András Schiff: Schubert C-major Fantasies (ECM New Series 1699)

June 9, 2013January 27, 2026 | Tyran Grillo

András Schiff
Franz Schubert C-major Fantasies

András Schiff piano
Yuuko Shiokawa violin
Recorded December 1998, Schloss Mondsee
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Produced by Manfred Eicher

It is tempting to say that the music of Franz Schubert (1797-1828) was ahead of its time. In the words of pianist András Schiff, “Schubert has such modernity—perhaps his time has only arrived now.” When encountering the 1822 “Wanderer” Fantasy for the first time, the characterization would seem to fit like a tailored suit. And yet, if we track its subsequent influence on composers as diverse as Liszt and Ligeti, it becomes clear that he was a composer of his moment, and it is this moment to which so many listeners have returned in their own wanderings. It might, then, be more accurate to say, “Modernity has such Schubert.”

In the first half of this recital disc for ECM, Schiff flows through the piece’s technical challenges like a river through a forest. As remarkable as this is, more intriguing are the ways in which he navigates its emotional mazes, for as a Schubert interpreter Schiff prefers poetry to drama. He gives requisite oomph to the magisterial introduction and from it elicits rounded gestures implying acres of pasture at a single touch of key. Yet his most commanding moments are the gentlest. Almost as still as mirrors, they reflect the leaf-patterned light that seeks them. Pulling away the vines, Schiff smells the moss, fecund with mystery. Knowledge of Schubert’s all-too-brief life inflects these passages darkly. From the spectral to the colloquial, the “Wanderer” spans the gamut of responses to landscape, though the Beethovenian desperation in the final fugue is undermined by an intermittent restraint that may sit oddly with fans of benchmark recordings like Richter’s or Pollini’s. Still, a resplendent sign-off gives the piece a total shape that is Schiff’s own.

His wife, violinist Yuuko Shiokawa, joins her partner for Schubert’s Fantasy D934, also in C major. Published posthumously in 1850, its proper score rested dormant beneath the recital stage until the 1930s. Emerging in a ghostly whisper, Shiokawa draws a spider’s thread through the piano’s microscopic tides. This is the dream to the former fantasy’s waking, made manifest through the strains of an inviting dance. Shiokawa brings appropriate balance of airiness and strident romanticism to what is arguably some of Schubert’s most beautiful writing. She partners well with the piano as a parallel voice—neither competing nor unified. Shiokawa also handles the technicalities with grace, particularly during a delightful passage that floats pizzicato in cascading undulations from Schiff’s fingers. Another flowery conclusion, if more succinct than the last, again closes the circle with confidence.

The recording here is noticeably soft in texture, heavy in the lower register. The combination sucks a bit of wind from Schubert’s sails in portions, especially in the finale of the “Wanderer.” Both Fantasies remain purest in their introductions and in their quieter turns. Such issues aside, with these two pieces Schubert shows that perhaps all music is fantasy.

<< Dave Holland Quintet: Prime Directive (ECM 1698)
>> Jan Garbarek/The Hilliard Ensemble: Mnemosyne (ECM 1700/01 NS)

Bent Sørensen: Birds and Bells (ECM New Series 1665)

May 21, 2013January 27, 2026 | Tyran Grillo

Bent Sørensen
Birds and Bells

Christian Lindberg trombone
Oslo Sinfonietta and Cikada
Christian Eggen conductor
Recorded October 1997 at NRK Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Audun Strype
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Visual practitioners have experimented with processes of decay for centuries. Their art has even become subject to it over time in varying degrees. Those working with sound, however, face different challenges in evoking the same. Electronic musicians have perhaps been most successful in this regard. Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin, better known as Boards of Canada, often subject their creations to a sort of virtual oxidation whereby the music loses its sheen and welcomes blemishes and distortions into its fold. William Basinski inadvertently took this one step further when he captured the process live while recording what came to be known as the Disintegration Loops. And now we have Bent Sørensen, whose quasi-spectralist sound-world dons the ECM New Series cloak in this program of instrumental works.

