Classical

Danish String Quartet: PRISM IV (ECM New Series 2564)

| Tyran Grillo

Danish String Quartet
PRISM IV

Danish String Quartet
Frederik Øland violin
Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen violin
Asbjørn Nørgaard viola
Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin violoncello
Recorded September 2018, Reitstadel Neumarkt
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Cover: Eberhard Ross
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: June 3, 2022

For this fourth installment of the PRISM series, the Danish String Quartet strikes its boldest combination of light and shadow. By starting with the Fugue in G minor, BWV 861, from Book I of Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier (as arranged by Emanuel Aloys Förster), it wears on its sleeve the subtle élan that permeates all to follow. Its textures are those of a piece of clothing one has worn for years, every memory connected with it coming to life in déjà vu. Stepping outside of that outfit and into another embroidered with the name “Ludwig van Beethoven,” it’s impossible to think of the String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, op. 132, as anything less than an unpacking of the gift we have just received. The opening forgoes Bach’s expansiveness, tracing ropes all the same but this time in less of a macrame and more of a sailor’s knot. The second movement, marked Allegro ma non tanto (“Fast, but not too much”), gives ample room for the musicians to spread their leaves in a canopy porous enough to nourish the forest floor with sunlight. The balance of urgency and patience is exemplary. A shift halfway through into sustained harmonies pushes hues of glory between the trees. The 18-minute third movement is like a pond in that while its surface appears tranquil, we are aurally edified regarding the undercurrents and other invisible forces keeping its waterline steady. A methodical seesawing between straight tones and vibrato amplifies a voice of literary dimension, circling clockwise from prologue to epilogue. Only then do we get the retrospective excitement of the fourth movement (a brief march), followed by the shifting plates of the fifth. When pizzicato punctuations from the cello signal the final stretch, a feeling of sadness eclipses the ears. Thus, any happiness we might have found must be returned to sender, leaving us to wonder when we will ever meet again.

It’s poignant to consider that Beethoven was just months from leaving this world behind when Felix Mendelssohn, then a tender 18, composed his String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, op. 13. Mendelssohn’s exploratory ethos was ripe for transplanting the influences of Beethoven’s Opus 132, watering them into a piece that overlapped in technical similarities even as it deviated in extroversion. Such is the spirit of the first movement, in which vertical and horizontal motifs favor parallel paths over common ground, so to speak. The Adagio that follows develops with nondescript urgency. The viola is especially robust as the violins circle overhead, high but never out of sight. The third movement is a delectable exercise in playfulness that foreshadows the pastoralism of Antonín Dvořák. Its abrupt ending gives us pause before the drama of the finale opens the quartet’s thickest curtain to reveal a densely populated scene, likewise open-ended in its resolution.

If any of the above reads evocatively, it’s because these Danes make it impossible to experience this program any other way. Their approach to synergy is as carefully planned as it is spontaneous, and with only one more volume to go, we have much to look forward to as this journey reaches its destination. At that point, however, we are likely to realize how much further we have yet to go in our listening.

Danish String Quartet: PRISM III (ECM New Series 2563)

| Tyran Grillo

Danish String Quartet
PRISM III

Danish String Quartet
Frederik Øland violin
Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen violin
Asbjørn Nørgaard viola
Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin violoncello
Recorded November 2017, Reitstadel Neumarkt
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Cover: Eberhard Ross
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: March 12, 2021

Ludwig van Beethoven’s five late quartets must be reckoned with. In the words of the Danish String Quartet, presenting the String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor of 1826, they “changed the game.” In saying as much, we might very well ask ourselves: What was the game to begin with? How far back does it go? With whom did it start? Augmenting the famous profession that “all roads lead back to Bach,” this recording charts as many paths forward as it does retrospectively. As for the game itself, we can say that it involves not only musical idioms but also hints of visual art, literature, religion, war, migration, and, dare I say, hope.

