Classical

Giacinto Scelsi: Natura Renovatur (ECM New Series 1963)

| Tyran Grillo

 

Giacinto Scelsi
Natura Renovatur

Frances-Marie Uitti cello
Münchener Kammerorchester
Christoph Poppen conductor
Recorded June 2005, Himmelfahrtskirche, München
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988) was among the handful of composers I came to admire early on in my contemporary foraging. His galaxies opened my ears as only Gubaidulina, Ligeti, Penderecki, and Górecki could. Here was another whose ability to translate the instrumental utterance into an experience of integrity and parthenogenetic ecstasy, whose sheer reach of vision and inspiring attention to detail, shaped my impressionable mind into an open vessel. And while Scelsi’s music has been profoundly represented elsewhere (most notably on the Mode label), it was something of a momentous occasion for me to see his name fronting an ECM New Series cover at last.


Scelsi

The present recording is the result of various dedications. There is the dedication of cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, to whom the composer imparted the task of archiving and transcribing his hundreds of hours of improvisations on the ondiola, a monophonic instrument that was his mouthpiece. There is also the dedication of Scelsi himself for making those recordings in the first place, and for letting his mind open beyond the body in some audible form. And then there is the dedication of Christoph Poppen, whose commitment to modern music is superseded only by his oneness with the material he conducts. It is as if he were playing it himself.


Scelsi’s ondiola

The program consists of pieces mainly from his fruitful Third Period (1960-69), of which Ohoi (1968) for 16 strings defines the pinnacle of the larger ensemble works. On the surface, it seems to start from somewhere far beyond the earth, working its way ever so slowly toward us. Yet it doesn’t take long for us to realize that in its microscopic clusters thrums something utterly earthly. Every molecule is a building block to discreet crystals of harmony, which en masse achieve an overwhelming beauty through their collective dissonance. Voices ascend into a realm where screams become language and words are the screams that cut language into pieces.

If Ohoi is a knot, then the lyrical Ave Maria (1966) is the blinding love that unties it. Along with the Alleluja (1970) that ends the program, it comes from the Three Latin Prayers for solo cello. Both are nestled in the fur of larger beasts, picking at lice and ticks unseen. With a finely honed solemnity, they breathe with expansive power, made all the more enthralling through Uitti’s afferent performances. Prayers is by far one of the most arresting pieces ever written for the instrument, and to have two of its three sides in glorious ECM sound is a treasure. Uitti continues that brilliance in Ygghur (1965). Another trilogy for solo cello, this self-professed “autobiography in sound” compresses an orchestra’s worth of statements into a microcosm of gut and wood. With two, sometimes three, voices enhancing one another at any given time, it develops humanly. Yet it is not a conversation with the self, but rather a conversation about the self. Not unlike the throat singers of the Tuvan steppes, Uitti treats the extended techniques therein with an organic rusticity. We can wax technical all we like about microtonal double stops, but in the end we are left with handfuls of nutrient-rich soil.


Uitti

The hapless reviewer is at pains to articulate the sound-world that awaits us in Anâgâmin (1965). Written for 11 strings, it defies categorizations like “modern” and “post-modern,” is neither an example of deconstruction nor of reconstruction. It crawls on its own gelatinous legs with a gait much akin to the album’s 1967 title composition, also for 11 strings, only in the latter the infusions of micro-clusters are even deeper. It is an unbroken string of tension. Bowings grow more agitated, textures denser, and the underline of the lower strings turns gravity inward.

To call this music mysterious would be to do it a great disservice, for it is so internal that we cannot separate it from who we are. Scelsi professes nothing. In being so selfless, his work casts its light on us and us alone. Is this nature renewed, or has the renewal simply been natured? Only we, the individual listeners, can make or break such an arbitrary question. Like the circle above the horizon of Scelsi’s signature we may never know whether it is rising or setting, but we can always be sure that it is singing.