Most of the program places soloists inside an ad hoc group under the moniker Cikada Ensemble. The Lady and the Lark (1997) centers on viola amid a spray of other colors. And yet this series of five miniatures (the longest at three minutes) turns soloist into periphery, dotting a mandala-like framework with textured bodhisattvas. Amid fluttering intentions and water-drip effects, woodblocks touch the night with their toad-throated vibrations. Like paintings subjected to X-ray, they reveal underlying sketches. Such attention to microscopic detail further shapes the Funeral Procession for violin, viola and 6 instruments (1989), which similarly pulls up the carpet from the forest floor and shines a flashlight on all that squirms beneath. Like an astronomer, it focuses on the negative space as much as the stars, each nothing without its limpid backdrop.

By contrast, while The Deserted Churchyards for violin, cello, flute, clarinet, percussion and piano (1990) designates no central instruments, piano and flute act as quasar to its gaseous system. Their transcendent relays render invisible fissions audible. A tubular bell bends to the will of a shifting wind and drowns in a wisp of distance. From the title alone, one might imagine a still and neglected scene. We instead encounter a microbiome of scuttling activity. Desertion does not mean death; it means the freedom of kinesis to run its course unimpeded, except by its own zeal.

The Bells of Vineta for solo trombone (1990) dips freely into the Uncanny Valley. Christian Lindberg is the soloist, and his presence throughout is almost disturbingly vocal. With every muted slur he walks the line between cartoonish mockery and cathartic mourning. He travels with an eerie persistence in the tripartite title composition. Composed in 1995, it drops him into the larger palette of the Oslo Sinfonietta under the baton of Christian Eggen, who elicits a viscous, bleeding mosaic with wounds that sparkle from the touch of a healing ear. Each grows a tiny hand of light, plucking thorns of shadow from its own luminescent skin. Lindberg again animates his playing vocally, closing and separating to the pulse of a larger body. The result is a Doppler effect of the soul, the tinnitus of collected verses that make up any life. The occasional rhythmic passage cuts through the fog, each a tadpole swimming in the piano’s darkened well, a place where reality and childhood intermingle like ink and water, respectively. References to George Crumb, Gideon Lewensohn abound inside these cellular whispers, dreams yet to be dreamt and whose realization flowers with the tide’s recession.

The Cikada Quartet draws a curtain with The Lady of Shalott (1993), which allows us to feel water and glass as if they were the same. Yet the cut of its passage is less like the boat in the famous John William Waterhouse painting…

…and more like the threads in William Holman Hunt’s rendering, spilling from their loom with all the profusion of Christmas yet clipped by cerebral destruction. These are the paths we have taken, and they lead us all to where we began.

And on that note, these pieces, if only by virtue of their programming, exist as part of a phosphorescent whole. They arch their backs along the edge of a crescent moon, feeding off the oscillation of the night. By the humble touch of a fingertip to string and bone, their effect births as much as it dissolves. Though the foliage may change, the branches pulse in synapses of life. There is destiny in these leaves and it quivers with every verdant breath. In this music, sun and moon can touch each other without the slightest hint of destruction, for in that contact they acknowledge having been spun from the same breath.

<< Misha Alperin w/John Surman: First Impression (ECM 1664)
>> Keith Jarrett Trio: Tokyo ’96 (ECM 1666)

Eleni Karaindrou: Dust of Time (ECM New Series 2070)

May 17, 2013July 29, 2013 | Tyran Grillo

The Dust of Time is the last film of Theo Angelopoulos, a status it attained only after the Greek filmmaker unexpectedly disappeared from the mortal landscape in 2012. This film was the second in a trilogy begun with The Weeping Meadow and set to be completed by The Other Sea, in production at the time of his passing. It is at once his most complex and simplest film. Because it is his last, we may feel tempted to see it as the capstone to his oeuvre, a summary and reflection of things past. We might also experience it as an inception, a regression into birth.

