Classical

Harald Weiss: Trommelgeflüster (ECM New Series 1249)

| Tyran Grillo

1249

Harald Weiss
Trommelgeflüster

Harald Weiss percussion, voice
Recorded September 1982 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Looking at the title of Harald Weiss’s only album for ECM, which means “Drum Whisper,” leaves us with no mysteries regarding what we are about to hear. This simplicity of purpose is characteristic of a composer whose modest discography has sadly left him little represented outside of his native Germany. As percussionist, vocalist, writer, and actor, Weiss brings a love of the theater to his performance style and world, which here is overrun with a thousand bare feet along the dusty earth. Weiss is also well traveled, and from his widely cast net hauls a wealth of local influences onto the vessel of his craft. And so, while flashes of Ramayana re-creation and Peking opera paint Trommelgeflüster as a disjointed pastiche, in the context of this recording these references take on a life of their own. Each percussive cell circles itself into an Ouroboros of change in a larger chain of being. Between the steel drummed steps and melismatic chants of Part I and the darker territories of Part II, which begin as if an offshoot of “Lucifer’s Farewell” from Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Samstag aus Licht before spreading into a diffuse palette of outbursts and whistling dreams, Weiss renders something intensely organic toward the concluding twang, steady and distant like a jaw harp in the mouth of providence.

A wonder of an album that defies categorization in the most pleasant way, Trommelgeflüster has the makings of a ritual, even as it uses itself as a stepping-stone into non-ritual realities, where regularity is but the dream of a nomadic soothsayer. The music skirts the edges of consciousness, even as it plumbs the depths of wakefulness.

Weiss is the recipient of numerous awards, and was just coming into prominence when Manfred Eicher decided to put him into the studio. The result is an intriguing session, and an artist, not be overlooked.

<< Charlie Haden: The Ballad Of The Fallen (ECM 1248)
>> Ralph Towner: Blue Sun (ECM 1250)

Frances-Marie Uitti / Paul Griffiths: there is still time (ECM New Series 1882)

| Tyran Grillo

there is still time

there is still time

Paul Griffiths speaking voice
Frances-Marie Uitti violoncello
Recorded August 2003 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“I shall th’ effect of this good lesson keep
As watchman to my heart.”
–Ophelia

Subtitled “scenes for speaking voice and cello,” the fortuitous meeting of music writer, novelist, and librettist Paul Griffiths and cellist Frances-Marie Uitti that resulted in there is still time wears no masks. Using only the 482 words available to Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Griffiths works with a vast magnetic poetry set on a refrigerator that runs on Uitti’s often-haunting improvisations. It is neither Ophelia nor Griffiths who speaks, but someone in between, a voice not so much twice removed as one once excavated and once buried. And while the backstory to this recording is fascinating in and of itself, its aural language is such that one may enter it blind and emerge from it fully sighted, if not the other way around. Griffiths treats language as a precipice from which to hang rather than as a spine from which to sprout nerves and muscle. Thus does the music’s grip deepen our mood with each weakening finger.

“I cannot remember” are the first words to awaken our senses, “when this is all over” the last before silence engulfs us: a brief life forgotten, regained at death’s door. Only the future can be held close, swaddled in opaque linens as it slips slowly from our hands into Uitti’s mournful fundaments and harmonic firmaments alike. Her reverberation becomes a stencil, and breath the paint sprayed through its glyphic wounds, where plasma congeals at the hinges of revelation. Griffiths’s intonations are fatigued, as if from the effort of articulation alone. In “think of that day,” he asks, “what should I fear?” A question that slithers thence, only here we get one of its clearest answers: what the voice fears is that “you,” the other to whom is being spoken, will say nothing. Such trepidations are thematic, hidden like Hamlet behind the curtain, stabbing at the wrong enemy. This troubled air returns for “how I wish,” over which the cello looms, a commentary on a commentary. Again, Griffiths speaks as if the very effort were much to bear, as if utterances of desire were the sole means of undoing it. The “you” remains silent, stagnant like a pool in some deserted landscape where the wind is never missed beyond perpetual cloud cover.

Griffiths doesn’t merely read his words, but comports them. If there is such a thing as method reading, then via his delivery we find an especially potent example in “call from the cold.” Its poetry draws a series of contact points between the body and the intangible, between expectation and inception, between the cello’s snowy scrapings and the listener’s suspension of disbelief. The narrative then sprouts bittersweet fruits from the buds of “touching,” skins of hope peeling away from flesh of horror. The melodious “there it was” measures the past like some vast diurnal clock compressed into the mouth before being expectorated in but a fleeting conjuration of lips, teeth, and tongue as Uitti draws whisper-screams in the air with her sobbing. Where the sunrays once frolicked at dawn, we find traces of “the bells,” no longer immortal yet still haloed by a lost cause, fading beyond every closing ear-lid. We are alone with their voices “some where,” bound by a capsule of parallel selves and places split by the prism of a single morpheme. The internality of it all is lifted once “for you” flies off the tongue with urgency. As much a question as it is a challenge, it emotes like an animal peering through the foliage at its own reflection, cello rasping, a gravelly Echo. “I did look” further slices open memory—an impossible dissection, it seems, for only more memory lies within, beating to the rhythm of an extended arco meditation, drawing out this operation to its most healing conclusion yet.