To know Beethoven’s Op. 131 is to take a full view of humanity, with all its triumphs and tragedies. The opening Adagio, the first of seven movements, spins fibers of tenderness into a muscle that flexes in tune with emotional suspensions, thus emphasizing the DSQ’s fitness as much as the composer’s. The Allegro that follows surprises with dance-like energies but may just as easily be interpreted as a coping mechanism against the grief that preceded it. Its extroversions are deeply entwined with introversion. Other movements, like the lively Presto, share their secrets more openly, taking on a litheness of clarity rarely heard in other renditions. The closing Allegro wears its heart on its sleeve just as securely, emboldening (not flaunting) its awareness as a modus operandi of exposition. But it’s in the gargantuan fourth movement, a nearly 15-minute Andante, where most of this vessel’s cargo is tallied in its keep. What begins as a spider’s thread of narrative sweetness morphs, as if in answer to the subtle insistence of the cello’s pizzicato, into a fog of impressions that resolves itself into a dew of urgent memories. All the more fitting that this quartet was never performed in the composer’s lifetime. For while its mixed receptions have morphed into high regard, the music reminds us of the necessarily contrasting organs in its body. As these meticulous musicians remind us, none will function on its own but only when connected to the larger whole.

For his String Quartet No. 1, op. 7, Sz. 40 (1909), Béla Bartók took inspiration from Beethoven’s opus 131. Both open in lament. That said, Bartók evokes a distinct shade of darkness made modern not only by its tonality but also in the interpretation so lovingly given here. The DSQ enhances the piece’s metallic sheen without neglecting the patina it already had when first composed. When the viola announces itself in the opening Lento, it does so not out of desperation but infirmity. At this point, the heart is already so weakened that beating its drum feels like an uphill climb. Somehow, Bartók affords us a view of the valley to show that achievement means nothing without hardship. Even the Allegretto that follows emerges hesitantly, an animal out of hibernation before proclaiming its heritage. The digging cello of the Introduzione that follows sets up the storytelling of an Allegro for the ages. The atmosphere is chiseled in something more durable than stone: an alloy of reinforcement made possible only by the laying of human hands on natural materials. Forgoing any illusion of permanence (everything decays), Bartók recognizes that imperfection is always a reliable receptacle for creative ideas. As the strings move—sometimes in unison, mostly apart—they prove that cohesion isn’t always obvious or visible. Rather, it is born through the message of interpretation. Every gesture of insistence in the violins gives way to glorious resolution, jumping from the edge of a collective inhalation. Is this triumph or just a return to baseline? You decide.

Because Beethoven was deeply inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, it only makes sense to include a fugue (this one in C-sharp minor, the very key signature used in Beethoven’s 14th quartet), as arranged by Emanuel Aloys Förster. Its tessellated configuration is a breath of higher origin, smoothing over the postmodern cracks with a reminder of what makes beauty earn its name: the scars of our destitution.

Heinz Holliger: Lunea (ECM New Series 2622)

| Tyran Grillo

Heinz Holliger
Lunea

Christian Gerhaher baritone
Julian Banse soprano
Ivan Ludlow baritone
Sarah Maria Sun soprano
Annette Schönmüller soprano
Philharmonia Zürich
Basler Madrigalisten
Heinz Holliger conductor
Recorded live March 2018
Opernhaus Zürich
Recording producer and editing: Andreas Werner
Recording engineer: Stefan Hächler
Assistant engineers: Alice Fischer and Philip Erdin
Cover sketches by Heinz Holliger / photo by Thomas Wunsch
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Co-production of ECM Records/Opera Zurich/SRF 2 Kultur
Release date: April 22, 2022

I am my own echo, but one eternally rigid and pinned down.
An echo nailed to the rock.

Heinz Holliger’s Lunea, described by the Swiss composer as his “dream opera,” grew out of a song cycle of the same name for baritone and piano. By 2017, Holliger had reworked it into its present form for the stage. Based on the demise of Nikolaus Lenau (1802-1850), who scribbled down outbursts during his years in an asylum, Lunea anagrams his name as a way of illuminating his poetic psychosis, thus hinting at the linguistic fragmentations we will encounter. As noted by baritone Christian Gerhaher, who seems born to sing this role: “Holliger presents these attempts on the part of the stricken poet to record his indescribable yet exquisitely traversed suffering—frightful and vivid experiences incapable of being communicated to another being.” And yet, communicate he does through a characteristically exquisite ear for nuance.

Whether by instinct or design, all of the artists of Holliger’s incidental interest, from Friedrich Hölderlin to Robert Schumann, are bound by the tattered thread of mental illness. His willingness to give them a mouthpiece through the score, of which language is a key instrument, finds a willing accomplice in Händl Klaus, whose libretto contextualizes 23 “leaves” in a space without linear order. Holliger’s approach to the text is microscopic in spirit but grand in scope. And yet, as Roman Brotbeck observes, “[N]othing is blurred; everything is as clear as glass and laid out by Holliger with maximum lucidity.” 