“Nothing ended. Nothing ever ends.” The voice of our protagonist. As in Ulysses’ Gaze, his name is A (Willem Dafoe), this time a director making a film about his parents’ perseverance in the post-Stalinist era. Sweeping through Italy, Germany, Russia, Kazakhstan, Canada, and the US, its manifold narratives take shape through soft address. A for anonymous. A for atrophy. A for apotheosis.

The film works on multiple levels. One finds A in the backwash of the tense politics that so fascinate him. His own film faces logistical difficulties, the weight of which, when combined with that of personal demons, seeks to break him. His anxieties shuffle into level two: his parents’ tale. Here the reality of cinema comes to life, indistinguishable from A’s own.

A clandestine exchange on a train introduces us to his father, Spyros (Michel Piccoli), whose twisting of the system has earned him an identity and the chance to see his beloved again.

A man hands him a fake passport: “From now on, you’re playing with time.” Words to live by for A in the present, and a clue into the film’s title. Like the coating on old stock, dust plays with the imagery of our experiences in microscopic dances of light and shadow, holds those experiences like a bottle holds wine. As A watches archival footage of communist propaganda, a patch of light covers his eyes like a protective mask.

As in so many moments of what follows, he bleeds into the biography he imagines. Witness in that alternate time his mother, Eleni (Irène Jacob). See the many border crossings etched into her face, the force of her abandon in the arms of the only other human being on her radar.

“It’s you. You’re here,” she says to Spyros, holding him at long last.

At the station, a crowd gathers before a statue of Stalin, disperses, and leaves us dangling in A’s pragmatic concerns.

He surveys the margins of a soundtrack rehearsal, thus enacting one of Angelopoulos’s deepest intertextual sequences. Dafoe cues a melody for a dance in the film (a dance that comes later, in the comfort of water).

Although I hesitate to compare Angelopoulos to Tarkovsky, I cannot help but see the ringing phone that interrupts the rehearsal as an analogue to the unexpected call that startles the heart of the Zone in Stalker. Dafoe answers it, only to be confronted with voiceless street noise. He hopes it is his daughter, also named Eleni, and fills the studio with her name in vain. He returns home to find his daughter missing, and on her bed his mother’s lost letter to Spyros.

Back in their story, Spyros and Eleni are captured in the wake of their lovemaking, leaving only tire tracks and brokenness to show for their catharsis.

This inspires a series of letters that she knows will never reach him. She flees to Siberia with their son and puts him on a train to Moscow in the winter of 1956.

Her heart allows room for Jacob (Bruno Ganz), a man whose head is a museum of broken statues: monuments whose bodies have dilapidated yet whose messages resound.

A’s daughter’s room is the physical equivalent. She has plastered her walls with heads of popular culture, each a window into aural upheaval and antidisestablishmentarian politic.

Like the soundscape that wafts in from the streets, they carry echoes of lost music, giving reason to a “strange anticipation” in A’s weary body. Together they are the song of a city greeting the new century. Later A stands before a movie theater, and in that moment realizes that his daughter’s collage is like the cinematic pantheon of which he is but a lost builder.

“For me there is no return. My destiny takes me somewhere else,” says Eleni to Jacob. She tells him to let her go, that no matter what happened between them she is someone else’s. Yet Jacob yearns for that return and finds its simulacrum decades later when Eleni and Spyros surprise A with a homecoming. It rings strangely hollow, however, and Jacob arrives in the hopes of reigniting what once so fleetingly was. (In a brief encounter, A admits to him, “I’m constantly traveling. Sometimes I don’t even know where I am.”) Jacob bears his soul to Eleni, invites her to touch the images burned into his mind. The trauma wells up in him. He raises his voice, as if he were onstage. He makes of life a theatre, replays scenes like an obsessed director.

Only with this emotional breach does A gain access to his mother’s youth, finding her in the mist in violent embrace. The camera revolves around them, as would a planet around a sun.

The final blow for him comes when his daughter threatens to end her life. In the presence of vagabonds and police, she gives in to her grandmother’s pleading, unlike Jacob who thereafter implores an invisible God before throwing himself into a river.