These points of contact are at once a source of expression and a denial of the self-generation implied by spoken words, such as in “my one fear.” The verb “touching” rings truest here and surfaces vividly as a means of grappling with the unknown. The nameless other is drawn in whispers and time, through which all is revealed, vulnerable and contrived. At this point, I cannot help but extend a line to King Lear, for it is speech over which the maddening patriarch harbors the deepest anxiety. Without Cordelia’s obligatory words of praise, for instance, he is but a blank page before her. (We hear this again in Lear’s deprecation: “She hath…struck me with her tongue.”) Similarly, in “the door,” the voice fears finding what it searches for: the mouth shut like a gate to possibility. In light of this, Griffiths’s final words (every detail captured by the superb engineering) are perhaps the most Ophelian. They lie in wait beneath the surface of the lake, grabbing hold of refractions baited on the cello’s fish hooks, pulled like a sheet from a sleepless bed.

Uitti’s ability to sound as if she were at once reacting to the words and birthing them is captivating, as are her wordless interludes, four of which trail-mark the program. The recitations strung between them make statements by enhancing the fallibility of statements, each utterance a fantastic implosion. Griffiths’s circadian rhythms are sometimes off center, sometimes regular to the point of apathy, and in being so speak with immediate effect. This is, perhaps, why Uitti’s art meshes so organically, for it pulls at the same frayed edges in hopes of unraveling a color, a texture, and a pattern unfamiliar to them both. Whether or not that unfamiliarity extends to us depends on our willingness to touch the text as a living sound, so that by the end we are renewed through impermanence, redrawn in monochrome by a parallel self in the here and now. What we fear is not to receive but to give and be received.

My own humble gift, then, is an offering cast from those same 482 runes:

his breath does honour to the words
his countenance more patient than a soldier’s
cold letters compos’d in noble fashion
in them I know doubt

it is not for naught
that the lady is here
the daughter of a lord
nay, of an owl

there’s a saint
larded with false affection
please, fear him not
for he hath bore it all for you

what is a courtier’s mind but a steward
held on the tongue of a king
a watchman in the closet
touching his eye with tragedy

belike the lady rises on this day
and becomes snow
on a mountain of dead flowers
as grace is deceived by remembrance

quoth she,
“steep is the way to dalliance”

a scholar’s tongue is his sword
it becomes a play
a chorus of tragedy
a shroud of charity

lock’d by his command of speech
the key to which is
something of a piteous fear
in our rich perusal

I know not where
I twice observ’d
the maid unkind and shaking
like a glass mould blasted by the night

I was lost
promis’d to another
when these eyes
wither’d in fennel perfume

down a thorny path
the music treads
long o’erthrown by horrors
young and beauteous

quoth she, “take them again
these flaxen columbines
and cast them by your deathbed
for they will keep you heavenly”

some may call it sweet
I call it an oath to memory

Heinz Holliger: Induuchlen (ECM New Series 2201)

| Tyran Grillo

 

Heinz Holliger
Induuchlen

Anna Maria Bacher recitation
Albert Streich recitation
Sylvia Nopper soprano
Kai Wessel countertenor
Olivier Darbellay horn
Matthias Würsch percussion
Swiss Chamber Soloists
Heinz Holliger conductor
Recorded 2007-2010
Engineer: Andreas Werner
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Ever since the star-covered Scardanelli-Zyklus found its way into my life, Heinz Holliger’s increasingly fractal compositions have been a vital part of my personal development. As a teenager, I felt such an intense connection to the early ECM Holliger releases that I used an online message board (back when such things were novel) as a venue to proclaim Holliger as one of the most important composers of the century. I was immediately met with a smattering of criticism, of which one comment remains lodged in my mind: “Though Holliger is a talented musician and, I admit, an interesting composer, I don’t think his colleagues or family members would ever consider him ‘important.’” In my youthful naïveté, I accepted this contention and shied away from mine. And yet now, some fifteen years later, I find my initial reactions being confirmed by critics and friends, all of whom have long recognized the significance of his multifarious deeds. I relate this anecdote not to underscore my prophetic abilities, nonexistent as they are, but only to direct the listener’s attention to the depth of Holliger’s output and the uncanny ways it has of getting under our skin over time.

