Classical

Music of Friedrich Cerha and Franz Schreker (ECM New Series 1887)

| Tyran Grillo

 

Cerha/Schreker

Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra
Peter Eötvös conductor
Recorded September 2003, MCO Studio 5, Hilversum
Engineers: Stephan Schellmann/Christian Starke (Cerha) and Ted A. Diehl/Laurent Watgen/George Luijten (Schreker)
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher

This unusual release from Austrian cellist Heinrich Schiff somehow slipped under my radar for years, coming rather late into my ECM New Series explorations. Neither composer represented here had been familiar to me, and I imagine these two works are as solid an introduction as any.

Friedrich Cerha (b. 1926) and Franz Schreker (1878-1934), both Viennese composers at the height of their creative powers here, seem to speak to one another beyond the force of their juxtaposition. Cerha’s Cello Concerto (1989/1996) bears dedication to Schiff, and the friendship between the two is evident in the familiarity of the playing. The opening proclamation brings with it an almost Dvořákian sense of communication between soloist and orchestra. The former skitters through the latter’s own lumbering (il)lustrations and races through the string-heavy surface with the ferocity of an impassioned editor: crossing out, underlining, circling, injecting its personal voice into the margins along the way. Yet the exact relationship between forces is always difficult to characterize. There is unity, to be sure, but it is not always so readily apparent, and this is perhaps the greatest challenge of this piece: namely, to supply that connective tissue with our undivided ears. The first movement excels in its quieter moments, for such are the moments when the cello meshes most harmoniously with its surroundings. The addition of percussion (steel drums, marimba, wood blocks) and pipe organ makes for some fascinating interplay, each ingredient flavoring the sonic recipe differently: the more you chew it, more delicious it becomes. The second movement, which is the core around which the entire concerto took shape, is gorgeous. The cello floats above wavering flutes and strings, hovering like a bird against an air current so as to render it stationary. The atmosphere is diffuse, comprising a fine mesh through which only light can travel. As strings slither in, they build of these sticks a more erratic cacophony. Woodblocks tick in every audible gap, seeming to punch out a hole with every contact, and as this climax dissipates, seemingly hundreds of individual paths open up before our eyes. Some forceful pizzicato signals the final movement, the cello’s rhythm dance-like yet somehow never exuberant. This tail is filled with verve, with all manner of snaps and other clicks to get us to our destination with plenty of souvenirs to spare.

Schreker’s one-movement Chamber Symphony comes directly out of World War I with hard-won tenderness. Almost rhapsodic, the violins trace a rippling orchestra, cutting through the darkness with the precision of a knife and the softness of a kiss. There is an ebb and flow to the piece that brings it full circle back to its own promises, turning darker as idealism crumbles in the shadow of reality. Thunder bursts with pastoral charm, frolicking among a meeting of winds. Each instrumental gesture translates into a visual stroke, rendering every detail of this broadening scene with the bleed of watercolor. Smaller offshoots of strings come together like orchestras in reduced form, drowning at last in their own murk and gloom.

Don’t worry if this album hasn’t won you over by the end of the first track, for it is a long and harrowing journey of triumphs and heavy losses, but through its continual tipping of scales one hears a vivid story. In the sparseness of Cerha, one finds the antidote to the density of Schreker and vice versa, and in that neutralization process there is a remarkable sense of belonging.

Luys de Narváez: Musica del Delphin (ECM New Series 1958)

| Tyran Grillo

 

Luys de Narváez
Musica del Delphin

Pablo Márquez guitar
Recorded April 2006, Kulturbühne AmBach, Götzis
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

That which is created
Is founded on music,
And the things that are created
Are all the more excellent
In that they are different
And that they are proportionate.

Luys de de Narváez’s seminal 16th-century Los seis libros del Delphin de música de cifra para tañer vihuela (Six books for the Dauphin, consisting of notated music for playing the vihuela) receives an introspective treatment via the fingers of Argentine guitarist Pablo Márquez. A student of bandoneón master Dino Saluzzi, Márquez indeed brings out a sustained quality to his notecraft, the subtlety of which will likely be lost in casual listening. While this disc will surely fulfill a certain function as the background to a dinner party, its greatest compliments are sure to reveal themselves only through personal attention. Though written for the 12-stringed vihuela, the music of Luys de Narváez translates beautifully to the guitar. Márquez’s fluid changes and attention to leading lines (something of a challenge in such repertoire) offer a wealth of listening pleasures for veterans and newcomers alike.