In the wake of these tribulations, A shares a ghostly moment, reflected on a passing car that bisects a line of eye contact with his ex-wife, Helga (Christiane Paul).

As Eleni falls ill, her hand drips with water.

At her deathbed, a great wind floods the room with the exhalations of an impending storm.

“Eleni, wake up,” says Spyro. “I’m coming to get you.” He reaches for her.

The girl takes his hand instead. It also drips.

Here is where the film manifests a third level: the pliant corridor of death along which our feet will all someday tread. For as young Eleni and her grandfather step out of the window into the falling snow, we feel in their traversal of logical space an openness of reason. Hand in hand, they run through the streets, deserted like the universe.

One can hardly discuss this film without noting Angelopoulos’s preference for back shots. Each portraits its respective character more insightfully than any close-up, and in the end shuffles our recollections until they unify.

A particularly moving example, however, is mother Eleni’s hair floating in the mist of her impossible reunion with A.

She is creation incarnate, the bringer of tears where only there is desert. But what is a desert without its sky? That is where the music comes in.

Eleni Karaindrou
Dust of Time

Sergiu Nastasa violin
Renato Ripo violoncello
Maria Bildea harp
Vangelis Christopoulos oboe
Spyros Kazianis bassoon
Antonis Lagos french horn
Dinos Hadjiiordanou accordion
Eleni Karaindrou piano
Camerata – Friends of Music Orchestra
Natalia Michailidou piano
Hellenic Radio Television Orchestra
Alexandros Myrat conductor
Recorded January (tracks 9 and 15) & March 2008 at Megaron, Athens, Greece
Edited and mixed July 2008

Perhaps more than in any other film, Eleni Karaindrou’s score for Dust of Time wavers in the shadows. “To write the music I had to look for the film’s secret codes,” says Angelopoulos’s trusted composer, “I had to bring the essence of things to the surface and shed intense light on the sound colors underlining the timelessness of nostalgia.” This time the instrumental colors are most intimate, honed to evocative perfection by violinist Sergiu Nastasa, cellist Renato Ripo, and harpist Maria Bildea. Hailing from Romania and Albania, this trio brings its own traditions and nuances to a permeable set of motives. Of these, the “Dance Theme” and its variations figure centrally in both film and soundtrack. It is the music we hear in the pivotal rehearsal scene, homage to Karaindrou’s voicing and intuitive matching. “Waltz by the River” crystallizes the theme’s core values, adding accordionist Dinos Hadjiiordanou into the watercolor mix. As in so many of Angelopoulous’s films, dance animates the passage of time, the degradation of history, and the preservation of memory. Karaindrou’s attention to every movement wipes clean emotional dumping grounds for tragic pasts, purges war-ravaged biographies of their blood in single strokes.

Because the soundtrack’s 45 minutes were culled from over 100 minutes of music, what we encounter is a powerful skeleton. Between the harp and violin duet of “Le Temps Perdu” and the concluding oceanic currents of “Adieu,” Karaindrou figures the power of the melody with as much tact as her arrangements thereof. Along the way, threads unravel to reveal the tumult of wandering and exile in “Seeking,” while passages like “Solitude” speak in monosyllables of enchantment.
Dreams are not beyond us. They return. Like the old reels of A’s interest, they hold their images until the light of waking passes through them anew. Every picture, every note on a staff, is a voyage waiting to begin.

Eleni Karaindrou: Eternity and a Day (ECM New Series 1692)

May 13, 2013January 27, 2026 | Tyran Grillo

“Open always, always watching, the eyes of my soul.”
–Dyonisios Solomos

The Film
An ancient city, lost beneath the ocean. The stuff of history. Time, a young voice tells us, is “a child playing jacks on the beach.” A piano wafts through the image like a breeze carrying scents and sounds of retrospection—the film’s leitmotif. Here the past functions not as a repository for memory but as a palimpsest for a mind still practicing. It is the mind of Alexander (Bruno Ganz), an aging poet whose dark trench coat cuts a crow’s wing against director Theo Angelopoulos’s wintry palette. A slow approach to a window guides us to the film’s title by way of Alexander’s boyhood. The camera follows him as if through a ghost’s eyes.