Holliger and Klaus pieced the opera together through fragments written on paper slips, glued with phrases (both musical and oral-motor) into shape. In doing so, they sought to resolve each sentence (or even word within it) through interpretation. If any plot can be discerned in all of this, it is embodied in the character of Lenau himself, whose cogent coterie of family members and acquaintances populates a bare environment like projections of his many sides. Lenau’s alter ego is Anton Xaver Schurz (1794-1859), a constant companion throughout his illness who also married his sister and published a nearly 800-page biography of Lenau in 1855. The women in Lenau’s life, including Sophie von Löwenthal (a platonic lover), Marie Behrends (his fiancée), and sister Therese, lend worldliness (if not also wordiness) to his isolation.

Holliger’s love for speech abounds, as when he incorporates the character of Justinus Kerner, a physician and close friend who, in 1850 (the year of Lenau’s death) began making what he called “klecksographs”—inkblot pictures mirrored by folding pieces of paper into symmetrical images. Following this, the opera is symmetrically arranged around the stroke Lenau experienced in September 29, 1844. Long before that, the opening speaks is as if through a layer of rice paper. Low reeds and an intoning chorus give way to Lenau’s amorous deteriorations. This is the asylum, a space in which the mind has free reign even as the body is contained. Such is the contradiction of operatic space: a stage that delineates mise-en-scène while opening our hearts to its inner flames. Holliger understands this in both the most traditional and postmodern sense.

For Lenau, “Man is a beachcomber at the sea of eternity,” and so might we call the instruments, among which the violin, cimbalom (Hungarian dulcimer), and bassoon move as characters in their own right. Each slices mortality at a different angle, offering us unrepeatable cross-sections of emotional sediment. As waves of utterances and choral echoes navigate the scrapheap of a broken mind, we are privy to glimpses of recovery and tension in kind. Some of the most profound moments are shared between Lenau and Sophie. Their wordless breathing in the Fourth Leaf palpitates the ears. And it is Sophie who, in Leaf Nine, brings the most hopeful beauties into focus. Such respite is brief and occasional, as in the skyward harmonies of the Sixth Leaf, whereas the most powerful interruptions (such as that by Sophie again in the Eleventh Leaf) make the morbid grays and charcoals of the opera’s fulcrum that much more morose.

In one key scene, played out in the Fourteenth Leaf, Lenau leaps from the window in desperation before bowing the violin in a cathartic dance of healing. What follows from here to the end is a reversion into childhood (Fifteenth Leaf) before solitary madness sets in. Turning as a revolving door from one state of mind to another, the chorus voices the multiplicity of his demise. The final part is a gravelly expression of death borders that burrows into the reptilian brain.

While Lunea is a chain of intimate fascinations as only Holliger can link, it is best appreciated with the booklet in hand, ready to absorb the fragments at hand and assemble them into your own whole. Its brilliance comes to life through the heartbeat of its concepts. Then again, the disorientation of not knowing where our ears might land next is appropriate enough when scrutinizing a mind that might never have demanded more. Hence the significance of Gerhaher being the only singer who doesn’t perform multiple rolls, at once emphasizing Lenau’s splintered cognizance and his insistence on maintaining an identity through it all. For a man who saw the moon as “a luminous, drifting tomb,” death was, perhaps, the only certainty.

Ferenc Snétberger/Keller Quartett: Hallgató (ECM New Series 2653)

| Tyran Grillo

Ferenc Snétberger
Keller Quartett
Hallgató

Ferenc Snétberger guitar
András Keller, Zsófia Környei violin
Gábor Homoki viola
László Fenyő violoncello
Gyula Lázár double bass
Concert recording, December 2018
Liszt Academy, Grand Hall, Budapest
Engineers: Stefano Amerio and Gergely Lakatos
Cover photo: Atilla Kleb
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: February 12, 2021

