Classical

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.

<< Paul Giger: Ignis (ECM 1681 NS)
>> John Abercrombie: Open Land (ECM 1683)

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.

<< Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy: I Only Have Eyes For You (ECM 1296)
>> Azimuth: Azimuth ’85 (ECM 1298)

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)