When we first encounter Alexander as he is now, he holds a taste of the sea in his mouth…

…and clutches his throat as if breathing were a labor. This momentary inability to get words out is both curse and blessing: an obvious malady for a man of letters, but also a release from the world’s imploration to dress its dreariness in pretty semantics.

The sea follows Alexander. It is the tail of the dying comet that is his life. His dog looks toward that same sea, a place where music and memory are engaged in dance. A terminal diagnosis looms over him (his constant pill-popping brings rhythm to the narrative), mist over a landscape of uneven hills. He feels silence encroaching and fills it with regrets of unfinished work, of “words scattered here and there.”

Alexander welcomes a boy (Achileas Skevis)—an Albanian vagrant washing windows at stoplights for petty cash—into his car. His whim begins a final poem, a magnum opus borne of action and sacrifice that can never manifest as ink and paper but rather unspools across light and film. Yet while this charity saves the boy from capture by police and gives us the film’s first smile, it comes at the cost of ignoring the other boys into whose meager routine of survival he had fallen.

Alexander knows the ripple effect of his actions. He feels the churning waters of time as a swallowing force. Its life-giving properties are so far removed from the here and now that it is all he can do to plunge his feet into the mud of recollection. After spending a lifetime waiting for progress, he will spend another waiting for regress. Angelopoulos’s title does not compare eternity and a day, but equates them.

As Alexander prepares to leave his everyday existence and spend his remaining days in convalescence, he brings the dog to his daughter, Katerina (Iris Chatziantoniou). The contrast between her upscale apartment and her utter yearning for a transparent ancestry are but surface to the inner sanctum of her father’s raw linguistic materials. She displays her anxieties among the art objects of her living room, where a wall catches the circumference of a projected clock. As the film’s symbol par excellence, it hovers like a dedication page torn from its binding and pasted where a window might be. In this manner Katerina turns her glitches into quantifiable space.

During this visit we learn that Alexander is completing an unfinished 19th-century epic by Dyonisios Solomos. “The Free Beseiged,” as it is known, is mired in the Greek War of Independence, from which it draws blood to fill its pen. Alexander has been working on the project since the death of his wife, Anna (Isabelle Renauld), who comes to us in flashbacks. And while Katerina may not understand why her father would ever wish to graft his words onto another’s, she flows through him like the returning sea when he gives her letters written in her mother’s hand. Through her reading, Alexander is read anew, revitalized as if by the boy whose fate he has influenced.

The sea is a trance, pillow of scent-filled houses. Sleep and silence cohabit its ever-changing shoreline. Through her daughter’s voice, a resurrected Anna links newfound maternity with love, safety, and breath. The vulnerability of her body engenders absolute trust in, and safety for, her blossoming child. For Katerina is indeed a flower, the center of a family gathering in the sunlit prime of a warmer era. Even in life, Anna was constantly on the verge of dissolving, a wanderer in love. Alexander is moved beyond comfort, for he knows that his dissolution will bring him closer.

Like all reveries, this one is all the more poignant for its brevity and it is Katerina’s husband who breaks its spell. Put off by the presence of what in his eyes can be nothing more than a haggard vagabond, he tells Alexander he has sold the old house by the sea—the very house where Katerina tumbled into maturity—and that it will be demolished. He also takes unkindly to animals and questions any obligation to welcome the dog into his home.

The streets, paved in articulate indifference, keep Alexander in check. They are the insignia of a publisher far grander than anything he can contemplate with his ties to speech. In opening himself to a stranger, Alexander realizes he has found in the boy a beacon—not of hope, but of evenness. This balance is upset when he witnesses the boy being thrown into the back of a cargo truck.

He follows the vehicle to a shady warehouse where other urchins have been plucked from their rocks and are being sold into an invisible market. The boys, however, are wise to this and make a run for it in a ballet of quick thinking and broken glass.