After making his ECM debut with the live recording In Concert and the jazzier follow-up Titok, guitarist Ferenc Snétberger returns to the label with Hallgató. Recorded live in December of 2018, it positions his strings amid those of the Keller Quartett and Gyula Lázár on double bass. The focus this time is on Snétberger as a composer, with three of his works standing as pillars of the program. His Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra (1994/95; arr. 2008) spans three substantial movements. Subtitled “In Memory of My People” and written for the 50th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust, it balances precise notation with liberating cadenzas. “Hallgató” (a somewhat ambiguous word meaning “listener”) sets the scene with guitar alone before the quintet’s entrance, feeling out the landscape upon which we are about to walk with these fine musicians as our guides. “Emlékek” (memories) is our first waystation. Romantic yet devoid of excess, its nourishment fortifies us for the fancier footwork of “Tánc” (dance), in which the catharsis we have been seeking is realized, reminding us of what vibrancy feels like. Snétberger’s Rhapsody No. 1 for Guitar and Orchestra (2005; arr. 2008) is equally dynamic, if less angular. Like a figure sashaying between historical buildings, it navigates city streets with the nostalgia of experience on its shoulders. In the journey between them, we come across Your Smile for solo guitar, a timely song without words.

Works from other composers fill in the gaps with vital organs. Two songs from John Dowland (1563-1626) are the subject of astonishing arrangements by David Warin Solomons. “I saw my lady weep” and “Flow, my tears,” both from 1600, show the undying spirit of this music, the guitar adding a lute-like touch to the backdrop while strings weave their tapestry in its light. The latter tune, a duet for guitar and cello, speaks in an unmistakable nocturnal tongue. The program takes its deepest breaths in the String Quartet No. 8 in C minor of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975). Written in 1960 for victims of fascism and war, its opening and closing Largos are played crosswise, lending a graceful urgency to their differences. The second movement, by contrast, is delicate without pulling the punches of its traumatic reveals, while the Allegretto dazzles with its rougher qualities. The Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber (1910-1981), taken from the String Quartet, op. 11, of 1936, is also included, rendered with a vocal quality I’ve rarely heard.

All told, this is a superb program from world-class artists. More than the performances, however, Snétberger’s writing scintillates. Such cinema requires no camera and only the heart as a projection screen. What begins with a yearning for peace opens into dance-like wonder, but only briefly before lowering the head in slumber to chase resolutions behind closed eyes. Because, in the end, memories may be nothing more than dreams we haven’t yet forgotten.

Tigran Mansurian: Con anima (ECM New Series 2687)

| Tyran Grillo

Tigran Mansurian
Con anima

Varty Manouelian violin
Boris Allakhverdyan clarinet
Michael Kaufman violoncello
Steven Vanhauwaert piano
Kim Kashkashian viola
Tatevik Mokatsian piano
Movses Pogossian violin
Teng Li viola
Karen Ouzounian violoncello
Recorded January-April 2019
Evelyn and Mo Ostin Music Center
of the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, Los Angeles
Recording engineer: Benjamin Maas
Cover photo: Jean-Christophe Béchet
Mastering: Christoph Stickel
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: November 6, 2020

Although “refined” has taken on elitist nuances over the years, Armenian composer Tigran Mansurian cuts to the root by following the true etymology of the word as a return to purity. In this all-chamber program, conceived as an 80th birthday gift by violinist Movses Pogossian and violist Kim Kashkashian, Mansurian’s combination of Armenian and European influences, sacred and secular alike, changes form as if viewed through a kaleidoscope turned in methodical wonder.

In the Agnus Dei of 2006, interpreted here by violinist Varty Manouelian, clarinetist Boris Allakhverdyan, cellist Michael Kaufman, and pianist Steven Vanhauwaert, one can almost feel his presence in the room. The simultaneous awareness of separation and overlap in the composing and the performing allows listeners to take the opening movement in many ways: as a mirror or opaque surface, liquid or solid, past or future. The clarinet is the glue that binds this scripture, the strings dialects, and the piano keys the pages they call home. The second movement indicates stirrings within, cradling dark exultation, while the third movement barely exceeds a whisper. As in the sonic architecture of Alexander Knaifel, the instruments humble themselves at the feet of the Spirit.

The Sonata da Chiesa (2015) bears a dedication to the priest and composer Komitas Vardapet (1869-1935), whose quiet legacy has permeated a range of previous ECM recordings, not least of all Mansurian’s own. In the hands of Kashkashian and pianist Tatevik Mokatsian, the first movement suspends itself before writhing with historical awareness. Kashkashian’s sincerity and Mokatsian’s energetic approach to even the most delicate gestures draws two lines of flight that gradually become one in the second movement. Like hope and reality, they are distant until something sacred finds commonality in them.

