I’ve just written for Sequenza 21 a retrospective of ECM’s New Series in celebration of the imprint’s 30th year in 2014. Click the cover to read.
ECM New Series Releases
Kremerata Baltica: Hymns and Prayers (ECM New Series 2161)
Kremerata Baltica
Hymns and Prayers
Gidon Kremer violin
The Kremerata Baltica
Roman Kofman conductor
Khatia Buniatishvili piano
Andrei Pushkarev vibraphone
Marija Nemanytė violin
Maxim Rysanov viola
Giedrė Dirvanauskaitė violoncello
Sofia Altunashvili voice on tape
Recorded July 2008, Pfarrkirche St. Nikolaus, Lockenhaus
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Gidon Kremer and Manfred Eicher
A recent album released of solo piano music by Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer bears the title Gaps, Absences, which best describes the music of the composer, pianist, and essayist who, born 1963 in former Yugoslavia, has since 1991 called France his home. His life as an improviser has brought him in collaboration with Fred Frith, Chris Cutler, and many others of the avant garde, while on the classical side he has enjoyed fruitful collaboration with violinist Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica, having served as composer in residence at the renowned Lockenhaus chamber music festival, where this album was recorded in 2008, and more recently at the Kremerata Baltica’s own festival in Latvia. His Eight Hymns (1986/2004), written in memory of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, begins a tripartite program of monumental works for various ensembles. Scored for violin, strings, vibraphone, and piano, each of Tickmayer’s hymns bears a title of calm strength. His atmospheres are deceptively minimal, at times spectral and at others hovering as mist over a lake at dawn. The instruments interlock in alternating tides and continental shelves. The piano paints evening skies as single notes break off into satellites of a deeper gravitation. The violin is a thin yet utterly present voice, an omniscient myth-keeper whose experiences of assumption, redemption, and remembrance all answer to the same voice. The vibraphone is a pinwheel moved by breath of slumber. Strings move in the draw of a paintbrush from behind a veil of ash and harmonic light. All of this ends in a flower, as fragile as it is trembling, leaving us indeed with gaps and absences of profound resonance.
Such soul-nourishing music finds like spirit by way of Giya Kancheli, who wrote his 2007 Silent Prayer in honor of Mstislav Rostropovich (for his 80th birthday) and Gidon Kremer (for his 60th). The familiar Kancheli themes crystallize in the prerecorded singing of one Sofia Altunashvili. Her pure-toned voice, carried like a feather on exhale, rings authentically for its vulnerability. It’s an unusual voice, an untrained voice, a voice unafraid of a misshapen psalm. As in the Tickmayer pieces, the violin feels thin and unchained, and puts into relief the spaciousness of strings dragging hands across water from methodical vessels. Their occasional interjects feel like proclamations from above, chances to restring the universal lyre. Still, there is a feeling of oppression to this piece, as if the sky had become weighted with death, so that the lively center almost blinds. Even more cinematic in feel than the Tickmayer, Kancheli’s hymnal cast turns wine into water in a single tracking shot.
Equally affecting, if by relatively compressed dynamic force, is César Franck’s Piano Quintet in f minor (1878/79), which occupies program center. A dramatic and chromatically ecstatic work that met with criticism at the time of its premiere, it also makes expert use of its formidable combination of instruments. What appears short and sweet by name becomes epic in performance as Kremer and his colleagues muscle their way through the first movement with heartfelt aplomb, chipping away at the music’s calcified soul as they proceed. Each drift into the major is a barrel over the waterfall of reality. The most genuine passages are the quietest. On that note, the second movement turns an elegiac frame into a window on fertile land. The legato phrasings of the final Allegro, then, are a bittersweet harvest, tempered by the promise of winter’s freeze. In anticipation of that cold, the piano holds a fire in its belly, changing from blue to orange to white as echoes return with nourished grief. For indeed, mourning is the final message of even the brightest day. The tinge of mortality knows no limits of sun.
