. To the touch-and-go listener it may seem an outlying choice for the Hilliards, unless of course one considers their likeminded reworking of Quechua and Passamaquoddy sources with saxophonist Jan Garbarek on, respectively, Mnemosyne and Officium Novum—in which case the fit could hardly be more intuitive. These are poetries rooted in that which roots us, pouring mercury into the primacy of oral over written expression: the lived knowledge that eternal regeneration is impossible without the fleeting rain.

The instrumental makeup alone chains this magnum opus to an immovable classical altar, surrounding the Hilliards with a full orchestra under the ever-erudite guidance of Dennis Russell Davies. It further bears the scars of Rypdal’s many-hued pools of influence, for his electric guitar bleeds through its movements like fire through lit steel wool, cupping a prog-rock relic or two in its satchel. In light of this, Melodic Warrior would seem to bring together many of his earlier threads into unified fruition—from his supergroup The Dream and on through the defining ECM years (Odyssey, Chasers, and especially Skywards) to the large-scale compositions mentioned above. The end effect is a snake coiled and poised to strike. Yet rather than deploy its secrets as weaponry (the melodic warrior sustains injury in place of others), it holds venom in mind and makes it palatable to the tongue and to the ear. Rypdal’s baying leads are unmistakable in this regard, stringing us as they do along a necklace of vocal cells, each writ large within the itinerant body. That we can at last experience the journey of that body on disc (prior to release, it had been maturing in ECM’s vaults for nearly a decade) is a gift for the soul.

Rypdal’s Opus 79 finds company in his Opus 97, And The Sky Was Coloured With Waterfalls And Angels. Whether coincidental or not, the numerical reversal suggests a kinship. And indeed, despite its wordless topography, the second piece would seem to drink from the same ocean, albeit on a different coast. Fronting now another orchestra and without the company of (human) voices, Rypdal paints bruises of a different kind: these the bursting flowers of a fireworks display. Although not overtly programmatic, those eruptions do materialize in periodic squints, carrying us out on a breath of awe.

It was an honor and a dream come true to contribute liner notes to this release. In solidarity with listeners (and because digital downloads deprive us of the pleasure of holding a booklet), I offer said notes in full below, with ECM’s kind permission.

… . …

Contrapunctus naturalis: Rypdal’s Warriors and Angels

The Chippewa tell a form of picture-story in which silence takes the form of two lines, close but never touching. As the asymptote of all existence, they do more than represent. They enshrine. Surrounding them is a need for self-questioning, for acknowledging the power of the beating drum.

River, nature, vision: these are the tools of the warrior whose flesh stands firm against the tide. Like the stag hanging from a tree—last touched by chipped stone and hunter’s eye, now drained by gravity and sun’s transit—it has an illusory stillness. Somewhere, in another time, the warrior’s legs still run. Terje Rypdal’s warrior is consequently melodic. Protagonist of his magnum opus, he activates a landscape by contact of lyric and pen. Its composer is a river; the voices of the Hilliard Ensemble its fauna; the writhing Bruckner Orchestra Linz, under the baton of Dennis Russell Davies, its flora. Davies adds depth through an abiding passion for living works. He gives voice to the margins, here doubly so, guiding Rypdal’s assembly through a 45-minute epic drawn from Chippewa, Navajo, Pima, and Papago sources. The words came to Rypdal by way of stage director and musician Carl Jørgen Kiønig, who lent him a book of Native American poetry. “Its closeness to nature mirrored my own,” he says, and thus the seeds were planted. Since its 2003 Austrian premiere, this Hilliard commission has taken on a soul that consolidates Rypdal’s many paths.

From his early ECM leader dates onward, including the self-titled 1971 debut and 1974’s Whenever I Seem To Be Far Away, Rypdal has had a hand in multiple idioms. He grew up in a classical home (his father was also a composer) and trained formatively in that sphere before taking to the guitar in his teens. If we can paint anything with these biographical colors, it is not the portrait of a fusion artist, but rather one who walks along dissolving borders. Whether in the chamber music aesthetics of Q.E.D. or the wayfaring 5th Symphony, in the droning lyricism of Undisonus or the flowing textures of Lux Aeterna, through it all persists a consistency of vision.