This is an album of many things: silence and half-language, shadow and movement, liminality and articulation. Through a technique that Holliger calls “vocal masking,” potentially straightforward motives are turned in on themselves, such that by the end our memories speak not in solos but in delicate aftershocks. Continuing the composer’s interest in marginal voices begun in such works as Beiseit is Puneigä. Reading like a well-compressed Scardanelli dissected under a microscope, it begins with the Walser-German poetry of Anna Maria Bacher (recited by Bacher herself) followed by Holliger’s spidery and biologically attuned settings thereof. In the absence of English translations, these pieces are left for the rest of us to emote on their own terms. And perhaps this is for the best, as Holliger has always seemed to approach a given text from the inside looking out, such that we need never concern ourselves with the arbitrary contours of its many surfaces. Either way, in them one can hear the cellular approach of his craft, an approach that seems as interested in unpacking language as it is in dismantling it. One hears this especially in the rattles and hums of the Zwischenspielen, each a wondrous division of spatial relationships that is incidental only to itself. Rotating through a series of watery reflections (“Wen mu plangät), earthly contacts (“Hêif!”), and reverberations (“Der Toot”), images stick out with the quiet interruption of a rock protruding from the glassy sheet of a waterfall. Within each rests the lock to a key.

Albert Streich’s poem “Induuchlen,” also prefaced from the author’s lips, provides a verbal runway into the soaring title piece for countertenor and natural horn. Holliger’s work gains facets the more its performers are reduced in number, and here one finds a wealth of such demands. Yet these are handled with such grace that one might think the results were entirely improvised. The countertenor is asked not only to plumb the depths of his baritone register, but even to step beyond them into some uncanny quotidian realm of, I daresay, Wagnerian anxiety, for indeed the music’s deepest secrets are, not unlike the sword in Die Walküre, fully visible yet can only be dislodged with the attendant promise of self-destruction. Here is a matrix of auditory gravel in which tremolos gasp, where overlays misalign, and from which arises a golem who seeks clouds more than land.

Embracing these throated reliefs is a frame of chamber works. Toronto-Exercises speaks in aphasic mumblings, which is to say in a vocabulary at once molecular, somnambulate, and exquisite. Scrapings, flaps, shivers, and overtones carve a broken chain of stone through this gorgeous little quatrain of forested sounds, while the fractured virtuosity of the percussive Ma’mounia deciphers its own fingerprints one vein at a time, releasing the screams and helical motives squirming therein.

Holliger’s is the music of a soul in search of those intricate gifts that enliven our bodies and minds. It is highly idiosyncratic and yet speaks of a wide-reaching science. For the sake of analogy, one might say he sits comfortably between Lachenmann and Kurtág, singing through the sometimes haunting immediacy of the former while holding close the latter’s appreciation for the miniature. In doing so, he gives us a medium of the anti-essence, wherein breathes only the potential for quiet rupture. He speaks more than any other composer I know, and yet never proselytizes.

Like an Italo Calvino novel, this music ladles over us a pathos we have long forgotten and through which we only now find a chance to embrace anew.

Johann Sebastian Bach: Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis (ECM New Series 2229)

| Tyran Grillo

Johann Sebastian Bach
Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis

Heinz Holliger oboe
Erich Höbarth violin, direction
Camerata Bern
Recorded December 20-22, 2010
Radiostudio Zürich
Engineer: Andreas Werner
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Of
a tree, of one.
Yes, of it too. And of the woods around it. Of the woods
Untrodden, of the
thought they grew from, as sound
and half-sound and changed sound and terminal sound…
–Paul Celan, “And with the Book from Tarussa” (trans. Pierre Joris)

On October 4th, within an hour of having listened to this album for the first time, I went out for lunch, when I noticed a peculiar sight. There, sitting at an outdoor table, was a hermetic figure with a Monarch butterfly resting on his outstretched hand. How could I not engage him in a conversation? The man, I soon found out, was Rolfe Sokol, a local fixture in Ithaca, New York for over a decade and one of the most sought-after violin teachers in the area. Rolfe had saved the injured butterfly after spotting her on the side of the road. During her recovery from two crimped legs and a damaged wing, she hardly left him. As Rolfe animatedly informed me, drawing his story as he might a bow, the butterfly spent most of her time on his shoulder or perched on a finger, living off the sugar water he provided. When she had recovered enough to make short flights, he took her to the park, where she greeted strangers but always returned.

Rolfe and I inevitably turned to topics musical. After being regaled with stories of some of my favorite violinists and composers, I asked if he was familiar with ECM Records and with Heinz Holliger’s latest Bach recording. Though the answer was no on both counts, he did tell me how the butterfly reacted most positively, fluttering her wings and “stamping” her forelegs, whenever he or his students played Bach. Upon hearing this, I immediately asked for Rolfe’s address and later sent him a copy of Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis to aid in the butterfly’s recovery, for the title—which translates to “I had much affliction”—seemed appropriate for one in a stage of healing. It is in that spirit of rejuvenation that I discuss the music at hand.