Garth Knox: Saltarello (ECM New Series 2157)
Garth Knox
Saltarello
Garth Knox fiddle, viola, viola d’amore
Agnès Vesterman violoncello
Sylvain Lemêtre percussion
Recorded December 2009, Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera, Lugano
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Garth Knox describes Saltarello, his second nominal disc for ECM’s New Series following 2008’s D’Amore, as “a mobile structure of musical ‘snapshots’ taken from nearly one thousand years of music.” As the former violist of the Arditti Quartet, Knox gained in-depth knowledge of music by living composers, all the while strengthening his relationship to the viola d’amore and folk-grounded fiddling, and compresses that knowledge into a roaming program. Knox has also developed his voice as a composer, as demonstrated by his Fuga libre for viola solo, which juxtaposes fiery arpeggios with moonlit pizzicato diffusions, glissandi, and harmonic overlays. This cellular approach is writ large across the album’s full breadth, which for the most part traverses centuries-old lineages. Joining Knox on his time travels are cellist Agnès Vesterman and percussionist Sylvian Lemêtre.
On the deepest end of the spectrum we encounter works of medieval masters Hildegard von Bingen and Guillaume de Machaut. The former’s lilting poetry, liturgical and solemn to its ashen core, comes out all the more authentically in the intimate setting, while the latter’s Tels rit au ma[t]in qui au soir pleure adds percussion in Sephardic spirit. Three dances from the 14th century speak further to an ancient aesthetic uncluttered by the discontents of modernity, resonating instead through the viola d’amore’s singing body. Here, too, the percussion balances luminescence opposite Knox’s originary tone. A handful of traditionals takes us into less definable territory, where Appalachian folk song and Irish fiddling meet in Black Brittany in limber arrangement with cello, and a trio of Irish tunes under the title of Pipe, harp and fiddle turns temerity into joy through a prism of bells and drums.
A dip into the font of the Baroque gives up the ghosts of Henry Purcell and Antonio Vivaldi. Where one feels steeped in downright cinematic tragedy, the other crucibles a concerto originally written for viola d’amore and orchestra down to its lead and bass lines, so that the striking geometries of each movement, from dancing to slumbering to dancing again, mold a beautiful sculpture of exuberance.
Bolstering all of this is contemporary Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s Vent nocturne for viola and electronics, which was written especially for Knox. The first of its two movements bears the title “Sombres miroirs” (Dark Mirrors), the second “Soupirs de l’obscur” (Breaths of the Obscure). The piece includes the composer’s own breathing, as well as the amplified sound of the bow drawn across a string, in a mood that best recalls Sofia Gubaidulina’s String Quartet No. 4. It’s a windblown reverie, opened and not merely enhanced by the technological overlay. It is sometimes restless and draws from a relatively stark palette, even as glass harmonica-like drones bleed into frame as if they were time itself. Splitting the two movements even as it binds them is John Dowland’s Flow My Tears, a song last heard under ECM auspices with words on In Darkness Let Me Dwell. It is, like the album as a unit, a prayer that looks itself in the mirror and neither smiles nor frowns, but takes in the entire face, scars and all, as something greater than the sum of its features.
Meredith Monk: Songs of Ascension (ECM New Series 2154)
Meredith Monk
Songs of Ascension
Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble
Ellen Fisher, Katie Geissinger, Ching Gonzalez, Meredith Monk, Bruce Rameker, Allison Sniffin voices
Bohdan Hilash woodwinds
John Hollenbeck percussion
Allison Sniffin violin
Todd Reynolds Quartet
Todd Reynolds violin
Courtney Orlando violin
Nadia Sirota viola
Ha-Yang Kim violoncello
The M6
Sasha Bogdanowitsch, Sidney Chen, Emily Eagan, Holly Nadal, Toby Newman, Peter Sciscioli voices
Montclair State University Singers
Heather J. Buchanan conductor
Recorded November 2009, Academy of Arts and Letters, New York
Engineers: James Farber and Paul Zinman
Assistants: Nelson Wong and Sean Mair
Editing engineer: Paul Zinman
Location Recording Service: SoundByte Productions Inc., New York
Mixed at Avatar Studios, New York by James Farber, Manfred Eicher, and Meredith Monk
Assistant: Akihiro Nishimura
Produced by Manfred Eicher
These pieces grew out of inspiration from poet Paul Celan, whose “Song of Ascents” suggested heavenly upward motion, and by extension a project to explore the sacrality of directions. Fortuitously, composer Meredith Monk was asked by artist Ann Hamilton to perform on site in Geyserville, California, where an eight-story tower with staircases in the shape of a double helix awaited Monk and her dedicated musicians. The beauty of the image, despite its live-giving implications, is that a helix has no up or down—or, rather, embodies both simultaneously—so that divinity comes to be expressed through suspension of the body.