The six books—from which we get only a disc’s worth of selections—are significant for their arrangements of contemporaries Josquin and Gombert, as well as for containing what Narváez called Diferencias, regarded as the first sets of musical variations ever to be printed in Europe. Our biographical knowledge of their composer is as sketchy as their melodies are robust.

Anyone worth his or her arpeggios can muscle through the faster movements, but it is in the tenderest passages where Márquez displays his finest technique. The Diferencias sobre el himno O Gloriosa Domina (Libro IV, 1) is especially enchanting, drawing every line with vocal profundity, and is but one of many individual moments I might choose. Yet I believe these pieces are best taken as a whole. To be sure, they are substantial airs, but each fits into an architecture that is beyond its own time. Their atmosphere is antique yet vital in the hands of Márquez and ECM’s production team. There is a silent repose to be found in the heart that beats within them. It is the comfort of the predictable contrasted with those learning moments of unexpected departure.

In listening to this disc again as I write these words, I imagine not the solo player, but a modest gathering of friends and acquaintances sharing in an alluring complexity. The well-balanced recording merely underscores this mood, close enough as it is to hear the instrument’s finer nuances while distant enough to allow fuller grasp of its gestural parameters. This isn’t music with a moral or even aesthetic message. It breathes, like its performer, between notes, as preparation for the audible utterance that comes from the darkness of anticipation. The music drops with the regularity of water off the tip of a storm-drenched leaf. Like the leaf, it bobs with every release.

A delightful album conducive to relaxing on a quiet afternoon, all the while underscoring our privilege to do so.

Garth Knox/Agnès Vesterman: D’Amore (ECM New Series 1925)

| Tyran Grillo

 

Garth Knox
Agnès Vesterman
D’Amore

Garth Knox viola d’amore
Agnès Vesterman violoncello
Recorded September 2006 at Propstei St. Gerold
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The name of Garth Knox’s solo ECM debut comes, of course, from the viola d’amore, a neglected instrument of which he is our greatest living proponent. Below its seven bowed strings lies a sympathetic loom, which absorbs what Knox calls “a kind of harmonically encoded souvenir.”

This luminescent album brings us straight into its unique body of twined metal, gut, and wood. And what better place to start than with Knox’s own 2004 composition, Malor me bat, of which the soulful playing and seamless execution are only part of the story. With a wide palette of sound colors at his disposal, Knox gives us a sometimes-unexpected journey, seeming to coax with harmonic arpeggios Agnès Vesterman’s cello from the depths of some enigmatic future. It is one of three modern works to appear on the program, the others being Roland Moser’s glyphic scratches in Manners of Speaking (2006) and Klaus Huber’s wonderful …Plainte… (1990), which ends the album with a meditation on (and in) negative space.

Along the way, we encounter a smattering from the early Baroque, including the somber, lilting A Pavin (1605) from Tobias Hume, Attilo Ariosti’s Prima Lezione (1720), which carves its rustic dances with a wide blade, and the immortal Les Folies d’Espagne (1685) of Marin Marais. Add to these a hefty sampling of traditional Celtic tunes, and the result is a vivacious cross-section of what the viola d’amore is capable.

On the whole, this is an adventurous disc and is sure to have something for everyone. Knox’s eclectic approach works wonders, prizing the instrument as the locus of musical activity before the bow even touches the strings. Such an approach allows us deeper insight into Knox’s own passions, that we might better attune ourselves to a wider musical world in the listening. That being said, the three modern pieces are what truly showcase the instrument’s breadth.

The favored acoustics of Propstei St. Gerold once again prove amenable to the music-making archived here, and lift every voice to sing with thrumming quality.