Rolfe’s butterfly

With his usual blend of humility and cogency, Holliger gives us in his liner notes an informed account of these recordings, which together represent a pastiche of reconstructions, arrangements, and restorations from, to recapitulate his quoting of Hegel, the “fury of disappearance” that so befell much of Bach’s oboe literature. Such unrecoverable shadows will have cast themselves over many a Baroque enthusiast and so bear no redrawing here. In any case, after listening to this recording almost once per day since receiving it so kindly from a faraway friend, I have become as intrigued by where its beauties are going as by where they came from.

Holliger’s latest for ECM is so rich it’s almost unhealthy. Three sinfonia introductions, two from among Bach’s cantatas and one from an Easter Oratorio, form its crux. Some music simply stills us, and the darkening swells of “Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis” (BWV 21) constitute such music. Holliger and violinist Erich Höbarth intertwine like birds in slow motion, each leaving a trail of something forgotten, blazing across the sky in a slow-moving fire, by which only one’s fate can be written, ever out of reach but always readable in the light of divine countenance. But where my description may be overblown, Holliger’s technique never is, always held in check by a profound reserve that allows the music to flourish on its own terms. Bach’s mournful reflection sings with a palpable retrograde, and from its first draw pulls the center of our being toward that of some unnamable other.

Of the four concertos offered here, the c-minor for oboe, violin, strings and basso continuo (BWV 1060) is the most humbling. Joined front-stage by the nimble fingerwork of Höbarth, Holliger details a multivalent sound palette. And in the d-minor (BMV 1059) his legato phrasings explore parts of the surrounding orchestral architecture that most oboists would neglect to see, let alone articulate. The slow, waltz-like quality of the Adagio is an especially profound wind-up for the heavenward lob of the Presto that concludes. Holliger looks even more inwardly in the A-major concerto (BWV 1055). Here, he luxuriates in the subtle turns of phrase and moments of tension that seem to stretch between orchestra and soloist and dance across water with every trill. And then there is Bach’s reworking of an Alessandro Marcello concerto, which glistens with poised ornamentations. A lively dance in the Presto percolates with bewitching charm as Holliger populates every interstice with his inextinguishable passion.

As one who believes the assembled performers to be a virtually uncriticizable combination, I risk redundancy in praising their results as a scintillating tour de force of tempo, timbre, and above all vocality. In light of the already wondrous 1982 recordings of BMV 1055 and 1059 on Philips with the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields (back during the latter’s hyphenated golden age), this could never be anything less than superlative in its complementary light.

Yet one notices also the striking differences between the two. ECM’s recording, while bright, explores this music’s deeper colors, balancing the swirls of refinished wood with an expertly miked continuo. Holliger’s playing has rarely sounded so earthy, so focused on its ephemeral task. These are not reimaginings but reawakenings. And while tempted, I hesitate to use the term “benchmark recording,” as it would speak of its interpretive possibilities as having been branded in time, checked off on the never-ending tick sheet of Bach recordings.

It is also tempting, following Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich, to think that “all roads lead back to Bach.” Yet rather than see Bach as the endpoint to a musical funnel that cuts across histories and geographies, we might better witness the avatar of a composer whose gestures of humility brought to fruition a sense of openness. We do well to resist painting Bach as a Universalist. In search of a alternate analogy, I return to the butterfly. Monarchs are known for their annual 2500-mile migration. Contrary to popular belief, no single pair of wings survives the entire journey. In essence, the group is a kaleidoscope of constant regeneration that returns a different entity from when it left. Like those roving splashes of black and burnt orange, Bach’s music itself travels in a constant state of regeneration, such that every fresh performance, every pair of ears newly enchanted, spreads its own venation of appreciation.

Two weeks ago I ran into Rolfe for the first time since our initial meeting, only to discover that his lepidopteran companion had not survived the cooling Ithaca climate in time to hear this album, but that when he received it he did play it for her. And so, in the interest of continuing this chain of memorial, which began with the death of Bach’s favored pupil (fresh in the composer’s mind when penning the titular sinfonia) and which is linked by Holliger’s loving dedications to the memories of his brother, Eric, and friend Gabriel Bürgin, if you ever find yourself in possession of this jewel of an album I hope you might also take a moment to remember Rolfe’s butterfly, who I like to imagine now rests contentedly on Bach’s shoulder, her proboscis no longer necessary for the music of the spheres that will forever sustain her.

Keith Jarrett: The Celestial Hawk (ECM 1175)

| Tyran Grillo

Keith Jarrett
The Celestial Hawk

Keith Jarrett piano
Syracuse Symphony
Christopher Keene conductor
Recorded March 1980, Carnegie Hall, New York
Engineer: Stan Tonkel
Produced by Manfred Eicher and Keith Jarrett