As Monk’s subtlest assemblage, Songs of Ascension births a masterfully realized bioform. I use the adverb not lightly, because only mastery could stretch such a stable tightrope between being and non-being and walk between the two as easily as falling. To her vocal montage Monk adds string quartet, percussion, and woodwinds, for an amalgamated effect of such intimate proportions that the seemingly massive roster only serves to compress the music’s molecules into a galaxy of interpretation: it holds its shape by strength in numbers, an ethereal note inked in long before the earth dotted it on the then-blank score of outer space.
Indeed, one might trace an evolution of global life in the album’s embedded structures. Four seasonal “variations” and three so-called “clusters” are its spiritual campgrounds, from which sparks fling themselves into the night sky as the firewood settles. Songs are intoned and invoked, touched by percussion and overlapping strings, and moving in unison renderable only through total corporeal commitment. Gatherings and inner psalms blur into one another until the topography changes into air. Whether in the pointillism of “cloud code” or the ricocheting pings of “burn,” the topographic circles of “mapping” or the piercing meditation of “fathom,” a consistency of vision prevails. The instrumental passages are just as vocal, the vocal just as instrumental.
Songs of Ascension brings the atmosphere down to soil level. It speaks a continuity of earth and sky, the elemental composition of which draws notecraft from the farthest reaches of the universe, which happen to reside between our ears.
Thomas Zehetmair/Ruth Killius: Manto and Madrigals (ECM New Series 2150)
Thomas Zehetmair violin
Ruth Killius viola, voice
Recorded May 2009 at Radio Studio DRS, Zürich
Engineer: Andreas Werner
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Violinist Thomas Zehetmair and his wife, violist Ruth Killius, break from their charter roles as one half of the widely acclaimed Zehetmair Quartet for a unique duo recital. In his album liner notes, Paul Griffiths says of the relationship between the two instruments, “What divides is also what binds,” and perhaps no summary could phrase it more accurately. The viola may often be mistaken as a mediator between the violin and the cello, a liminal instrument whose status in subordinate to either. In a setting like this, hearing music specifically written or arranged for the combination, it becomes an equal partner to the violin while retaining the edge of its voice: harmony through distinction.
The program casts a long shadow from 2006, when Heinz Holliger composed his Drei Skizzen (Three Sketches) for the duo, back to the undateable Icelandic folk song Ó min flaskan friða (A love song to a bottle), given a fresh coat of paint in an arrangement by Rainer Kilius. The latter’s pulsing, stone-textured polyphony opens the album, flinted until it sparks. Holliger’s pieces, by not so large a contrast, chart the passage of fire into darkness. The glassy spindles of “Pirouettes harmoniques” are, like so many of the composer’s works, genuine agents of atmosphere, and culminate in a rich, if breath-held, conclusion. Moments of self-reference also abound. The swirling gestures of “Danse dense” recall his Duo for violin and cello, while the “Cantique à six voix” resurrects the more ethereal moments of his Scardanelli-Zyklus. This last movement requires the violist to sing, thus bringing out an antique spirit behind the meticulous abstractions. Holliger’s music follows that of 20th-century individualist Giacinto Scelsi, whose 1957 Manto gives up half of the album’s title. This piece, in which the musicians employ scordatura tuning (as they do in the Holliger), is also in three parts. It makes slow, archeological work of its motifs. Killius sings here, too, only in a trembling incantation, a ritual on the verge of dissolution. Bohuslav Martinů’s Three Madrigals of 1947 is yet another tripartite composition. Its lines are toned and strong, moving from sharp to supple in a single movement. From muted strings and flowering trills come the exuberant dialogues of the final Allegro, which unspools a tower of Baroque stairs into flourish.