Vladimír Godár: Mater (ECM New Series 1985)

| Tyran Grillo

 

Vladimír Godár
Mater

Iva Bittová voice
Miloš Valent violin, viola
Chamber orchestra Solamente Naturali
Bratislava conservatory choir
Dušan Bill choirmaster
Marek Štryncl conductor
Recorded September 2005 at St. George Church in Svätý Jur, Slovakia
Recording director: Peter Zagar
Engineer: Otto Nopp
Produced by Pavian Records

Slovak composer Vladimír Godár’s Mater is really six pieces in one, each connecting into the larger whole of an hour-long cantata. The composer himself likens its introspections to travel: we arrive at a new place, only to scope out its most prominent features. Only with time can we find those niches, hidden alleys, and hideouts. The period instruments (played at period pitch) featured on this recording embody this philosophy to the letter, as do the voices, which switch comfortably between Yiddish, Slovak, Latin, and English throughout.

Godár’s experience as a film composer and interest in early music are both immediately evident in the opening Maykomashmalon (2005) for female voice, viola and violoncello. Singer Iva Bittová’s superb diction and commitment mix with her generous honesty to stunning effect in the present surroundings. This incantation is like that of a Latin mass, so that when the strings come in amid an earthen song, we have already felt that vocal urge in our hearts. Its song entwines the power of a lullaby and the catharsis of a lament. The 2003 Magnificat for female voice, choir, string orchestra and harp contrasts double bass drones and a choral middle ground with jagged consonants from strings. The entirety of this section arises as if its own nucleus, carrying the gravid harmonic changes of a Renaissance organum into the shadows of Luspávanky (Lullabies) (2001/03) for female voice, two violins, two violas and violoncello. The lead becomes more playful here, setting off a pentatonic intro through open strings, like a child playing on piano. As the piece winds down, Bittová brings an anthemic resurgence to bear on the encroaching silence. Ecce puer (1997) for female voice, two violins, viola, double-bass, harp, chitarrone and harpsichord takes James Joyce as its textual inspiration. The arrangement glows, Bittová unafraid to show the honesty of her vulnerability. The music cycles through its progressions, laying down lines with surety. With each repetition, it becomes more comforting. A glorious piece.

Yet it in the 2001 Stálá Matka (Stabat Mater) for alto, violin and chamber orchestra (and sung in Slovak) that we find the real heart of Mater. There is such ineffable purity here that one hardly notices the fleshiness of the playing. The power of monophony, caressed by every instrumental gesture, embraces the voice like a newborn in the amniotic flow of its revelation. One hears the ghost of Górecki here, hovering like a prophet as every stanza burrows deeper into itself. An orchestral swell at the center spreads like the bones of a gothic ceiling, from which censers spill out their smoky breath. So placated, we are lowered gently into the play of light in Regina coeli (2003) for female voice, violin, choir and chamber orchestra. With Renaissance colors, a single call is taken up by the chorus, thereby awakening the spirit of an age since buried in the battlefield of modernism, but now carefully unearthed, dusted off, and redressed. A reinstatement of Maykomashmalon ends and thereby fixes the piece in time, and in so doing sets it free to wander in ignorance of it.

Mater takes is melodic promises seriously. Fans of so-called “Holy Minimalism” are sure to feel right at home here, but also to become slowly aware that the term is redundant.

Erkki-Sven Tüür: Oxymoron (ECM New Series 1919)

| Tyran Grillo

 

Erkki-Sven Tüür
Oxymoron

Pedro Carneiro marimba
Leho Karin violoncello
Marrit Gerretz-Traksmann piano
Vox Clamantis
NYYD Ensemble
Estonian National Symphony Orchestra
Olari Elts conductor
Ardor recorded March 2003 at Estonia Concert Hall, Tallinn
Engineer and recording producer: Maido Maadik
Produced by Eesti Radio
Salve Regina, Dedication, Oxymoron recorded June 2006 at Estonia Concert Hall and Issanda Muutmise church, Tallinn
Engineer: Margo Kõlar
Recording supervision: Helena Tulve
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher

Oxymoron is ECM’s fourth album dedicated entirely to the exciting music of Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür. Each of its four pieces is recorded here for the first time.