Keith Jarrett’s classical modality often comes across to me as a dark pastoral, a variegated tapestry of intensity and withdrawal. And while The Celestial Hawk may be no different in this regard, it promises some brighter discoveries upon deeper listening. Against a gentle backdrop of percussion that includes timpani, snare, and triangle, Jarrett deploys his tiny fleets of high notes in the First Movement, out of which arises a delicate harp ostinato, doubled by piano and accentuated by woodwinds and strings, as a crystalline glockenspiel slowly clouds into less translucent ores. After a deep surge, Jarrett rows us into calmer waters alone at the piano, where dolphins in the forms of harp and mallet percussion soon join him. The Second Movement offers up the most cinematic passage of this piece. One can feel its images running, skipping, and emoting through lives unseen. We never stay in one thread for too long, for each is picked up by another into which the previous one has looped itself. The martial snare and cavalrous brass of the Third Movement glisten with the patriotism of an undiscovered country, bound to a manifest destiny in which walking is like flight. From behind the uplifted curtain, horns dance for us a message to prosperity. And yet even as the twilight descends, the oboe threads a ray of moonlight through the waters, bringing with it all sense of time for which beauty is but an afterthought to the truer beauties of slumber, where life ends in a crashing gong.

Despite being very programmatic, this music is far more than incidental to the narrative it describes. At times tumbling in billowy romance, at others even jarringly uncomfortable, Jarrett’s piano embraces itself, following the orchestral advice that surrounds it to the letter. It is an honest music, a painful truth, a call for peace in a violent world.

<< Keith Jarrett: Sacred Hymns of G. I. Gurdjieff (ECM 1174)
>> John Clark: Faces (ECM 1176)

Keith Jarrett: Sacred Hymns of G. I. Gurdjieff (ECM 1174)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1174

Keith Jarrett
Sacred Hymns of G. I. Gurdjieff

Keith Jarrett piano
Recorded March 1980, Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The exact date on which George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was born into this world is unknown. This is fitting, for to one who spent his life trying to unravel it, such mundane details would have been unnecessary in the grander scheme of things. Born in Armenia to a Greek father and Armenian mother, Gurdjieff traveled the world in search of fabled monasteries and the secrets they contained. Unlike many before and since, he succeeded. Yet more unlike many before and since, he packed that knowledge into his somatic consciousness until it burst like a supernova. Biographer John Shirley likens the Gurdjieff encounter to a cold shower, “a welcome shock of wakefulness” that leaves its deep, indelible traces in body and soul. Music was the dark matter of his cosmology and operated at the whim of an inarticulable law by which the listener felt compelled to turn oneself inside out, loosing previously bottled emotions into the open stars. Music was vibration, and vibration was life itself. In the hands of an artist like Keith Jarrett, I daresay it becomes something more.

Composed during Gurdjieff’s so-called “second period,” the music on this album arose from a fruitful block of the 1920s, which saw him and Russian composer Thomas de Hartmann together producing a treasure trove of melodies drawn from various folk music traditions and Russian Orthodoxy. The resulting selections are understatedly suited to Jarrett, spun as they seem to be from the kindred methodology behind his own solo improvisations, which construct from the ground down glorious caverns of sound, melody, and spirit. The strains of “Reading Of Sacred Books,” for example, unfold ever so gently, and yet rather than unveiling new territory simply open more and more doors within, each the mirror to a different face of our psyche. Ceremony and despair share the same sky; exaltations and poverty, the same ground. Each of these living moments winds itself like a string around the finger of spiritual forgetting. Jarrett negotiates these stark contrasts, and the connective tissue between them, with unwavering attention. Just listening to the brilliance with which he dialogues the punctuations of “Hymn To The Endless Creator” with the Debussean meditations of “Hymn From A Great Temple” and “The Story Of The Resurrection Of Christ” is wonder in and of itself. “Holy Affirming—Holy Denying—Holy Reconciling” perfectly describes the tripartite process of becoming that Jarrett enacts throughout, leaving us suspended in the final “Meditation.”

From the titles alone, one might think of these pieces as incidental music, when in fact the music is its own ritual, a collection of hymns to itself in a mise-en-abyme of faith. It is a multifaceted jewel of loosely bound energy that finds joy in emptiness. With due assurance and temerity, Jarrett proves it’s not music that is its own religion, but religion that is its own music.

<< Ralph Towner: Solo Concert (ECM 1173)
>> Keith Jarrett: The Celestial Hawk (ECM 1175)

David Darling: Journal October (ECM 1161)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1161

David Darling
Journal October

David Darling acoustic and electric cello, voice, percussion
Recorded October 1979 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Having recently seen the film adaptation of James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy, which cycles through the book’s eight manifold insights on the path to another, the number nine is fresh in my mind. And so, as I pore through the sonic pages of David Darling’s Journal October on this fallen winter night, I inevitably see each of its nine tracks as an insight in and of itself. Darling’s music is one of ECM’s most invaluable treasures, and one could hardly find anything more beautiful than what he has left behind in its archive. His electric cello bays like a resurrected voice, an insight in and of itself into the lucidity of “Slow Return.” This introductory track is also the longest, drawing every jagged line like the echo of a mountainous horizon. From this potent doorway issues a host of transient forms.