The last of the threes comes by way of Nikos Skalkottas. A student of Arnold Schoenberg whose stark, individual qualities as a composer are nakedly audible in the 1938 Duo recorded here. The first movement opens with scraping bows and interlocking lines, all coming together with a certain thickness of description. This foils the central Andante’s blurry sheen and frames the final movement, which percolates through a network of forgotten folk fragments. Occupying a different band of the folk spectrum is Midhouse Air. This 1996 composition by Peter Maxwell Davies references folk music from the Orkney Islands and reaps a field of exuberant dreams.
Two outliers in the program nevertheless blend seamlessly into their surroundings. Béla Bartók’s Duo, composed in 1902, captures the spirit of a faraway dance with presence of mind. In this compact, Neo-Classical gem, the musicians play the same melody, only one of them inverted and backward. Johannes Nied’s Zugabe (2004), on the other hand, is a jagged yet cohesive piece. It bears further dedication to the duo, and from the performance it’s clear as to why. Like two pieces of clay scratched before kilning, they bond through the heat of creation, brushing the recital’s scope with a love and professionalism that perhaps only a married couple can bring to the studio.
Georg Friedrich Händel: Die Acht Grossen Suiten – Smirnova (ECM New Series 2213/14)
Georg Friedrich Händel
Die Acht Grossen Suiten
Lisa Smirnova piano
Recorded May 2007, May-June 2008, and Feburary 2009 at Schloss Goldegg, Austria
Engineer: Jens Jamin
An ECM Production
This is not the first time that music from Georg Friedrich Händel’s Suites de Pieces pour le Clavecin (a.k.a. the “Eight Great Suites”) of 1720 has appeared on ECM. Pianist Keith Jarrett recorded for the label’s New Series imprint a selection of suites by Bach’s near contemporary in 1993, and with it endorsed an affirmative reassessment of these exceptional works. Several complete recordings have since been issued, and many more predate it on vinyl, so the press release’s claim that these pieces are “too rarely brought together on disc” is, in fact, moot. Paul Nicholson’s cycle for Hyperion, recorded on harpsichord a year after Jarrett and distinguished by its highly embellished repeats, was a notable companion. Two further accounts have been issued this year (2014) alone. The first, by Richard Egarr for Harmonia Mundi, also opts for harpsichord, while the second, by Danny Driver for Hyperion, joins this 2012 release from Vienna-based Russian pianist Lisa Smirnova as a formidable contender for piano renditions. Smirnova would seem to marry the best of those recent followers, combining Egarr’s charm and Driver’s vibrancy with idiosyncratic success.
Although Händel humbly called these pieces “lessons,” their exact purpose is unclear. Their difficulty is, however, anything but and comprises an earthly counterpart to J. S. Bach’s heavenward considerations at the keyboard. For Smirnova, it is timeless music all the same, as attested by the five years of preparation and careful study she poured into it before a single studio microphone was switched on. Just as intriguing and well considered as her performance of the suites is the order in which she plays them, beginning as she does with the Suite No. 2 F Major HWV 427. A subtle yet bold choice of introduction, it lowers us into Händel’s pond so that we might see the ripples for what they are: as beautiful disturbances brought to life by a human touch. In the latter vein, the suite highlights Smirnova’s technical prowess: her syllogistic approach to the binary Adagios, balance of fluttering trills and steady pacing in the Allegros, and exquisite pedaling throughout.