The title piece (2006-2007) is scored for two violins (Pogossian and Manouelian), violas (Kashkashian and Teng Li), and cellos (Karen Ouzounian and Kaufman). Being a meditation on Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 13, the viola is of liturgical importance. Incredibly, the higher the tones, the darker the sky grows over its catharsis. Next are the String Trio (2008) and String Quartet No. 3 (1993). If Con anima was closer in mood to Shostakovich, the trio is closer in form, moving ever closer to the shaded drawl of its final movement, while the quartet assumes an inverted progression from subterranean fields to aboveground terrains. Finally, Die Tänzerin for violin and viola (2014) shines a light on Armenian folk dance, bringing Bartók to mind.

As convenient as the above comparisons may be, they do nothing to capture the atmosphere of this music. Mansurian, by self-characterization, creates a crossroads of speech and silence that cannot necessarily be articulated by either. Given the honesty and truth with which he fills his cup, not every question he poses demands an answer. Searching without finding becomes its own gift in a world hell-bent on exploiting destinations.

Erkki-Sven Tüür: Lost Prayers (ECM New Series 2666)

| Tyran Grillo

Erkki-Sven Tüür
Lost Prayers

Harry Traksmann violin
Leho Karin violoncello
Marrit Gerretz-Traksmann piano
Tanja Tetzlaff violoncello
Signum Quartett
Florian Donderer violin
Annette Walther violin
Xandi van Dijk viola
Thomas Schmitz violoncello
Recorded April 2019 at Sendesaal Bremen
Engineer: Christophe Franke
Cover photo: Thomas Wunsch
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: November 13, 2020

Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.
–James 4:3

Since debuting on ECM’s New Series in 1996 with the inimitable Crystallisatio, the humanity of Erkki-Sven Tüür has revealed itself through score after score in search of a purer distillation of his uniquely “vectorial” approach to composition. With Lost Prayers, his first chamber-only program for the label, he may have found his clearest alloy yet in the grander scheme of elements that informs his far-reaching spirit. No stranger to meshing contradictory elements into coherent wholes without capitulating to monolithic dogma, striking a path between mathematical precision and organic flow, he taps into something familiar that allows us to bypass the pleasantries of getting-to-know-you conversation, going straight into dialogues of faith, reason, and love.

Violinist Harry Traksmann, cellist Leho Karin, and pianist Marrit Gerretz-Traksmann embrace Fata Morgana (2002) as a child in need of comfort. The opening violin arpeggios and piano chords over crunchy cello double stops work into a controlled frenzy, indicative of an inner turmoil such as only a fresher soul could lay bare. As molecules join and separate, time loses all shape. Refrains, each a return to self before disembodiment resumes, stand out for their subtlety. Leaping gestures are quickly sublimated by quicksand motifs, pulling the listener into subterranean spaces where notes cease to matter, giving way instead to textural authority. The ending tremors hint more at glory than physical compromise. And while something about this piece leaves me feeling homesick, the same musicians close with a sense of family in Lichttürme (2017), a veritable lighthouse in sound. The violin is the glassy lens through which its glow is magnified, the cello the tower housing it, and the piano a tickle of awareness in the sailor’s cerebral cortex.

Between those poles, violinist Florian Donderer and cellist Tanja Tetzlaff chart points of continuity between night and day in Synergie (2010) before the Signum Quartett’s sensitive rendition of the String Quartet No. 2 (2012), from which this album gets its name. Like a conversation between epochs, it shifts from empathetic and coherent to cross-wired and fragmentary, its answers only becoming clear when taken in the aggregate. At its loudest moments, the notecraft soars; at its quietest, it scuttles along the ground toward agitations of light. 

Tüür’s music is never content with endings. It dwells not in our bodies but in the natural materials our bodies partake of, harvest, and transform. Even as the instruments dip themselves in a font of inspiration, the water’s surface has been sprinkled with the lycopodium of honest self-reflection, leaving them dry. This is Revelation as Genesis: the potter’s vessel of our century broken into pieces and refashioned in the image of revival.