And what of Melodic Warrior? “The title came to me almost as a vision,” Rypdal recalls. “It felt as if I had planned something like this all my life.” Given the strength of this conviction, one might expect a ruder “Awakening” than what transpires in the eponymous prologue. The first of nine movements, it opens its eyes in high-pitched stasis, an abyss where the fray of human awareness hums above the earth’s surface. The ensuing plunge is cinematic to the core, traveling from cosmos to land, from breath to heart. In it we find the glitter of coastal waters, a veritable Bering land bridge rooted in sea floor and spreading its fingers toward wounded sky. To tread here is to embrace daylight, to feast on it, as the crow takes to carrion.

Storm, leaf, soil: the constellations Rypdal’s electric guitar lives by, echoes from a mythic past, garments donned by our four unmistakable voices when twilight falls around them. Their welcome blessing reveals an organic body, splitting and fusing like water’s flow. As one, they fly. In isolation, they soar. During solos their spirits thread disparate needles, sometimes flirting with call and response, but always with unity in sight. A storm is nothing without its droplets.

Rypdal remains the omniscient lurker, resurfacing across the suspenseful pages of “The Secret File” with script aflame. He envisions this dramatic intermezzo—having used it before in a hard-rock context—as a nod to Western film soundtracks, thereby bearing relevance on the contradictions of the Native American theme. Not until “Song Of Thunder” does he ride lightning into the roiling ash. He weaves stealthily, finding in the curve of a whale’s back, in the sweep of a honeybee’s pollen comb, the natural counterpoint that haunts his oeuvre at large.

The strings of Linz mark the face of this music with laugh lines. Profound shifts in light reveal rivulets and isles of possibility. In “Magician Song” countertenor David James evokes a leaf on that water, the tremble of the branch before its descent, the seed from which that tree burgeoned. Ancestors become stories, backgrounds become foregrounds, as they would in dreams, and close the circle by way of opening another in the light of a morning star.

The flair of Melodic Warrior brings to mind another ECM-represented composer, Erkki-Sven Tüür, whose background in progressive rock buoys a mind meld of fortitude and color. And if we can draw further lines of contact to the work of such 20th-century stalwarts as Górecki, Ligeti, Penderecki, and even a hint of Glass, it is only because Rypdal has mixed and baked his clay from the mineral-rich soil of deep listening.

All of this comprises a challenge to purveyors of modern music who rest on atmospheric crutches in lieu of compelling linear themes. Rypdal points to early conversations in this regard with label mate Ketil Bjørnstad: “We used to talk about how melody in contemporary music was looked down upon. I knew right from the start of my composing that I had to bring back melody…and beauty in general.” His forte embodies the uphill battle of this realization, beholds the world as new parents behold themselves, at once without and within. The polarity makes sense, for what is the guitar if not a bringer of visceral melody? It is a fortuitous compositional tool in the hands of one who wields it properly.

Sky, journey, reflection: the shaman’s initiations. As technician of the sacred, the shaman dismantles mortal designs. He abstains from taste of dust for that of haze. He casts bones through skin, passes mind through matter, and returns with timely prophecy. He visualizes decay, the withering of boundaries. He casts one eye down and the other up. Thus undone, the earth overflows.

And The Sky Was Coloured With Waterfalls And Angels is the receptacle of that excess. More than a landscape, it is another link in the chain of being. The live recording presented here opens a curtain on Wrocław, Poland, where the 2009 Jazztopad Festival (artistic director: Piotr Turkiewicz) is about to set forth on this purely instrumental journey. It is under these auspices that, with Sebastian Perłowski leading the Wrocław Philharmonic and Rypdal poised before six foreshortening strings, the music bubbles with the freshness of its premiere.

The piece was inspired by the 2008 International Fireworks Festival in Cannes and assumes a denser structure than its sibling. It brings to evidence the din of human commerce, technology, and construction, even as it links those rosettes high beyond mundane concern. The violin scratches an itch it cannot quell, unfurls banners of melancholia between explosions. Even a surge of harp brings little hope or heavenliness. It is caked with time, unshaken. Somehow all of this finds peace, such that the sky becomes the cell of another body, and that body the cell of another.