The album opens with his 2005 Salve Regina for male choir and ensemble. Beginning with a plainchant-like tenor line amid pattering hand drum and dissonant clusters, it blossoms into the creeping breath of organ, whose quivering configuration leaves us primed and centered for Ardor. This concerto for marimba and orchestra (composed 2001/02) is characterized by engaging, halting rhythms and quick clusters splayed against a terse backdrop. The marimba would be enough to carry itself on its own, and seems not to need the orchestral accompaniment, but the harmonics of the flute, signaling a sustained drone from orchestra in the second movement, prove that Tüür knows what he is doing. As he traces each finely shaped footstep of percussion in the softer sands of the ensemble at large, the sound becomes fuller, more urgent and demanding, reaching a drummed frenzy in the sustained tone that concludes, only to die in a wisp of tide.

Dedication (1990) for violoncello and piano is the earliest piece on the album and is an especially welcome addition to ECM’s ongoing Tüür survey, which now tunes our ears to his uniquely detailed approach to chamber idioms at last. Here are his melodic skills at their most potent, at once straightforward and crafty.

The 2003 title piece on which the album ends is exactly what it professes to be, fusing contradictory gestures of form and execution in a seamless whole. The overall effect is colorful, almost jazzy, and intensely involving.

Tüür’s typically unstable lines are so alive that they develop their own biological signature through a wealth of successive properties. Here is a voice never content in being still, one that is always challenging itself, growing toward something infinite and nourishingly whole.

Thomas Larcher: Ixxu (ECM New Series 1967)

| Tyran Grillo

Thomas Larcher
Ixxu

Rosamunde Quartett
Andrea Lauren Brown soprano
Christoph Poppen violin
Thomas Demenga violoncello
Thomas Larcher piano
Recorded July 2005, August-Everding-Saal, Grünwald
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Illness is many things. Indisposition, an amalgamation of cause and symptom, a clinical mystery and emotional nightmare. Thomas Larcher seems less interested in these polarities, however, and more in the sinews that connect them. For him, the notion of illness lives by a fragmented language. Ixxu, ECM’s second disc dedicated to the work of the Austrian composer, is thus a force to be reckoned with. It’s not that each of these world premiere recordings is particularly weighty, but more so that the sheer difficulty of their interpretation and execution is palpable. This is not for mere effect, but rather done in the interest of expanding musical languages to the point of distention. In the composer’s words: “I’m not interested in using shock techniques to flaunt the novelty of my architecture. I want to arrange and enhance the elements so as to produce new expressive values.”

The title string quartet (1998-2004), for one, proves that Larcher’s is a unique compositional voice when such distinction is sometimes hard to come by. He is rhythmically astute, melodically complex, and simply tantalizing to listen to. High-pitched whispers make for organic contrast to the music’s underbelly, culminating in the final movement with haunting charm. Another string quartet, Cold Farmer (1990), ends the album in Hartke territory, with just a touch of Schnittke and Riley to be found in due measure. Its equal dose of whimsy and magical realism make for a composition that would easily fit into the Kronos Quartet’s repertoire, and which completes the frame around the album’s masterful center. In the hands of the ever-capable Rosamunde Quartett, these pieces glitter.

My illness is the medicine I need (2002) for soprano, violin, violoncello and piano is indeed a most competent stroke in the realm of textual settings—these, medical patient statements found, of all places, in a Benetton Colors magazine. Soprano Andrea Lauren Brown embodies in its deft unraveling the very reenactment of a quantifiable cause, so that one’s illness indeed does becomes the only source for its cure. This is symptomatic music par excellence, and pairs well with Mumien (2001/02) for violoncello and piano. What begins as a staccato agitation ends up a handful of threads drawn into a single focused line. The rhythmic integrity of Larcher’s piano is a constant presence, while Thomas Demenga’s cello is the empathic observer, clarifying intentions with every turn of phrase.

The music of Ixxu has the quality of certain nursery rhymes: on the surface playful, perhaps full of holes, yet betraying an amazing wealth of morbid fascination just beneath the surface. Make these your bedtime stories, and you won’t be disappointed.