Schiff/Widmann: Brahms Clarinet Sonatas (ECM New Series 2621)

| Tyran Grillo

András Schiff
Jörg Widmann
Johannes Brahms: Clarinet Sonatas

András Schiff piano
Jörg Widmann clarinet
Recorded May 2018
Historischer Reistadel, Neumarkt
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Cover photo: Jan Jedlička
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 2, 2020

In the opening gestures of the Sonata in E-flat major, op. 120/2 (1894), for clarinet and piano, it’s difficult not to feel the breath of life that moved its composer, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), to such rapture in the latter years of his life. As the second of two such sonatas and his final chamber work, it is a testimony not only to Richard Mühlfeld, the master clarinetist of his day whom Brahms called “the nightingale of the orchestra,” but also to the self-effacement with which Brahms struggled throughout his creative life. And so, when considering the enduring interpretations here by pianist András Schiff and clarinetist Jörg Widmann, one must understand that without a love for every note, the bars between them would erode. Thus, Widmann gives colorations to the breath at every turn, while Schiff understands the role of the piano in Brahms’s chamber works as more than an accompaniment, giving it the fullness of expression it requires. The second movement, a rousing Allegro appassionato, is quintessential Brahms for its controlled drama and balance of fine motor skills, all tied together with a rustic charm. The final movement works patience into the virtue of exuberance.

The Sonata in f minor, op. 120/1 (1894), is even more dynamic. After a gradual first movement, the second unravels like paint from a brush, finding favor in the final trails of each stroke. The restrained Allegretto that follows sets up a rousing Vivace, the ebullience of which dazzles the senses. Given its symphonic textures, it’s no wonder the piece lent itself so gloriously to Luciano Berio’s orchestral transcription in 1986.

Between these giants of clarinet literature are Widmann’s five Intermezzi (2010) for piano. As tributes to both Schiff (to whom it is dedicated) and Brahms, they show a modern heart in love with the blood of tradition pumping through it. The central intermezzo, at 12 minutes, digs deepest into the spirit of this emotional transference. Throughout, we encounter waking moments in an otherwise dreamlike mise-en-scène. Nevertheless, clarity abounds.

Camerata Zürich: On an overgrown path (ECM New Series 2597)

| Tyran Grillo

Camerata Zürich
On an overgrown path

Camerata Zürich
Igor Karsko direction, lead violin
Maïa Brami speaker
Recorded September and November 2017
Radiostudio DRS, Zürich
Engineer: Andreas Werner
Cover photo: Nadia F. Romanini
An ECM Production
Release date: November 26, 2021

“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.”
–Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Czech composer Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) penned his two-volume On an overgrown path between 1901 and 1908. While its significance in the pianistic pantheon is often eclipsed by canonical predecessors, its inventiveness is marked by nonorthodox shifts in harmony, each a full statement without the need to justify what precedes or follows. Given the music’s history and place in time, few would be up to the task of arranging it for string orchestra with equal fervor, but this is precisely what Daniel Rumler did in 2016 to luminous effect, breathing not new but old life into the lungs thereof.

As Thomas Meyer notes in the CD booklet, the title of On an overgrown path references a Moravian wedding song, said path signifying the new bride’s severance from a home to which she can never return. The result is a collection of what the composer called “distant reminiscences” of folk songs and practices. In pieces like “A blown-away leaf,” the underlying connectivity of the notes rises to the surface as treasure from past sediment. Given its basis on the rhythms of the Czech language, we can rightly think of these as “texts” across which editorial marks of prosody and poetry abound, shifting with lyrical abandon from elegy to triumph at the gesture of a bow. Dances (e.g., “Come with us!” and “They chattered like swallows”) testify to the power of memory to reside where it cannot be erased. The spiritual glimpses of “The Madonna of Frydek,” which paints in broad strokes yet with detailed awareness, lean into Janáček’s love for his daughter, Olga, who died in 1903.

Much of this music, however, is divided against itself. For instance, what begins as a frolic in “Words fail!” morphs into uncertain recollections and emotional vulnerabilities. The latter work their way through “Good night!” and “Unutterable anguish” with the wormlike glow of burning steel wool. The strings are especially able to draw out that inner turmoil with maximum acuity. Even the closing Allegro grasps a bouquet of fragmented selves, each a palimpsest of circumstance.

Between the cycle’s two books is a 10-part text by Maïa Brami, dedicated to Thomas Demenga, who was the director of the Camerata Zürich when the orchestral arrangement was being put together (and who suggested the writing of these texts). Brami describes the scene as follows:

“In the evening of his life, Leoš Janáček returns to his native forest. He does know it, but it is the last time. The composer is looking for Otto, the son of his muse, Kamila Stösslova, whom he loves passionately. The boy has wandered off into the woods. After years of passionate correspondence, the young woman finally accepted the first-name as an admission of shared love and came to visit him in his family home. When he met her at a spa in 1917, the artist was at his lowest ebb: he had not recovered from the death of his daughter Olga and his career was not taking off. Kamila, his ‘rose,’ his ‘red flower,’ will resurrect him.”