Valentin Silvestrov: Metamusik / Postludium (ECM New Series 1790)

| Tyran Grillo

Valentin Silvestrov
Metamusik / Postludium

Alexei Lubimov piano
Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra
Dennis Russell Davies conductor
Recorded April 2001 at ORF Studio, Vienna
Engineer: Anton Reininger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“Meta” is a prefix often thrown around without much thought as to its origins. The academic world of which I am a part is especially fond of it. Yet the nuance of “meta” as “transcending” (as in “metaphysical”) is a mistake born of frequent misuse and reinforcement. Its origins lie in the Greek preposition, which means “in the midst of, in pursuit or quest of.” These get us closer to the heart of Metamusik, the title of a one-movement symphony for piano and orchestra from Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov that forms the bulk of the third album dedicated to his music on the ECM New Series. And indeed, the opening proclamation of the selfsame composition already sounds as if it were in the midst of, if not in pursuit of, something. And while I normally find that Silvestrov’s motivic denouements emote more effectively in concentrated settings, in this case I find that the 48-minute running time allows both listeners and performers all the breathing room they need to delineate its finer anatomies. The soloist here is Alexei Lubimov, who first introduced us to Silvestrov in the ghostly recital, Der Bote. His role, however, is neither to lead nor respond, but to inhabit as many particles as he can of the piece’s opening Big Bang. These, he connects through a wavering orchestral environment with planetary care. He opens every note like an ocean in and of itself, ebbing and flowing simultaneously, redrawing the same lines along the shores of unpopulated worlds. It is that rare sound which mesmerizes by way of dark matter and black holes, falling without end into a void of shifting pathos. Whether our eyes are closed or open, we see nothing but the nebulae of our own consciousness, naked and diffuse.

If by now any of us expect to achieve familiarity in the accompanying Postludium, then we need only still ourselves before we are ready to see. The title here is another didactic one. It is Silvestrov’s default modality, the aural afterword to a non-existent referent. In short: an epilogue to silence. And though these same musicians may exert themselves and the composer may labor over the staves that engender the music’s emergence, our experience of it lacks the immediate visceral connection of having performed it. (It is just such a chain of meteoric intentions that binds us to the postlude as “genre.”) In acknowledging an emptiness from which forms all matter, we also know there is emptiness to be squeezed from the tangible, somehow beautiful in the embrace of our acoustic validations. We may float without direction, but Silvestrov seems to say that our voices, the very notecraft of our being, are the only compasses we need.

The power of this music speaks differently to all of us. It is a living force that mimics whatever vessel contains it. It is also a blank page: present yet weightless with meaning. Silvestrov’s is a sound-world of punctuation marks. It is up to us to fill in the words.

<< Helmut Lachenmann: Schwankungen am Rand (ECM 1789 NS)
>> Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber: Unam Ceylum (ECM 1791 NS)

Frode Haltli: Looking on Darkness (ECM New Series 1794)

| Tyran Grillo

Frode Haltli
Looking on Darkness

Frode Haltli accordion
Vertavo String Quartet
Øyvor Volle violin
Berit Cardas violin
Henninge Landaas viola
Bjøg Værnes cello
Recorded August 2001 at Sofienberg Kirke, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Much like its bellowed cousins, the accordion’s mystique lies in its duality. With one hand the chords are laid, with the other a melody is wrought. Yet just as easily those roles may switch, intermingling in a constant process of renegotiation. Although they share the same breath, pushed and pulled through the same lungs, there is always a separation between the two, so that when they are brought together in a program like this, they seem to unfold, one division after another, into a greater unity. This refraction of audible intent renders any introspection attempted by the musician a moot endeavor, seeking instead a window of opportunity in which to curl one’s fingers about the contours of an unspoken promise. In this way the accordion becomes a psychological instrument, providing more insight into its handler than psychoanalysis ever could. Through this window we can see that Frode Haltli’s is a mind of depth, conviction, in service to the music he plays. For his first solo album, the young Norwegian puts his bellows to four solo compositions and one for chamber ensemble.

First, the solos.

Bent Sørensen’s title study in decay is the perfect place to open our ears. It eases us into an uneasy sound-world, where light is darkness and the vocal becomes instrumental. The result sits somewhere between a declamatory statement and an uncertain question. From this we are awakened to different shades of vulnerability. Haltli shows no fear in exposing these snatches of tenderness, proving just how delicate a line he walks.

PerMagnus Lindborg’s abiding interest in all things electronic shines through in his Bombastic Sonosofisms. The sound is more pointillist here, and seems to peer into even darker recesses of the psyche. While it does require some astounding virtuosity, a shimmering, cosmic veneer obscures any possible wow factor that might get in the way of the listening. Where Sørensen drew in arcs, Lindborg favors the erratic, nesting us in a field of right angles.