Darling shifts the chronology of his recollections, grafting each to the new experiences of these studio performances. Their breath fills the album’s two solo cello improvisations, each of which cycles through grief’s most harrowing stages toward an inner peace. Rapture comes through in his involuntary vocalizations, in the dissonances that feed them. Darling foregrounds his body in “Solo Cello And Voice,” a self-division of high reaches and archaeological digs, while “Far Away Lights” gives us a taste of his pizzicato technique, which on his electric cello resounds like a tambura undone.

Two Darling touchstones—“Minor Blue” and “Clouds”—also make their first appearance in Journal October, both revisited in his masterful 8-String Religion. The former comes across with more impactful effect, less obscured by gossamer veils of reverb. The latter’s rocking ostinato buoys atmospheric vocals with vulnerable clarity, amplified harmonics ringing out with all the power of a waterfall compressed into a single string. The closing piece sails like an entire biography gathered into one vessel. Notes ascend into birdcalls, circling a teetering falsetto that reshapes the drone dynamic as one suspended rather than suspending.

This album began a walkabout of sorts that has borne some of ECM’s most humbling revelations. Such sounds still the heart and lure our inner eyes with their slow-motion lobs. Darling clears out the detritus of arrangement, the ornaments of song, and the obligations of tradition, forging an improvisatory path that is all his own. It may be trimmer than his later treks along more fluid paths, but his subtle intensities are all there, waiting to embrace the next aching spirit that comes along.

<< Steve Swallow: Home (ECM 1160)
>> Sam Rivers: Contrasts (ECM 1162)

Translating Time: Leonidas Kavakos Concert Review

| Tyran Grillo

Time
in places
becomes
so thin
you can see
through its
fading material.
–Lera Auerbach

On Thursday, 3 February 2011, Cornell University’s Bailey Hall was graced by one of the world’s preeminent violinists. Having achieved this status through, among many other accomplishments, standout readings of Ravel’s Tzigane and the neglected works of Enescu (ECM, 2003) as well as his award-winning violin concertos of Sibelius (Bis, 1992) and Mendelssohn (Sony Classics, 2009), Athens-born Leonidas Kavakos has charted a rich swath of sonic territory. And therein lies the rub. With such a hefty cache of threads from which to spin his musical webs, a musician of Kavakos’s stature is faced with an unenviable amount of repertory choices. In a day and age when contemporary music is undergoing a deep shift into uncertainties and sometimes less-than-successful pastiches, this means a mounting challenge to give voice to underrepresented composers. Enter the music of Lera Auerbach, from whose Preludes for Violin and Piano, Op. 46 Kavakos and his accompanist, Enrico Pace, offered a hefty selection at the heart of the evening’s performance.

Leonidas Kavakos (Tchaikovsky Competition publicity photo)

Born in 1973 on the Siberian border and sufficiently endowed with the gifts of her predecessors (Schnittke comes immediately to mind) and contemporaries (particularly Kancheli and Silvestrov) alike, Auerbach has emerged as one of her generation’s most influential voices. She is also an accomplished poet in her native Russia, where her writings have already been incorporated into literary curricula as required reading. To be sure, the Preludes speak with a grammar uniquely their own. That being said, listeners of the parenthetically aforementioned may find her motivic paths well-worn. At some moments deliberately contrived and at others innocent, the Preludes have been called a Well-Tempered Clavier for the 21st century. Such comparisons do nothing, however, to obscure what is already her rather cloudy aesthetic.

Since composing her first major opera at age 12, Auerbach has been no stranger to the complexities of vocal representation, but negotiating the “voice” of a single violin set against its most intimate partner, the piano, is a poetry in and of itself. Hers is what I might call “postludinal incidentalism.” Put another way, the music plays like a requiem for one who has yet to pass, and nowhere more so than in the fleeting march that was the Prelude No. 1. Its metronomic beginnings and breathy ascents set the tonal contrasts for all that followed. The strident yet haunting pianism of No. 18 unraveled what Kavakos could not with merely four strings at his disposal. From the long sustains of No. 20 to the pseudo-romanticism of No. 12, each contributed a potent cell to the overall kaleidoscopic effect. Also intriguing were the morose etude-like scales of No. 16 and the turbulent Bach deconstruction built into No. 24.