This panoply of yearnings and recollections (“God how I would love to hold on to the summer,” he cries, “I who waited for it all my life!”) unfolds like a biography in miniature, brilliantly capturing moving images of the composer’s childhood (“Deep down in my suitcase, a pot of honey from my father’s hives, heavy as my grief”), mortal anxieties, and the loves connecting the spaces between. Thus, the composer is able to dip his fingers into the font his creative inspiration. And as the end encroaches on him, he resigns to the fleeting nature of things.

The program is bookended by two kindred pieces. The Meditation on the Old Czech Chorale St. Wenceslas, op. 35a (1914) of Josef Suk (1874-1935) welcomes natural sonorities. Like tall grasses in a windswept landscape, it gives purpose to the elements by making known their otherwise invisible movements. The Notturno in B major, op. 40 (1875) by Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904) closes with grace, folding us into a river’s current in search of an oceanic afterlife.

Parker Quartet/Kim Kashkashian: Kurtág/Dvořák (ECM New Series 2649)

| Tyran Grillo

Parker Quartet
Kim Kashkashian
György Kurtág/Antonín Dvořák

Parker Quartet
Daniel Chong violin
Ken Hamao violin
Jessica Bodner viola
Kee-Hyun Kim violoncello
Kim Kashkashian viola
Recorded November 2018, Radiostudio DRS, Zürich
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Cover photo: Woong Chul An
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 22, 2021

If the phenomenality of existence is rooted in its fleetingness, then music cannot be clothed in any raiment other than its mortality. Such is the impetus (and the slip-through-your-fingers brilliance) of György Kurtág’s composing, which never bites off more than it can chew so as to absorb every nutrient of its dialogic vocabularies. In the invocational architectures of his Six moments musicaux, op. 44 (2005), which open this program of ear-opening juxtapositions, there is much to be uncovered by listeners willing to seek the fragmentary in the harmonic and the holistic in the dissonant. Whether dancing with exuberance or wallowing in the eventide of mourning, the strings manifest as much meaning untouched by the bow as humming beneath its pressure. Shades of motifs that came before crack themselves open like eggs to reveal two distinct textures that cook at different temperatures. The Parker Quartet treats these dichotomies as anything but, reveling quietly in their gradations of white and yellow. The icy “Rappel des oiseaux…” (an etude rendered mostly in harmonics) is the clearest example of how sensitive one must be to speak Kurtág’s language. The quieter his grammar, the more robustly it leaps from the score.

The painted side of this mirror is Kurtág’s Officium breve, op. 28 (1988/89). Written in memory of composer Endre Szervánsky (1911-1977) but also paying respects to Anton Webern (1883-1945), its fifteen movements open as if tuning, bleeding into concentrations of light. Like a candle during a power outage, its quotidian purpose is magnified to near-sacred focus. For the most part, however, these pieces are reflections of reflections. From the sonority of the “Sostenuto” to the fragile spirituality of the “Canon a 2,” the Parkers erase the “d” in “breadth” and leave it to exhale into the slow-motion slumber of the final “Larghetto.” It is, as Paul Griffiths best describes it in his liner note, “A homecoming, to a lost home.”

Between these two destinations blossoms the String Quintet No. 3 in E-flat major, op. 97, of Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904). Composed in 1893 during a sojourn in the small Iowa town of Spillville, its rendering here with special guest, violist Kim Kashkashian (a mentor of the musicians), immediately boldfaces the brightness for which the Czech composer was so well known, soaring in search of a place without winter. What begins as a splash of sunlight in the Scherzo shifts into fluid motion, the violin working its way like a bird in slow motion without any other purpose than to mark its path with invisible ink. Heat comes in the slow burn of the Larghetto, which rests its weight on Kashkashian’s shoulders as on a savior in dark times. This is a highlight for the quartet’s ability to mesh with itself and incorporate the extra instrument as if it was always there. Between the light footfalls of the cello’s pizzicato and the dreamlike tremble of its higher cousins, everyone has a chance to make peace with the fullness of their message, finding in the Finale a way to begin again: by inhaling with a prayerful spirit.