Take away the “Per” and you are left with Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg and his Jeux d’anches. This piece thrives on identity crises and rhythmic leaps, gathering into its purview a life unfulfilled yet resigned. It is a puzzle unfolding piece by piece, only each is of uniform shape and size. In such great numbers, however, one is baffled to put them together. Haltli accomplishes the daunting task of forming a cogent picture out of them all.

Asbjørn Schaathun’s Lament explores the accordion more than any of its companions. From growling low notes to piercing highs, it surrounds a turgid middle ground. It is a church organ being born, coming into self-awareness as the music marks its slow passage through muddy terrain. Notes coincide, double, and fragment, seemingly unable to strike out on their own and achieve true independence. In the end, they are bound by air.

Then there is the program’s centerpiece, the gagaku variations of Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje, which pairs the accordion’s fullness with another: the string quartet. In this configuration, violins melt into Haltli’s richer sound like ghosts hidden in between its folds. The contrast between brief pizzicato passages and the more sinuous notes of the accordion cut through the very tensions they define. Some probing questions from the high strings bring our focus away from the sky and back to the soil, and in the end paint us with their own language. If this were a play, we would be the ones on stage, and the performers would be watching, waiting for us to speak.

The accordion is not an instrument one is used to hearing in a classical setting, and yet here it blossoms without generic borders. In Haltli’s hands, it attains a level of depth rarely heard. His performances are bold and detailed, as if he were holding a magnifying glass to a newspaper photograph in an attempt to show us the dots and blank spaces it is made of. The album’s title tells us all: rather than looking into darkness, we are looking on it, for the naked eye will never uncover the core of that which is infinite.

<< Zehetmair Quartett: Robert Schumann (ECM 1793 NS)
>> Arvo Pärt: Orient & Occident (ECM 1795 NS)

Michael Mantler: The School of Understanding (ECM 1648/49)

| Tyran Grillo

Michael Mantler
The School of Understanding

Jack Bruce observer
Per Jørgensen teacher
Mona Larsen refugee
Susi Hyldgaard journalist
Karen Mantler student
John Greaves businessman
Don Preston doctor
Don Preston synth drums
Robert Wyatt guest observer
Michael Mantler trumpet, conductor
Roger Jannotta clarinet, bass clarinet, flute, oboe
Bjarne Roupé guitar
Marianne Sørensen violin
Mette Brandt violin
Mette Winther violin
Helle Sørensen cello
Tineke Noordhoek vibraphone, marimba
Kim Kristensen piano, synthesizers
Giordano Bellincampi conductor
Recorded and mixed by Largs Palsig
Danmarks Radio Studios, Copenhagen
August-December 1996
Occasional assistance by Henriette M. Frandsen
Orchestral strings recorded by Bo Kristiansson
Robert Wyatt recorded by Ewan Davies
Chapel Studios, Lincolnshire, England
Produced by Michael Mantler

“don’t mind me
I am just watching
and observing
asking questions
trying to understand”

Thus do we look into the heart of Michael Mantler’s magnum opus, The School of Understanding. Originally called The School Of Languages, the piece’s central theme came out in its final title, for which the composer did not, for once, work with Heiner Müller and wrote his first libretto instead. Mantler calls this “sort-of-an-opera” not just as a humble gesture, but also because it is an expression of the music’s unwillingness to mask itself in romantic decorations. Rather, it emotes through a powerful cast that includes Per Jørgensen, Jack Bruce, Mona Larsen, Susi Hyldgaard, Karen Mantler, John Greaves, and Don Preston. Whether familiar or not, these names fade into the roles they now adopt. As Teacher and Observer, Refugee and Journalist, Student, Businessman, and Doctor, they bring essential theatrical elements to the offering table.

But like an opera, we begin where voices can have no foothold: in the breathtaking “Prelude.” This tremulous coming into being cracks like the skin of time, filling in every new border with musical information. Against the program’s soft palate, the harder strings bounce like a rubber ball into stasis, leaving behind a trail of dots and lines. This moves us into “Introductions,” during which Teacher brings a raw professorship to bear on the lives of his students, who open like college-ruled notebooks before him. Though bound in primary colors, their stories intersect in all manner of hues and combinations, while Teacher’s haggard monochrome reflects those starry-eyed gazes, those hopeful dreams, those tortured pasts, like unpolished silver. Occupations, aspirations, and inspirations fall to the linoleum floor—itself an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, the pieces of which will never all be found.