The suites are full of idiomatic variety and avoid formal suite structure altogether. Consequently, Smirnova’s immediate jump to the Suite No. 8 F Minor HWV 433 makes as much sense as the composer’s elision of a Sarabande in the same (this peculiarity also marks the set’s most Baroque Suite No. 1 A Major HWV 426, which Smirnova places second to last). Thus foregrounded, this final suite elegantly flaunts its darker, more mature wardrobe. The extraordinarily lovely Allemande exemplifies both Händel’s sensitivity as a composer and Smirnova’s as a performer, legato phrasings and all. The concluding Gigue, too, shows us her grace and her ability to be fortuitous without tripping over prosody.
The Suite No. 4 E Minor HWV 429 and Suite No. 5 E Major HWV 430 are the only consecutive pairing. The echoing beginnings and sportive finish of the one sit comfortably alongside the dreamy core of the other. Next, the Suite No. 3 D Minor HWV 428 proceeds with gusto. The fantastic keyboard coverage of its Prelude recalls the grandeur of Bach’s organ works and opens a multivalent interface toward the gargantuan Courante. Simple in design yet expansive in effect, its octave voicings in the left hand and spurring trills in the right keep the final Presto in its sights, inspiring some of the set’s most virtuosic control of dynamics. By contrast, the Suite No. 6 F Sharp Minor HWV 431 portions itself more conservatively, keeping its inner fire audible but in constant check.
Händel mixes things up yet again in the Suite No. 7 G Minor HWV 432, for which he adapts the Overture of his cantata Clori, Tirsi e Fileno HWV 96. Here Smirnova puts on the air of a harpsichordist, her style brisé lending bite to every tantalizing swerve. This fullest of the suites is a veritable summation of the whole. From the salon-like Andante to the affirmative Passacaglia, it draws on many autobiographical roots until a new tree is born. Smirnova may be just one of many leaves on its ever-growing branches, but among them holds the sun in frame, her heart glowing green against cloudless sky.
(To hear samples of Die Acht Grossen Suiten, click here.)
Dario Castello/Giovanni Battista Fontana: Sonate concertate in stil moderno (ECM New Series 2106)
Dario Castello
Giovanni Battista Fontana
Sonate concertate in stil moderno
John Holloway violin
Lars Ulrik Mortensen harpsichord
Jane Gower dulcian
Recorded June 2008 at Propstei St. Gerold
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
John Holloway has charted a veritable history of the Baroque violin across the waters of ECM’s New Series, but perhaps none so tantalizing as the selections he has assembled for this benchmark recording. Holloway notes a special affinity for Dario Castello (1590-1658) and Giovanni Battista Fontana (1571-1630), composers whose works he played as interludes in vocal music concerts early on in his career. Now, nearly four decades later, he allows them the full force of center stage.
This program’s featured sonatas denote a time when the violin was coming into its own as a melodic lead (where before it was merely a consort instrument) and the portability and projection of the fagotto, an early incarnation of the bassoon known also as the dulcian, replaced the viola da gamba as the bass line in chamber ensembles. Historical bassoon specialist Jane Gower plays the dulcian alongside Holloway—with whom, as always, is harpsichordist Lars Ulrik Mortensen. It’s a formidable trio playing formidable music, but with a graciousness born of knowledge and experience.