Mirror, vessel, silence: the totems of a composer seeking nectar. Once found, it drips from waterskin, emphasizes imperfections. This music holds a mirror to land, turning every arch into a ring. The counterpoint is more than natural. It is the all-encompassing sight of things created and destroyed. Every instrument sheds a skin.

The horns in particular take on a quasi-Wagnerian role throughout the program, signaling themes and atmospheres as they become intertwined with locations and avatars. At one moment the song of bestial life, swaying the next in bowed waters, they cast crimson lines of intention into a darkening sea. This is the trick of Rypdal’s notecraft: he digs into continental influences with an archaeologist’s eye, persevering where many have quit until that single common vessel is revealed, petrified yet singing.

Tyran Grillo

Silence

Michael Mantler: Songs and One Symphony (ECM 1721)

| Tyran Grillo

Songs and One Symphony

Michael Mantler
Songs and One Symphony

Mona Larsen voice
Michael Mantler trumpet
Bjarne Roupé guitar
Marianne Sørensen violin
Mette Winther viola
Gunnar Lychou viola
Helle Sørensen cello
Kim Kristensen piano, synthesizers
Radio Symphony Orchestra Frankfurt
Peter Rundel conductor
Songs recorded October 11, 1993, Danish Radio, Copenhagen
Recording engineer: Ronald Skovdal
Mixing engineer: Lars Palsig
One Symphony recorded November 13/14, 1998, Hessischer Rundfunk, Frankfurt
Recording engineer: Thomas Eschler
Mixing engineer: Rainer Schwarz
Album produced by Michael Mantler

I don’t know
anything darker
than the light.

Whatever your spiritual inclinations, you can be thankful that people like Michael Mantler have walked this earth and left behind a sonic trail so intuitively drawn it almost hurts. The Austrian-born composer delivers a subtle yet nonetheless smashing twofer in Songs and One Symphony, pairing his settings of poems by Ernst Meister with the titular symphony.

Songs is performed by the Chamber Music and Songs Ensemble, a group Mantler formed in 1993. Last heard in his masterpiece The School of Understanding, its instrumental signatures are uniquely Mantlerian, including the composer himself on trumpet, Bjarne Roupé on guitar, Kim Kristensen on keyboards, and a string quartet. For the present recording singer Mona Larsen assumes the throne, her wrapping of words the perfect disguise for Meister’s bare bones. Mantler’s ability to draw out melodies from the texts as if they’d always been there is uncanny. The cycle’s smoothness of execution is uniquely moving in this regard, finding traction in every negative space on the page. The connective tissue between “For ever” and “Nothing more,” for example, breathes in the fumes of just-sung sentiments and exhales the fearless drug of circumstantial evidence. Indeed, each slide on the projector roulette bears its own exhibition letter, submitted to the scrutiny of an invisible jury. Their shifting and murmuring implies conclusions but them lets them go in the interlude “How Long Are Our Nights,” from which the cello espouses lachrymose verdicts in kind. Larsen slips through words like a snake through the knotholes of an abandoned shed, carrying in her mouth the minimal shadows required to bleed warmth and misery. She embodies Meister’s “stir of solitude” so unpretentiously that one need know nothing of her pop music roots. Rather, she unearths her art for the first time with every stanza.

One Symphony is the result of a German radio commission. It takes the concept of a symphony in its most rudimentary form—which is to say, as a large meeting of musicians—and represents Mantler’s mounting interest in explicitly notated material. Consisting of four numbered movements, it finds its voice early on with the establishment of a characteristic flow. The harp flirts with the water’s surface like a sunlit dragonfly in Part 1, sucking inkblots from paper as if water from a glass. The shifting rhythms and textures achieve perfect kilter in the final origami fold, looking deeply into the mirror where its cinematic fantasy moves on. Part 2 opens poised before an oncoming train: it hears the signals but heeds them not in the widening funnel of light. The clouds offer little solace, dark and gnarled as their manner is. The feeling of locomotion never completely recedes. It touches the piano keys, flicks its hair in the wind, and swings from brass branches. The honeycombed Part 3 unloads a relatively mechanical shipment of dots and dashes, leaving the aftermath to spawn life of its own will in Part 4. This self-tending garden sustains some of the symphony’s darkest wounds and presses its palm to a cold window until an ephemeral handprint is all that’s left of its ever having been here.