The voices are as distinct as their characters, blending histories as they drip like turpentine from an unwashed easel. Still, there is one who holds back until all ears are on him. One who speaks through the act of witnessing. One whose drama is sonorous, heart-stopping. “First Lesson” is a call to mental action, an acknowledgment of tools both given and made. There is only one book and an ever-present television screen, both conduits of words and concepts to the outside world, which itself lies in ruins. And on that screen, we encounter the “News,” a catalogue of inhuman affairs, a string of adjectives, and a slow-motion punch to the winded gut of relevance. The hypnotic pulse of reiteration throws us into the quicksand of information. The orchestral colors that began the piece now merge into a tracking marimba and Mantler’s trumpet. The latter is the occasional placating force, adding brief but potent addendums to narratives of oppression.

There is also a satellite drama. We follow it from “Love Begins” to “Love Ends,” for it can never rise above fallacy in a world whose political architecture is brick-and-mortared with enmity. A clarinet takes off its shadowy muzzle to reveal a voice of reason and bleeds into a formative conversation, a date—as in dinner and a movie—that thrives on a hint of obligratory romance, yet which dies in the inevitable dismay of human connection.

“War,” in both length and content, is the heart of this composition, a tearful sermon on the iniquities of weapons and flesh which makes clear to us that this is a school not only of understanding but also of conversation, a school where education is nothing if not extracurricular. It is a church whose only preacher is whoever appears on a tendered note, and where terrorism is a font in which anyone may be baptized. The cry of an electric guitar bounces across faded frescoes. The students are shocked to realize that war is a reality one may live. The real learning begins in the knowledge that placing their minds in the hands of conflict is one thing, but that likewise placing their bodies is another entirely. An acoustic guitar is another veil of tears through which only the Refugee may see clearly to the memories beyond. She tells her story as might a mother to her child, as might a child to her mother. This street where once she ran is now a place of careful footsteps and homes reduced to ashes and dust.

We “Pause” for reflection and release, swimming through the confusions and contusions of “Understanding,” and awaken in the deeply rooted tremors of “Health And Poverty.” True sickness, we are told, ignores the corporeal and makes its nest in denial and vanity. Once the mirror is broken, we at last see ourselves for who we are, sucking life like parasites from those who need it most, those who’ve never known what it could be, to whom possibility is a passing ideology. Once suffering has clarified its cause, the rest of us latch on to the effect, as if it might give us answers. To the awakened mind, the truth is too much to bear, so that statistics become like words, speaking all too clearly. And while the banality of human interaction (“Platitudes”) is offset by alluring music, we check off our litany of exasperations in “Intolerance,” working our way toward silence, where only one question remains: “What Is The Word.” The Teacher’s voice grows distant as we fall from the source of all songs, sliding down the double-edged blade of knowledge, which both brought everyone here and glints with the promise of hard-won salvation. It cuts the playing field into same-sized pieces, repeating itself, repeating itself…

If you were ever unsure of Mantler’s genius before, then I can only hope this will convince you. The School Of Understanding is not the soundtrack to a film, but the film to a soundtrack. It scoops the idea of education like a dead fly out of stagnant water and resuscitates it to full buzzing flight. It is the pinnacle of Mantler’s craft. This definitive recording belongs on any “Best of ECM” list.

<< Dominique Pifarély/François Couturier: Poros (ECM 1647)
>> Selected Signs, I: An ECM Anthology (ECM 1650)

Bach: Die Kunst der Fuge – Keller Quartett (ECM New Series 1652)

| Tyran Grillo

Johann Sebastian Bach
Die Kunst der Fuge

Keller Quartett
András Keller violin
János Pilz violin
Zoltán Gál viola
Ottó Kertész cello
Recorded May 1997, Altes Stadttheater Eichstätt
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.
–Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

One is tempted, perhaps, to experience the fugue as a puzzle. In that puzzle are strings of numbers unraveling from a central rope, even as they spin into one. Yet when listening to Bach’s Art thereof, and especially in the Keller Quartett’s sensitive hands, we find that even our best similes are weak and arbitrary, for this music, this expression of internal power, is alive. By no means universal, it takes a different form every time to every listener. We in turn can take comfort in knowing that the final triple fugue was never finished, for into it the composer wove his signature B-A-C-H (B-flat-A-C-B) theme, as if signing off on a lifelong document. Thus is The Art of Fugue an “emancipatory work” in the estimation of Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich, who in his accompanying essay goes to great lengths to demythologize the unrealistic pedestals upon which the work has been placed. The instrumentation was never resolutely determined, though it was likely intended for the nascent pianoforte. The string quartet presents a compelling solution. In this respect the Kellers push the envelope, varying tempi considerably and in doing so point us to a humbling truth: namely, that if this was to be Bach’s most lasting statement, it had to be invisible.