In her book Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music, musicologist Susan McClary brilliantly describes Dario Castello’s instrumental pieces as latching onto “a succession of impulses—some ordered with respect to goals, to be sure, but others producing extended passages of hovering.” Such a characterization might easily carry over into the concerto, to which this music represents a transitional link. Castello’s distinctly Venetian ornaments and flair for ecstatic denouements make of the listening—and, one can only imagine, the performing—a rewarding experience. The album is bookended by six sonatas from his two massive books of the same. All but two, the Sonata Prima à Sopran Solo and the Sonata Seconda à Sopran Solo, feature the dulcian. Those without boast a staggering variety of speeds, dynamics, and textures. Holloway and friends negotiate transitions between slow, reflective stretches of beauty and their cathartic outbursts with ease, and by those changes underscore a grand (but never grandiose) sense of development. Sonatas with the dulcian outweigh the potential complexities of the combination with awareness of line and form. Like masterful Celtic knotters, composer and musicians attend to every curve. Gower’s contributions (note especially the Sonata Ottava à due. Sopran e Fagotto) add depth of character to Mortensen’s sparkling frame, while Holloway enlivens the music’s cyclicity with meticulous intonation. The concluding Sonata Ottava à due. Sopran e Fagotto indeed brims with dramatic finality and, for its quick-witted arpeggios and filigreed structure, is the most virtuosic of them all.
It’s only natural that the music of Giovanni Battista Fontana, closest in style to Castello’s, should occupy the program’s center. Here we are treated to seven of his concerto sonatas, of which four do without the dulcian. To these Holloway brings a rustic energy by means of his bow, yielding and dancing in a veritable profusion of flora and fauna. Fontana, it might be said, was even more of an expository composer than Castello, as evidenced by tactile Sonata Terza Violino Solo and flowing tempi of the Sonata Sesta Violino Solo. Even more so with the dulcian in tow, as in the charged interactions of the Sonata Decima Fagotto e Violino. If these pieces seem more temperate, however, it’s only because the transitions between subdivisions are less explicit, marking as they do a time of great invention in the Italian sonata, so dutifully preserved for our own desire and pleasure for countless years to come.
Duo Gazzana: Poulenc, etc. (ECM New Series 2356)
Duo Gazzana
Poulenc / Walton / Dallapiccola / Schnittke / Silvestrov
Natascia Gazzana violin
Raffaella Gazzana piano
Recorded June 2013, Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera, Lugano
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Produced by Manfred Eicher
In 2011, pianist Raffaella Gazzana and violinist Natascia Gazzana, better known as Duo Gazzana, made a quiet, if colorful, splash with Five Pieces, their first record for ECM’s New Series imprint. Navigating a recital comprised of works by Takemitsu, Hindemith, Janáček, and Silvestrov, the Gazzana sisters, in close collaboration with producer Manfred Eicher, demonstrated an acute sense of programming, technique, and integrity. Despite the title of their debut (named for the Silvestrov composition of the same name), which contained only four pieces, Silvestrov’s Hommage à J.S.B. (2009) comprises the heart of this truly pentagonal sequel. The Ukrainian composer offers three short movements: two Andantinos and one Andante, each the band of a deeper and more nuanced spectrum. The end effect is one of suspension. Although originally written for Gidon Kremer, the Hommage is uniquely informed here by the Gazzanas’ attention to detail. “The music of Silvestrov is not difficult in terms of notes,” Raffaella tells me in a recent interview, “but it’s so particular. In a way, you have to isolate yourself from the noise of life. He’s a composer who belongs to another time, bringing these beautiful melodies, as if from the past.” Indeed, as Wolfgang Schreiber observes in his album notes, the Gazzanas share in the spirit of the music they have selected, which like them finds newness in the old. Their unwavering commitment to urtexts only serves to emphasize what is unwritten in them, thus coaxing out hidden messages and spirits.
Radiating outward from the Silvestrovian center are two richer, denser works: Poulenc’s Sonate pour violon et piano (1942/43, rev. 1949) and William Walton’s Toccata for violin and piano (1922/23). Dedicated to the memory of Federico García Lorca, the Poulenc sonata is, in Raffaella’s estimation, a product of its time, as is clear in the first in third movements, designated “Allegro con fuoco” and “Presto tragico,” respectively. These are extroverted, almost flailing. Stravinsky looms large in the final, especially, but there are also—unwitting, perhaps—nods to the late Romantics and Ravel as the piece nears its enigmatic coda. “After expressing the suffering of the war,” Raffaella observes, “Poulenc wanted to finish with this dreamy catharsis. This was his character, shy but also enjoying life. He was, I think, a very elegant man, and in this sonata you can hear that.” Poulenc purists take note: the Gazzanas’ interpretation corrects mistakes left in the original French edition prepared by Max Eschig, which elides key signatures in the last page. After careful study of the facsimile, they believe to have arrived at the definitive version.