<< Karl Amadeus Hartmann: Funèbre (ECM 1720 NS)
>> Nils Petter Molvær: Solid Ether (ECM 1722)

Eleni Karaindrou: Trojan Women (ECM New Series 1810)

| Tyran Grillo

Eleni Karaindrou
Trojan Women

Socratis Sinopoulos Constantinople lyra, laouto
Christos Tsiamoulis ney, suling, outi
Panos Dimitrakopoulos kanonaki
Andreas Katsiyiannis santouri
Maria Bildea harp
Andreas Papas bendir, daouli
Veronika Iliopoulou soprano
Eleni Karaindrou
Antonis Kontogeorgiou chorus director
Recorded July 2001 at Studio Polysound, Athens
Engineer: Yiorgos Karyotis
Produced by Manfred Eicher

No human heart is set so hard
that hearing the grave music of your dirge,
your keening, would not bring tears.

The distinct approach of Greek composer Eleni Karaindrou to film sound-tracking, through ECM’s rigorous documentation of her partnership with director Theo Angelopoulos, has imbued her music with a life of its own among international audiences. All the while, Karaindrou had been nurturing an equally prolific association at home with the theatre. Her Angelopoulos in that craft has been director Antonis Antypas, with whom she has collaborated on over 20 productions for the Aplo Theatro. This album documents her incidental music for a new staging of the Euripides tragedy Trojan Women, which received its premiere at the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus on August 31 and September 1, 2001.

First performed in 415 B.C., the play was a vitriolic critique of the Athenians’ then-recent attack on the island of Melos, where countless violently perished and women were sold into bondage in the name of conquering Sparta (in this the Athenians did not succeed). It is perhaps no coincidence that the word melos also means song, for singing constitutes the very flesh of this album’s limestone skeleton. Karaindrou kneads into these politics the idea that less is more. With the barest use of folk instruments—such as the Constantinople lyra, ney, santouri, and bendir—she implies a battered panorama of immense emotional congruity. Producer Manfred Eicher has lent further sanctity through his arrangement and editing of the material into its present form.

A profoundly comported scenography of touching (which is to say, tangible) melodic beauty finds particular expression through the lyra’s grasshopper song. It is a mournful, unforgettable sound, dry as a reed in summer. The harp also figures notably in the music’s rolling waves, overcoming the barrenness evoked by titles like “Terra Deserta” with oceanic depth. Its vibrations are transformations of landscape itself, silenced by their own resonance.

Much of the material on Trojan Women will sound familiar to regular Karaindrou listeners. The themes, although nominally character-specific, are melodically uniform, changing their instrumental clothing from visage to visage, thereby sounding a fluidity of purpose and choice. Unusual, and perhaps a point of contrast to nevertheless persistent indications of barrenness, is the presence of choir and a soprano soloist who only occasionally poises her lips above the waterline to spout names of the deep. Of central importance in this regard are the three stasimons (choral odes), each a vertebra of both story and music, a refraction of the rest. In them voices grow bolder, reaching epiphany in “An Ode Of Tears” and “In Vain The Sacrifices,” the latter a ring to which the former’s gaping clasp holds true. These voices do more than the traditional Greek chorus. They burgeon at stage center, relegated not to the wings but to the head and body of a flightless bird. Without wings, they think themselves into freedom, casting their minds from horizon to horizon, faster than the sun. They do not create the stars but make them brighter.

As a matter of course, the pieces are generally short (only one surpasses four minutes). In their sublime chemical suspensions of tears, blood, and determination swims a pair of eyes—one directed at us, the other elsewhere. Consequently, there is a feeling of stepping out of time in order to better understand its circumscription. Vast harmonic networks slumber in the underlying empty spaces, never stirring except in the most funerary moments. Despite the mythic sheen, the music of Trojan Women finds deeper mystery in the earth’s living subjects, which in isolation reveal the mystery of creation, both divine and mortal, far more acutely: in order to attain permanence one must be open to the fallacies of agreement.