Lera Auerbach (photo courtesy of Auerbach’s official site)

Auerbach is a force to be reckoned with and one well adjusted to discerning contemporary audiences. Her plurivocity engulfs but never dominates. Unfortunately, many of her subtleties were lost in the shadows of the program’s opener. The origins of Prokofiev’s weighty Sonata No. 1 in F minor, Op. 80 in Stalinist Russia tend to mask this admittedly despondent work with associations of darkness and deprecation. Such interpretations are only underscored by the composer, who himself characterized the piece’s most recognizable motifs as “wind passing through a graveyard.” In the hands of our consummate duo, said wind was stilled in the eye of a storm that one could see but could not hear. The sonata’s four movements consisted of two pairs of Andantes followed by brisker counterparts. The funereal mood of the first struggled to hold its resolve in the glare of Kavakos’s glistening trills. Every double stop felt like an internal conversation over Pace’s Debussean tintinnabulations. The ensuing Allegro was pulled off with gusto. Staggered rhythms and crunchy arpeggios popped with requisite verve while a seesawing motif on the D and A strings seemed to caress the violin’s very architecture. And as the horsehairs went flying, I began to hear the music not as a conservation so much as conversion—from sentiment to statement, and from thought to action. The undulations of the third movement were accentuated by highs that glowed like hand-blown glass. So angelic was this passage that the final movement came almost as a shock, so that one now looked back on the Andantes as unrecoverable catharses. It also harbored an unexpected moment of whimsy when the sheer power required for this finale loosened a peg. As Kavakos stopped to retune, he graciously quipped, “It happens sometimes. We’ll try again.” And try again they did, giving an even sharper rendering the second time around. Amid more dangling horsehairs and gypsy flair, the duo finished with panache.

If any connection was to be drawn between the Prokofiev and Auerbach, it was that both were dark in theory but in practice danced on lines of light. Which leads us to Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 9 in A major, Op. 47 that concluded the program. Known as the “Kreutzer,” it was premiered in 1803 by its dedicatee, violinist George Bridgetower, with the composer at the piano. A subsequent disagreement prompted an outraged Beethoven to rededicate the piece to Rodolphe Kreutzer, the finest violinist of the time, who found the sonata “outrageously unintelligible” and refused to privilege it with his bow. If the first half of the evening’s performance felt curiously chosen, perhaps it seemed even more so in light of the inevitable “wow” factor that Kavakos and Pace unleashed through Beethoven. Wherever the variations ran, we could be sure that they never left their thematic mothers’ sights. And where the high notes from the Russians scintillated, here they trembled with a profound sense of emotional upheaval. This constant negotiation of tension and release worked its way into every lucid afterthought to spill from Pace’s fingers. The Andante, by contrast, unfolded in a slow skip. With protracted exuberance, every playful rumination from the violin found its better half in the keyboard. Kavakos’s delicacy made of these vignettes a window into the imagination of experience. Pace had us at A major with the raw statement that signaled the final Presto, and which worked through its anticipations with fortitude to the very end.

In spite of his reputation for symphonic density, as a chamber composer Beethoven clearly wanted his musicians to breathe. In the case of the Kreutzer, he accomplished this by placing strategic gaps throughout the score. These gaps allowed our musicians plenty of space in which to spread their wings together. This unity made all the difference and stretched a fine canvas upon which to brush in a lovely encore in the form of the “Garden Scene” from Korngold’s “Much Ado About Nothing” suite.

Kavakos’s instrument, an “Abergavenny” Stradivarius dating from 1724, was more than a mere vehicle for the music and provided a bird’s-eye view of the landscapes at hand. Sitting in the second row as I was, I could hear its every vulnerable detail. Its raspy highs and liquid lows coalesced into a formidable sound palette. Sadly, the same could not be said for the Steinway from which Pace struggled to elicit anything more than a muddy blur of sound, not to mention that anyone with perfect pitch would have cringed at the tuning problems in the lower register. Add to this an unpleasant squeak in the sustain pedal, and one begins to recognize Pace’s talents all the more for having poured on his meticulous attentiveness undeterred. The latter two issues at least were rectified during intermission, after which the Beethoven shimmered with noticeably brighter syncopations and octaval consonance.

Enrico Pace (photo courtesy of Amadeus Online)

Pace is himself a native of Rimini, hometown of famed director Federico Fellini, who once said, “A different language is a different vision of life.” And perhaps nothing could better sum up the effect of this concert. Each piece inhabited such a distinctly “linguistic” space that it seemed the audience was hard-pressed to test its fluency across the board. At the very least, one can only admire the program’s adventurous spirit, even if it did not quite work as a whole. It also gave us the audible resumes of two performers at the peaks of their careers.

All in all, it was as fine a way to spend an evening as any, and I imagine that everyone walked away with mental tethers trailing behind them to an equally disparate selection of moments. As for this listener, though Kavakos is certainly a fiery performer when he wants to be, I left taking comfort in his conservatism, which continues to provide a valuable alternative to the histrionics of a Gidon Kremer or the technical favoritism of an Anne-Sophie Mutter. His restraint indicates a mind for which music is primary and its effects open to the indeterminacies of life itself.

(This review was published in its original form at the Cornell Daily Sun.)