Although more obscure, Walton’s Toccata was the subject of Raffaella’s dissertation and is no less possessed of elegance. Nataschia’s opening proclamation stirs the piano’s waters with relish and fortitude, giving way to a virtuosic and starkly exuberant foray, pocked by haunting, probing depressions. Although written in the composer’s 20s, it smacks of maturity and daring-do. Raffaella: “I am always impressed by the piece’s improvisational elements. At the time he was working on it, Walton was planning a jazz suite for two pianos and orchestra. Although it never panned out, you can hear this influence throughout the Toccata. The beginning contains no tempo or bar divisions. You just have to go with it.”
Two further works draw the album’s outer circle. First is Schnittke’s Suite in the Old Style. Originally composed for two 1965 films (Adventures of a Dentist and Sport, Sport, Sport) by director Elem Klimov, Schnittke arranged these five selections for violin and piano in 1972. Its moods are crisp and compelling. Especially moving are the Minuet and the spirited Fugue. Only the final movement, marked “Pantomime,” has the surreal touches one might expect of the composer. Still, it is playful and fragile, ending with a mystery.
Tartiniana seconda (1956), by the 20th-century Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola, concludes. Referencing Tartini, this divertimento spreads a beautiful carpet across its four Baroque-inspired movements. “This piece enjoys great popularity in Europe,” Raffaella explains, “especially in Italy. It makes exclusive use of canons, pastorale, and variations: all forms that belong to the past.” At times ponderous and lyrical, at others swirling with ornament and invention, it culminates with a set of emphatic statements from both musicians. Of all the pieces on the album, it is the most architectural. This is no coincidence: “It helps to have the score in hand when listening, because it’s as much for the ears as it is for the eyes. In the opening Pastorale, for instance the piano plays the violin’s lines exactly, but staggered and in reverse, while in the second Variation, it plays the exact reverse, bar for bar.” The Tartiniana also gives contrast to the freer forms of Walton, lending finality and flourish to this exquisite sophomore program.
Coinciding with the release of this disc was the Duo Gazzana’s North American concert premiere when, on May 2, they performed as part of 2014’s Look & Listen Festival in New York City. For this performance, they chose the Silvestrov and Poulenc pieces from the new album, and enchanted the audience with their grace, sensitivity, and mutual resonance. Hearing this music live brought home a vital point in relation to the album’s core philosophy. Because the nature of past and future is immaterial, the only true reality of this music can be the here and now of performance and listening. On this point, Raffaella has the final word: “Chamber music has ever been one of the most beautiful expressions of liberation, one that tests the ability of performers to listen to one another in dialogue. These peculiarities attract us and in our interpretations we try to emphasize them. All the study we put into these pieces is just the grammar. But grammar must be spoken to come to life. Nowadays, it’s easy to speak without caring what other people think. Chamber music ensures we never fall into that trap. Sure, there are good performers, but it’s obvious when they’re performing only for themselves. Chamber music is, quite simply, enjoyable. It’s so beautiful to share it with such a caring musical partner, and with the listener in turn. When you do something out of love, you transmit this love to others. And people can hear this.”
(See this article as it originally appeared for Sequenza 21. To hear samples of this album, click here.)
Robert Schumann: Geistervariationen – Schiff (ECM New Series 2122/23)
Robert Schumann
Geistervariationen
András Schiff piano
Recorded June 2010, Historischer Reitstadel, Neumarkt
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Pianist András Schiff, best known for his surveys of Bach and Beethoven, combines the former’s austerity and the latter’s dynamism in this, his second ECM reckoning with Robert Schumann. More so than the first, the present program tracks a composer stepping out from Beethoven’s shadow and into a light very much his own. As any Schumann interpreter perhaps must, Schiff brings awareness of attendant shadows as well. These he evokes through a balance of restraint and transparency.