One with a deeper background may train a musicological magnifying glass to every weaving line, but these ears are more interested in the effect than the cause. And of that effect, I am at pains to say anything worthwhile. Although its movements comprise a moving target of speeds and densities, a constant hum runs through them. It is something we feel rather than hear. Cellist Ottó Kertész is particularly well suited, evoking the slightly metallic continuo of yore with a tinge of intangibility. (This, I think, explains the curious production, which favors distance and cavernousness—it is not historically informed, but seeks to inform history.) That being said, the music is nothing if not expressible. It might very well be Bach’s swan song, and therefore the culmination of his craft, but I prefer to hear it as a homecoming, a clearing of clouds to let fall the darkness that nourishes all artists, paling into the light that embraces them once they’re gone.

One day, we encounter this music and it sings to us. But then the voices stop mid-phrase, as the Kellers have preserved them, and suddenly the galaxy unravels, leaving us floating in the stagnant pool of all silence. Listen, and you know there is truth in the number:

One.

<< Roscoe Mitchell: Nine To Get Ready (ECM 1651)
>> The Hilliard Ensemble: In Paradisum (ECM 1653 NS)

Keith Jarrett: Book Of Ways (ECM 1344/45)

| Tyran Grillo

Keith Jarrett
Book Of Ways

Keith Jarrett clavichord
Recorded July 1986 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Trying to describe Keith Jarrett’s alchemical explorations of the clavichord is like trying to describe love: if you’ve never fallen into it, the words of others mean little. All I can do is share and hope my impressions might speak, for the album promises something so ineffable that it can only be expressed in music.

Over the course of nineteen improvisations, Jarrett transcends both the medium and the message in search of something untouched for centuries. He burrows into the heart of this nearly forgotten instrument, seeming to make music as if only after centuries of slumber. By the time he awakes, his body has fused with every molecule of metal and wood, so that he needs only step into a latter-day age, where the magic of technology allows us a glimpse of that anatomy, wavering and fair.

1
Like some vast lute, curled into a withering plant of dedicatory power, it wishes itself clean of all earthly things, finding balance in song where there can be no troubadours to sing.

2
It is a self-sustaining lantern, whose oil is memory and whose flame is the flick of a maiden’s tongue along the edges of speech.

3
It is a scribe in a dimly lit cave, where every note is the scrawl of a quill on cracked parchment, sipping nourishment from an inkwell.

4
It is a taste of birth on the mind’s palette. A tearful wish discarded like so many handkerchiefs along garden paths. A joyful reunion reflected in her broach. A portrait in miniature, forgotten in a decaying drawer next to her brittle volume of poetry. She hums, her throat wound like a string.

5
It is a dream, wistful yet morose, putting a stopper into the night’s hidden vial. There it holds us, ever thoughtful, winded like an errant pageboy cursed with an undeliverable charge.

6
It is a child of time who speaks through dance, our feet its only partners. It looks to itself for guidance, only to touch an anxious moth who hopes the window will melt away, as if its millennia of grime will somehow afford a view of the impossible horizon.

7
It tickles the feet of our childhood, making us laugh in ways we have since denied.

8
It trembles like a plucked string that, once slowed to show every nuance of its warbling activation, finds much to fear in its own echo.

9
It turns to every Baroque master who sat alone at a keyboard and painted the room with novel sounds.

10
It is a percussive message that knocks on every castle door and rattles the bones in its crypt.

11
It is a love letter, a heart unfolded into the map of another heart. A dewy pasture that remembers lovelier days when the torturous end of an age was not upon us.

12
It strums an unmade bed in the hopes of recreating the music that once rustled there, but alas, there is only the lingering scent of a love that can never be washed away.

13
It is a necklace of memories, each bead more translucent than the last.

14
It opens our eyes to the clouds and to the trembling Tree of Life that hangs the wash of history from its boughs.

15
It carries us down an eroded stairway, even as it lifts us to the top of the tower.

16
It is a forlorn carnation, every petal the leaf of a story whose only tether is its maternal stem.

17
It upholds a chivalrous decorum, tilting its hat to the unbroken gait of a faithful horse. Through thick and thin, it has batted neither tail nor eye at knighthood’s unstoppable demise.