Demenga/Larcher/Anzellotti: Chonguri (ECM New Series 1914)

| Tyran Grillo

 

 

Chonguri

Thomas Demenga violoncello
Thomas Larcher piano
Teodoro Anzellotti accordion
Recorded August 2004 at Clara-Wieck-Auditorium, Sandhausen bei Heidelberg
Engineer: Teije van Geest
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher

Cellist Thomas Demenga offers up a colorful program of encores in Chonguri. From the pizzicato tour de force of the title piece by Sulkhan Tsintsadze, which imitates the selfsame four-stringed instrument of the composer’s native Georgia, it’s clear we’re in for a lively and eclectic treat. Pianist Thomas Larcher accompanies Demenga for most of the program, which includes nods to the familiar and not so. Of the latter, Catalonian composer Gaspar Cassadó’s Danse du diable vert is among the more spirited pins in the album’s geographic and chronographic spread. Two Chopin nocturnes give us a taste of home, in a manner of speaking, with the c-sharp minor presented to us in one of the more beautiful arrangements one is likely to find (though I’ll always be partial to Bela Banfalvi’s). The balance here is superb. A dash of Webern keeps us on our toes, his three Little Pieces sparkling with a charm that is, I daresay, romantic. Of romance we get plenty more in the three Fauré selections sprinkled throughout, of which Après un rêve is a highlight, and in Liszt’s evocative La lugubre gondola.

Four Bach chorales, in Demenga’s arrangements, for which he is joined by accordionist Teodoro Anzellotti form the album’s roof.Sounding somewhere between an organ and a hurdy-gurdy, the sheer depth of tone from Demenga’s cello in these is inspiring.He also offers two pieces of his own, of which the programmatic New York Honk is a delightful end.

Demenga’s playing is such that one can feel the lineage that binds all of this music together into a masterful patchwork as idiosyncratic as it is (seemingly) inevitable. Such programming epitomizes the ECM New Series spirit insofar as it charts the contemporary while paying due respect to the antique in what amounts to one of Demenga’s finest recordings to date and a label landmark.

Silvestrov/Pärt/Ustvolskaya: Misterioso (ECM New Series 1959)

| Tyran Grillo

Misterioso

Alexei Lubimov piano
Alexander Trostiansky violin
Kirill Rybakov clarinet
Recorded May 2005, Historischer Reitstadel, Neumarkt
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Alexei Lubimov has been painting himself quite the somber niche in ECM’s New Series catalogue, and perhaps nowhere more so than with Misterioso. This suitably titled disc brings the Russian pianist together with two younger colleagues—clarinetist Kyrill Rybakov and violinist Alexander Trostiansky—for a program of splendid contrasts.

We begin at the end, as it were, with Valentin Silvestrov’s Post scriptum (1990) for violin and piano. Like much of the composer’s later work, it manages to sound like a quotation without, in fact, being derivative—a reference to the abyss in which the creative spirit dances. In this vastly self-referential universe, the balance between drama and gentility breathes in shadowy cascades and pizzicato afterglows. The piano acts as core, while the violin etches upon it signs of its own becoming. Between alternating contacts and separations, the piece eschews sequential development in favor of hopping reflections. Where the Andantino shows a profoundly respectful sense of melody, constructing with minimal elements a fully fleshed organism of song without words, the third and final movement picks up on the plucked themes of the first, sounding almost synthetic in its precision before total dissipation.

Silvestrov’s 1996 title composition is the most cerebral piece on the record. Scored for “solo clarinet (with piano),” the piece is dedicated to Evgeny Orkin, a musician adept at both instruments, thereby necessitating the same demands on the contemporary solo performer. What may seem on the surface an elusive piece quickly turns, however, into something geometric, even gritty. Through its protracted twenty minutes we find ourselves at an impasse of time and space. The structure is sporadic, yet bound, every sub-section joined by the barest of chains. It is the temerity of creative life and of the existence that engenders it. Delicate flutters from the clarinet speak of an era beyond the now. Breath is expelled without notes, expressing more solitude than wind. It is the base level of the utterance, a song reduced to its core constituent.