Heiner Goebbels: Eislermaterial (ECM New Series 1779)

| Tyran Grillo

Heiner Goebbels
Eislermaterial

Ensemble Modern
Joseph Bierbichler voice
Recorded live October 1998 at Hebbel-Theater, Berlin
Engineer: Max Federhofer, SWR
ECM Records co-production with Ensemble Modern, Südwestrundfunk, Deutschlandfunk

“Fear is a false expression.”
–Hanns Eisler

Hanns Eisler (1898-1962) is the subject of Heiner Goebbels’s fascinating homage, which has become as beloved as the music that inspired it. Eisler was the third protégé, after Berg and Webern, of the Schönberg dodecaphonic school, and a German expatriate who fled with close friend/collaborator Bertold Brecht in the 1930s to the United States, where he would go on to compose two Oscar-nominated film scores (1943’s Hangmen Also Die!, for which Brecht also wrote the script, and None but The Lonely Heart one year later). Just as he was settling into his exile, however, Eisler was deported (he was among the first to find his name on the Hollywood blacklist), but not before a series of benefit concerts—sponsored by Aaron Copland, Roger Sessions, Charlie Chaplin, Igor Stravinsky, and Leonard Bernstein, to name an illustrious few—were given to raise funds for his defense. Virgil Thomson, writing for the New York Herald Tribune, said of the final program on 11 March 1948:

The impressiveness is due less to any profound originality, as in the case of his master, Arnold Schönberg, or in that of his sometime model, the German-language works of Kurt Weill, than to his graceful and to his delicate taste. Eisler’s music, whether the style of it is chromatic and emotional, diatonic and formalist, or strictly atonal in the dodecaphonic manner, always has charm. It has charm because the tunes are pretty, the textures bright and light, the expressive intentions thoroughly straightforward and clear. Eisler is that rare specimen, a German composer without weight. He uses no heaviness, makes no insistence.

When Eisler returned to East Berlin he penned the GDR’s national anthem amid a spate of intense musical activity, culminating in a Faustian opera that was characterized by Neues Deutschland as “a slap in the face of German national feeling” and therefore never completed. After the death of Brecht, Eisler’s disillusionment intensified and plunged him into depression, during which time he breathed his last.

Eisler and Brecht, 21 March 1950 (Bundesarchiv)

The dramaturgy of Eislermaterial calls for a small statue of its namesake to be placed at the center of the performance space: the surrogate conductor, standing in a field plotted like some gridless Go board. Befittingly, Eisler’s compositions make up the piece’s entirety. The resulting “assemblage” uses his many voices as raw materials for a tribute that shuns ideological heavy-handedness in favor of a bittersweet portrait comprised of lieder and relatively unknown instrumental pieces. The latter are artfully arranged and performed here by the discerning musicians of Ensemble Modern, who crack open the kinetic energy residing within. Of these, Suite for Septet No. 1 provides particularly delightful insight into this eclectic mind, while a fragment for string quartet is rendered all the more moving for being juxtaposed with a turn from his Orchestral Suite No. 3, which sounds like a big band falling down a flight of stairs. Wonderful.

Eisler statue, up close and in situ (photos by Matthias Cruetziger)

Surrounded as these are by nine of Eisler’s songs, they take on more than mere interludinal quality, rather embedding themselves like nodules of concentration. Eight of these are settings of poems by Brecht. Tones range from patriotic (Children’s Anthem) and nostalgic (And I shall never again see) to proletarian (Four Lullabies for Working Mothers), and cover such themes as adaptability (The Grey Goose), the visibility of privacy (Mother Beimlein), renewal (Of Sprinkling the Garden), and fatalism (War Song). On Suicide unfurls the set’s most pensive backdrop, both lyrically and musically:

In such a country and at such a time
There should be fewer melancholy evenings
And lofty bridges over the rivers
While the hours that link the night to morning
And the winter season too each year, are full of danger.
For having seen all this misery
People won’t linger
But will decide at once
To fling their too heavy life away.

A verse by Peter Altenberg closes the set with a melancholic picture of resignation: “Eventually, longing dies, too, / as blossoms languish in a cellar / waiting daily for a little sun.” The interpretations are sometimes augmented by stark contrasts, such as the scratchy free jazz solo of The Grey Goose and the morose rubato of Mother Beimlein. Singer Joseph Bierbichler makes no attempt to sing like Eisler and instead brings out subjective and endearing performances that are as genuine as they are vulnerable. Goebbels also includes two “Audio dramas,” making use of clips from the Eisler archive in true Glenn Gould fashion. In these we are treated to his thoughts on sound, culture, science, and contemplation, evoking an age of black and white imposed upon a world of horrid color.

The comprehensive booklet for Eislermaterial includes an interview with Goebbels, who credits Eisler with having jumpstarted his life in sound. Certainly, one need hardly look deeply to see the affinity. Not only did Goebbels find his own Brecht in Heiner Müller, but both he and Eisler have successfully united politics and music in such a way that one finds them impossible to separate in the listening and likewise to dilute in the thinking. Eisler was more than a Marxist cog with a creative streak, and no one is better suited than Goebbels to tell that story to its fullest. This is the most “filmic” of Goebbels projects and lends itself wisely to an aural and textual world bound by an undying love for theatre. A masterpiece on all counts and a crowd favorite among fans and newcomers alike.

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