18
It is a funereal ode, a pyre burning to its glowing orange roots.

19
It brings us full circle to the avenues from which that first shadow extended before a dying sun.

Not only does this recording show us a book of ways, but it also shows us the way of books, for it teaches us that the written word, like music, is but a stepping-stone to silent understanding.

<< Enrico Rava/Dino Saluzzi Quintet: Volver (ECM 1343)
>> Terje Rypdal & The Chasers: Blue (ECM 1346)

Michael Fahres: piano. harfe (ECM New Series 1281)

| Tyran Grillo

Michael Fahres
piano. harfe

Polo de Haas piano
Gyde Knebusch harp
Paul Godschalk live electronics
Hans Stibbe live electronics
Digital Recording, August 1982, Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

German-born, Netherlands-based composer and sound installation artist Michael Fahres flirted with ECM for the duration of this single album only. Simply titled after its two central instruments, this vinyl-only rarity gives healthy intimations of the electro-acoustic depth for which he is now so highly regarded.

We find in both of these early pieces a sense of self-directed wonder, as if one’s reflection has come to life and danced a version of the future. The low note that spawns a taped echo in piano sets just such a tone. A crack in the window of our desires spiders its way to the edges, falling into the garden when it has nowhere else to go. Every shard sprouts legs and trips through the underbrush. Foxes and moles—each a clouded memory returning with soft vengeance—nip at their ankles like herding dogs. The live piano stares into a digital mirror. Thus confronted with its mortality, it grows still, like a foot poised above a landscape of eggshells. Behind closed eyes, it falls into looped miracles. The jangle at the periphery, never clear before, is now crystalline. Voices tremble, a flock of rubber bands falling one at a time into a synthetic gallop. Veins resonate, each the tube of a televised existence. Your hand passes through childhood like the illusion it is, a canopy of little legs kicking above its Alvin Lucier-like current. They crawl over one another as high as they can, growing more distorted with every promise, until there is only shadow to hold you.

But then, in harfe, strings are touched by flesh, each unfolding a city map. Streets hum like birth. (The atmosphere reminds me of a Zeena Parkins performance I once attended as a teenager: an undercurrent of restless comfort bedding naked scrawls.) Between watery ascents and muddy stumbles, someone speaks: “The voice of reason is the one that achieves distance.” There is a beating of the string, subtle and barely noticeable. A knock at the door of a museum where only the debris of earthquakes is shown. A meditation without eyes, a prickling of hairs, an imploding temple. There is something sacred implied here. Its transcendence melts into a single piece of candy, placed on a serpent’s tongue. The trees buckle their knees in guttural pathos, every torn root a string plucked by green hands. The sky awakens, pouring its flood into a restorative nightmare. Finis.

In spite of my unsettling impressions, I would never characterize this album as such. There is something hopeful about its inventiveness. In exploring the contours of ruin, it holds itself aloft, away from those whose only desire is to crush music into a dark key. The lock to that key is nowhere but here, floundering like a fish cradled back into a sea of twilight.

<< Jack DeJohnette’s Special Edition: Album Album (ECM 1280)
>> Chick Corea: Voyage (ECM 1282)

Schubert: Sonate B-Dur op. posth. D 960 – Edition Lockenhaus, Vol. 3 (ECM New Series 1682)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1682

Edition Lockenhaus, Vol. 3:
Franz Schubert: Sonate B-Dur op. posth. D 960

Valery Afanassiev piano
Recorded July 1985 at the Lockenhaus Festival
Engineers: Peter Laenger and Stephan Schellmann
Produced by Manfred Eicher and Gidon Kremer

With over 100 recordings of Franz Schubert’s last sonata, one might ask: Why another? Valery Afanassiev gives us a resounding answer with this performance from the 1985 Lockenhaus Festival (a last-minute substitution for a canceled trio), bringing to glorious life what Bryce Morrison has called “the pianist’s Hamlet.” As a swan song, the B-flat Sonata may easily be read as a tarnished mirror where our mortality balks at its own reflection. Yet in the listening, I am wont to hear not the looming specter of death, but rather the fluttering of a curtain letting in the light. Like a piece of fruit rotting in reverse, the B-flat Sonata awakens to find that its decay was but a dream, that it is as crisp and as ripe as the day it was born.