One might think there would be no need for another version of Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel (1978), but in this for clarinet and piano we find ourselves regaled anew by its simple, mirrored beauties. The faster treatment here gives it something of a romantic quality and allows it to congeal against the constant threat of silence that embraces it from all directions.

Considering the mastery encoded into every moment of Galina Ustvolskaya’s 1949 Trio for clarinet, violin and piano, it’s no wonder the piece remains one of the greatest for its combination. The dynamism of its contours bespeaks a surface tension so resilient that its fulfillment (enhanced by the unification of the album’s three musicians at last) rings genuine and unforced. A jovial sense of play is at work here, skirting an edge between exuberance and emotional turmoil. At moments the syncopation recalls Shostakovich (unsurprising, considering that Ustvolskaya was his student), making for an intense danse macabre. The central Dolce wanders like a creeping shadow into all-consuming thought, and seems to echo the beauties with which the program began, while the final movement, marked Energico, throws us into a murky spiral, crashing in a punctuation of deflated purpose.

We end with another Ustvolskaya piece, the 1952 Sonata for violin and piano. Over the course of its nearly 20-minute single movement, we listen as a staggering entity, drunk with regret, turns in on itself, stretching thin like taffy until barely connected to the breath that animates the album as a whole.

Nicolas Gombert: Missa Media Vita In Morte Sumus – The Hilliard Ensemble (ECM New Series 1884)

| Tyran Grillo

 

Nicolas Gombert
Missa Media Vita In Morte Sumus

The Hilliard Ensemble
David James countertenor
Rogers Covey-Crump tenor
Steven Harrold tenor
Andreas Hirtreiter tenor
Gordon Jones baritone
Robert Macdonald bass
Recorded May 2002 at Propstei St. Gerold
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher

A rightful successor to Josquin Desprez, with whom he studied, Nicolas Gombert had been long neglected at the time of this recording. The mass represented here, split as it is among a choice selection of motets, is exemplary of his gift for rewriting. His vocal lines are characterized by their restlessness, both in terms of composition (the virtual lack of rests in the score) and mood (in its constant search for resolution).

How do Hilliards bring their own sensibility to music already so fine? By doing what they always do so well: allowing their entire beings to resonate with every note they sing. Augmenting their usual quartet, the Hilliards welcome bass Robert Macdonald and tenor Andreas Hirtreiter (making a trio of tenors for three of the motets herein) for this long-overdue recording. Macdonald’s presence is especially felt in the six-part motet, Media vita in morte sumus, that opens the program. Like much of what follows on this disc, the music is dark and bottom-heavy. This doesn’t mean, however, that moments of light are nowhere to be found, for in the escalations of tense polyphony that abound there is the illumination of obscurity. Like a stained glass window, one comes to know it through its variations in opacity and translucence, and then only through a glow whose source remains as intangible as the reverence that gave it life.

Gombert takes the Media vita in morte sumus as source for his five-part Missa Media Vita. Scattered among a selection of motets, the voices of the Missa tumble into one another in a music resigned to its own finitude. Harmonies tend toward the dissonant and tight, so that moments of consonance shine with an airy quality that seems to bypass the mind completely and head straight to the prayerful heart. There is gravity in this music, both in its sense of seriousness and in terms of force. One need listen no further than the Kyrie, which through its introductory tenor line shifts the angle of light to a gallery of rolling landscapes. Between the subtler interactions of the Sanctus and the continued magic of the tenor lines in the Agnus Dei, one cannot help but hear in their amen(d)s a visceral resolution.

Throughout the remaining motets, the brilliance of David James steals the heart, especially in O crux, splenidor cunctis. His duetted lines with tenors in the Salve Regina seem also to fly, scanning pasture for supplication. Unexpected changes await in Anima Mea, which moves with the timidity of a newly baptized child, while the closing Musae lovis, a tribute to Josquin, surrounds us in folds of ever-changing breath.

Gombert’s is music one can easily get lost in. In doing so, the listener learns to shut out the individual voice in favor of the grander tabernacle it embodies. His motives work in ropes more than threads. Like members of a shepherd’s flock, herded by divine command, they may not understand the constitution of the voice that guides them, but through the sound alone they know to press on with their brothers and sisters into the setting sun.