To be sure, the Papillons (1829-31) one of Schumann’s earliest piano works (it is his Opus 2), benefits from just such a well-rounded approach. This collection of 12 innovative vignettes linked in brazen montage is as colorful as it is compact. Indeed, each section would feel like the beginning of a longer excursion were it not already so elaborate. The C-sharp Waltz and Waltz in D are notably filigreed in this manner, while the playful chromatism of the Polonaise in D leaves a tannin-rich aftertaste.
The first sonata, his Opus 11, follows. Written in 1835 and dedicated to his future wife, Clara, it is an effusive and utterly heartfelt work, one from which Clara would draw themes for her own compositions. From the introduction alone, it’s clear that Schiff has hit upon the right formula. The modest Aria that follows is, at just over three minutes, a lovely foil to its 13-minute predecessor, and all the more enchanting for it. Even in his propriety, Schiff teases out an epic flow from its underlying fortitude. The final two movements pulse with theatricality. The last is engaging from the first, not least for Schiff’s handling of its quieter passages, the sonata’s most delicate. Through both jagged stitching and smoother threadings of the needle, a brocade of melody and atmosphere emerges that works lyrically, but with a certain sense of muscle that is distinctly Schumann.
The Kinderszenen or “Scenes from Childhood” (1838) are his most widely performed pieces and represent another innovation: children’s music for adults. Among the first of their kind, they have inspired many imitations but none quite so charming and musically direct. Moments of quietude and solitude increase among those of play as they drift onto darker, more dreamlike avenues, culminating in the grimly apportioned “Der Dichter spricht” (The Poet Speaks). Whether opaque or translucent, all 13 are suffused with a spirit that in Schiff’s hands feels as fresh as the ink drying on the original score.
On the subject of original scores, the Fantasy in C of 1836 will be either the decisive or divisive hinge, depending on your taste. Schiff works vitally through the first two movements, his left hand working overtime in support of the flowering right. Furthermore, he brings out that special stream of consciousness that pervades even the softest moments of Schumann’s writing at its most mature. In a brief liner note, Schiff delights in his possession of a first-version manuscript of the third and final movement. In this iteration, Schumann revives the final theme of the first movement—a strategy later scrapped for its pedantry. For the tried-and-true, Schiff tacks on the final, published version at the album’s end, leaving those used to the latter searching for it there. Perhaps a more useful strategy would have been to switch the two, but this is one pianist’s vision, and to it we are invited to abide. Whatever your preference, an inherent boldness perseveres.
The Waldszenen (1848-49) or “Forest Scenes” are similar in title to the Kinderszenen, but reflect a starkly different spirit. Schiff seems to draw energy directly from nature and experiences of observation for a reading that is understated yet lyrical. He brings enough insight to inspire but not to overwhelm, allowing the solace of each to occupy its respective niche with plenty of room to slumber.
Last on the program proper is Geistervariationen, or “Ghost Variations.” These pieces of 1854 are rarely performed, much less with such veracity, and comprise Schumann’s final piano work. Brokering some urgency here and there, the main theme and its five variations bespeak a tender privacy that is self-assured and wise, despite being written in the wake of a failed suicide attempt and soon before admission into an asylum. And yet, here it stands, calm and collected, in need of a wider circle of interpreters to make its visions known.
On the whole, this has the makings of a benchmark record, although some listeners will want to pair it with other classics in the field. These Kinderszenen, for instance, may not replace Horowitz’s beloved traversal of the same for CBS, but are a close second and well worth as much consideration as Schiff has put into them. Neither will Richter’s take on the C-Major Fantasy likely forfeit its place at the top for some (or any) time to come. Nevertheless, what we have here is another example of a profound relationship between artist and label, triangulating with a composer whose piano music glistens anew, as if of its own desire to be heard.
(To hear samples of Geistervariationen, click here.)