Karl Amadeus Hartmann: Funèbre (ECM New Series 1720)

| Tyran Grillo

Funèbre

Karl Amadeus Hartmann
Funèbre

Isabelle Faust violin
Paul Meyer clarinet
Petersen String Quartet
Münchener Kammerorchester
Christoph Poppen conductor
Recorded July and September 1999, Angelika-Kauffmann-Saal, Schwarzenburg
Engineer: Andreas Neubronner
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Funèbre stands out in the New Series both for its due attention to German composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann (1905-1963) and for welcoming conductor Christoph Poppen and the Munich Chamber Orchestra into the ECM fold. The latter have since gone on to record a number of pivotal records for the label, including the all-Scelsi program Natura Renovatur and the Bach/Webern crossover project Ricercar. Here they are joined by violinist Isabelle Faust, the Petersen String Quartet, and clarinetist Paul Meyer for a shuffling of dark, darker, and darkest. The two main courses—Concerto funebre and the Symphony No. 4—are among Hartmann’s best known and preface the world premiere recording of his Chamber Concerto for clarinet, string quartet, and orchestra.

Hartmann’s fiery personality and strikingly inter-idiomatic style made him an easy target under the Third Reich, during which time he withdrew his music from the public sphere altogether in solidarity with other persecuted composers who chose “internal exile” over excommunication (or worse). It was nevertheless heard abroad, where it took on a life of its own. After the war, his revitalization of the European soundscape through the famed Music Viva concert series further deflected attention away from his own work at home. This, coupled with his penchant for self-criticism, left the world with a minimal published output, a problem rectified only after his passing when all-but-forgotten scores were restored, printed, and performed.

Concerto funebre for solo violin and string orchestra is Hartmann’s only violin concerto. It is meant to navigate the iniquities he saw brewing in 1939, when he began writing it. Hartmann dedicates it to his son, only four at the time. In this spirit, he wrote in retrospect, “The chorales at the beginning and end are intended to offer a sign of hope against the desperate situation of thinking people.” The piece in four tableaux initially bore a different title: Musik der Trauer (Music of mourning)—which naturally recalls Hindemith’s Trauermusik for viola and string orchestra—before changing it upon revising the piece in 1959. It forges a unique alloy of violinist and orchestra, so that the former’s attitude is more traveler than soloist, strings the life-giving land from which it comes together. The end effect is such that high notes and low notes are not markers of altitude, but rather inversions of one another on a horizontal axis of expression. The violin is a full-throated being, a pendulum housed in wrought iron. Neither do typical rules of concerto form apply. The Allegro does not provide catharsis but rather embodies a deepening of grief. Only in the Adagio do we detect a morsel of affirmation. Nevertheless, the Allegro does provide a physical sensation of uplift, a cyclone of leaves in which Faust is the only one determined among them. It is also a stepping-stone for the achingly beautiful corridor of the final Chorale, which strengthens the elasticity of the body’s emotional skin and draws on its palimpsest a broken circle.

The Symphony No. 4 (1947/48) for string orchestra takes a 1938 concerto for strings and soprano as its palette and builds from it a new diorama. Two slower movements sandwich a compact inner core: a sonic flag bearing ugly repression and shaded resistance. The colors are wan at first, rhythmically tethered to a far-off caravan whose footprints have long since been dusted over. Lachrymose and weighted by unspoken fear, the figures that left them are but a flicker on the horizon. Hints of Mahler and Webern dot an otherwise bold, original score. That Hartmann deploys these references so organically is one thing. That he does so with such arresting melodic development is quite another. The free-floating sensations of the symphony’s bookends are especially instructive in this regard, while its heliocentric Allegro reaches downright thrilling peaks of agitation. The broad sweep of its closing Adagio is overwhelmingly dense, leaving us with a heavy bowl of fruit indeed to share with those who will listen.

Although the unusual Chamber Concerto was completed in 1935, it was first performed only posthumously, in 1969. In light of its gypsy flavors, that it bears dedication to Zoltán Kodály should come as no surprise. Two longer outer movements create yet another frame, this one housing six brief dance variations. Across these Hartmann splashes the piece’s most vivid colors. Gorgeous, rustic, and magnetic, the tunes practically leap of their own volition, turning midnight into dawn at Meyer’s fluid inflections. All of this builds to a haunting stretch of ocean, crisp and bright as the moon.

If this sounds like your cup of tea, you’ll not want to miss out on ECM’s worthy account of Sándor Veress, and vice versa. Both composers draw out likeminded freshness from the earthly cares of which they were both injured subjects.