As it stands, Afanassiev’s interpretation is broader than most and respires through a powerful dynamic range. In his liner notes the Moscow-born pianist speaks of absolute truth, and of how the low flutter of the opening movement—what he calls “the most uncanny trill in the history of music”—grounds us from our high horses. For him, this sonata is a monstrous thing, the shock of horror behind a veil of art. He also critiques himself for leaning on sentimentality, though I think we can forgive his brazenness, for it is of the gentlest kind.

The first movement begins where many would end: in utter suspension. Every rustling is a bird falling into an abyss of yearning, where memories collide with the yet to be. Voices bubble up from that seismic trill, shielding us from our own expectations. Afanassiev’s punctuations are expectorate and his ascending lines as lilting as they are forlorn. Implications of perpetual motion interlock their fingers with weighty pauses and distant considerations, resolving into stained-glass intimations of “Adeste Fideles.”

The formidable Andante—a Largo in Afanassiev’s hands—whispers in half-light. He builds this slow prance brick by ephemeral brick, as if through a haze of recollection. At eleven and a half minutes, it is among the longest versions on record, and clothes a heart that one finds beating even more nakedly in the piano works of Valentin Silvestrov. Reason enough to own this disc.

After the stark wash of this silent film, we are thrown into the sparkle of a Technicolor spectacle in the Scherzo before sliding down its rainbow into the final Allegro. Here Afanassiev’s deep breath acts as emotive bellow, seeming to blow dust at the feet of the finale, which remains frozen in mid air—racing but never quite touching ground, flapping but never quite lifting off.

Despite the breadth of his tonal spectrum, Schubert is not a composer who works in gradations, but in densities. The light is always there. We simply see or less of it depending on how porous the scrim of the music becomes. Some sections, like the opening leitmotif, are latticed; others are tightly woven baskets; still others, nets through which any hope may pass unfiltered. It is music that works in ages, by turns dancing and hunched on the gnarled cane of infirmity.

If Schubert speaks in tenses, then Afanassiev is a master conjugator. This is a rendering at once flagrant and conservative. A valuable performance to have on record.

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Chick Corea: Septet (ECM 1297)

| Tyran Grillo

SEPTET

Chick Corea
Septet

Chick Corea piano
Ida Kavafian violin
Theodore Arm violin
Steven Tenenbom viola
Fred Sherry cello
Steve Kujala flute
Peter Gordon French horn
Recorded October 1984 at Mad Hatter Studios, Los Angeles
Engineer: Bernie Kirsh
Produced by Chick Corea

Chick Corea is a musician who plays with X-ray vision, which is to say he’s highly adept at animating skeletons through his improvisatory prowess. And yet, whenever those bones are fleshed out into full-grown compositional organisms, one tends to lose sight of their anatomy. With the exception of Children’s Songs, Corea excels where there is at least a combination of the prescribed and the free. On Septet he is joined by a string quartet, flutist Steve Kujala, and Peter Gordon on French horn. Already in the First Movement, we are confronted with the quartet’s somewhat pedantic role, which is at pains to blend with the otherwise lovely sound forged by Corea and Kujala (not suprising, given that they’d just cut the effervescent Voyage not three months before). That being said, there is a wistful vitality to be had in those occasional moments that said forces do sync, as in the Second Movement. Some gorgeous, abstract pianism distinguishes the opening waves of the Third, which, despite exploring the album’s more fascinating ideas, are quickly curtained by the horn. Things fare far better in the Fourth, with its Bartókian sense of rhythmic acuity, and in the richly varied Fifth. At 10 minutes in length, the latter is also the most fully formed. Tacked on to this picturesque finale is portrait of “The Temple of Isfahan” that could easily soundtrack a documentary about the temple in question, a sacred site to the Zoroastrians who saw its attributive fire as a purifying agent. Like a well-edited film, this piece builds itself through vignettes, which despite never quite connecting as organically as they might have had they been left to speak among themselves, form a larger chain of ideas that must be taken in deep breaths before they can be exhaled as one.

It’s hard to know what to make of this album. What it lacks at the start, it certainly makes up for by the end, but it doesn’t necessarily beg for repeated listening. The musicianship is also top flight, especially the lovely playing of Gordon, who wrenches a gutsy and artful sound from his horn, and in the peerless virtuosity of Kujala. A lovely jewel for the completest, to be sure, but its absence would make Corea’s crown no less bright.

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>> Azimuth: Azimuth ’85 (ECM 1298)