From the ash comes the phoenix.

<< Mat Maneri: Trinity (ECM 1719)
>> Michael Mantler: Songs and One Symphony (ECM 1721)

Alexander Knaifel: Amicta Sole (ECM New Series 1731)

| Tyran Grillo

Amicta Sole

Alexander Knaifel
Amicta Sole

Mstislav Rostropovich cello
Tatiana Melentieva soprano
Soloists of Boy Choir Glinka Choral College
State Hermitage Orchestra
Arkady Steinlukht conductor
Psalm 51 recorded September 2001 at Propstei St. Gerold
Engineer: Stephan Schellmannn
Amicta Sole recorded July 2000 at St. Catherine Lutheran Church, St. Petersburg
Engineer: Semion Shugal
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The text is intoned as if it sounds. These, the simple instructions that composer Alexander Knaifel offers in the score of his Psalm 51 for cello solo. Dedicated to Mstislav Rostropovich, who also performs it in the present recording, the piece is as skeletal as its source: a sounding of spirit made flesh by mortal touch. While listeners may never hear the words, they will feel them in Rostropovich’s bow, poised as it is on a fulcrum of silence. Says Knaifel, “it is the only one and unique experience in my life when not a note was composed—in the fullest and most exact meaning of this word.” By this he admits no fallacy of the creative process, but instead reveals the divinity behind its cause. The internal is renderable only as an idol to itself, so that every dynamic of the cellist’s articulation seems destined to tremble. A climb into higher registers opens a flame’s pathos into vision and leaves one suspended in Heaven’s basement.

Like the burnt offerings of which the psalm concerns itself in its final stanza, the music scatters easily in the wind. That it holds true to form at all is proof of its spiritual integrity. Although the performer is singular, the incantation is sometimes plural. From piercing bridge crawls and vulnerable downward steps to interlocking pizzicati, every motion signals a diacritical reality. Rostropovich achieves all of this through his decades-long path toward mastery. For while the notecraft is almost as bare as the paper it is written on, Knaifel infuses every nodule with a word. Were we to plot each on an axis of pitch and time, they would form a rainbow arc through the firmament from birth to death. Only at the end does light creep in, pulling ever higher into the cello’s very threshold of audibility.

The papery consistency of Psalm 51 provides absorption of the ink in Amicta Sole (Clothed with the Sun) for soloist (female) of soloists. As a follower of the former’s grace, this starkly glassine piece speaks in angel’s tongue and awakens to angel’s ways. It is also performed here by its dedicatee, the inimitable soprano Tatiana Melentieva, who etches with her voice a denser light against a slow waterfall of strings and choral textures. Now that the texts are consciously sung, there is great movement from above to below, from interior to interior’s interior.

Inspired by the “woman clothed with the sun” who appears in Revelations, Amicta Sole sequences the genealogies of Christ as a helix between new prayer and ancient origins. The instruments perform the same role as the cello in Psalm 51, sounding the texts as if singing them, while the voices sing the texts as if sounding them. Melentieva’s art is so rich that she could very well carry these forces without their cushion, for she seems to summon legions of air before her. Despite the above connotations, what we have here is the full spectrum of earthly care, the weight of human conditions pressed upon our ears with the almost there-ness of a molt feather. And although we are invited to bask in the caesural nature of what transpires, stretched into barest triad, we can never be a part of its cathedral, where vibration and darkness dwell. The feeling of renewal is such that no architecture can stand here for so long as a breath (hear this in the flute’s red thread of color). Only in the harp is the promise of good news made manifest, and with it the uniform face of which our own are imperfect copies.

That the pieces here are from the mid-nineties, shaded by a lingering fog of the Soviet era, is only fleetingly significant. In them is a stillness of heart that reflects on troubled pasts. By the same token, their worth lies not in their politics, bleeding as it does through the reddest of paper with its own hues intact. At once reifying and transcending the corporeal waver that is its mirror, they are but two jewels in an eternal crown. 

Have mercy on me, O God, according to Thy great mercy,
and according to the multitude of Thy tender mercies
blot out my iniquity.

<< György Kurtág: Signs, Games and Messages (ECM 1730 NS)
>> Robin Williamson: The Seed-at-zero (ECM 1732)