In the ensuing chaos, Alexander saves the boy of his interest, giving all the money on his person in exchange. He puts the boy on a bus going toward the Albanian border, both in the hopes of losing him before he loses himself and in the hopes that there might be a home to return to.

The boy comes back to Alexander, having found a home in presence of the bearded stranger. He sings a children’s song from his homeland, tells Alexander of crossing the border, thereby revealing a likeminded fixation on language. Alexander takes him to the border, but they run when the boy tells him he has no one.

Alexander tells him the story of the poet Solomos (Fabrizio Bentivoglio), Greek but raised in Italy, who returned to his homeland when he heard the Greeks were rising against the Ottomans. He does not speak the language, and so he buys words from the locals. Across a night “sown with magic” he travels, reaching deep into his reservoir of sentiments to produce the “Hymn to Liberty.” It remains a significant verse for Alexander, a bid for freedom from language, through language.

In the end, he entrusts the dog to his housekeeper, Urania (Helene Gerasimidou), interrupting her son’s wedding to do so. Spectators hanging from the gates mirror those at the border, each a living puppet frozen in the wake of a changing tide.

This leaves the boy, Alexander’s only link, his only mirror. “You’re smiling, but I know you’re sad,” the boy tells him. Such contradictions—in the end, not really contradictions at all—are essential to Angelopoulos’s cinematic world, a world where light and dark are so permeable as to be unquestionable. For while Alexander’s cape is the shadow of his deteriorating self, of a body blurring into lifelessness, it is also a flag whose communication harnesses wind like a sail.

He is a man devoid of contact, yet who is touched by humanity; a man in self-imposed exile, yet who knows the landscape as if it were his own; a man known for words, yet who pays for them with emotional currency. The boy wants to say goodbye, but Alexander convinces him to stay, will not accept that his hand may bring about another end.

Thus the camera looks beyond the curtain into the reflecting pool of the human condition.

His films are unfinished, stitched yet tattered. In allowing their seams the privilege of coming undone, he delivers messages devoid of hyperbole. The zoom, for example, sheds its derivative qualities in such a context, seeking not to focus our attention so much as to remind us of limitations. As in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, the occasional close-up shocks with its candor, reaches into the pit of our complacency and stirs up the love we have forgotten. When Alexander turns his back on us, he turns his back on the world.

The Soundtrack
Composer Eleni Karaindrou has her finger so firmly on the pulse of Angelopoulos’s ethos that her flesh has melded with his images. Yet there is something more than the combination of sight and sound going on in Eternity and a Day, for this more than any other film she has soundtracked is an ode also to time.

Eleni Karaindrou
Eternity and a Day

Vangelis Christopoulos oboe
Nikos Guinos clarinet
Manthos Halkias clarinet
Spyros Kazianis bassoon
Vangelis Skouras french horn
Aris Dimitriadis mandolin
Iraklis Vavatsikas accordion
Eleni Karaindrou piano
String Orchestra La Camerata Athens
Loukas Krytinos director
Recorded March and April 1998, Athens Concert Hall
Engineer: Andreas Mantopoulos and Christos Hadjistamou
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The title of the first piece, “Hearing the Time,” would seem to say as much: just as Angelopoulos puts an eye to lens, so too Karaindrou puts an ear to history. She draws thick yet airy wool over our eyes, that we might view the world through the blur of fibrous experience. Over an expanse of archival strings we hear a distant relay between violin and accordion. These punctuations are not ruptures but voices from below. The composer at the keyboard elicits “By the Sea,” a humid snapshot that segues us into the mandolin accents and silken oboe line of the “Eternity Theme.” As Beethovenian cellos churn, we think back to its corresponding scene in the film, in which we find Alexander listening to this very music on the radio. He shuts off his mechanical translator and looks out across to the other apartment complex, where the same music flows from another window. “Lately” he muses, “my only contact with the world is this stranger opposite who answers me with the same music.” Perhaps true to character, he decides against pursuing this fascination: “It’s better not to know…and imagine.”

And imagine is all we can do when taking this soundtrack on its own terms. The theme echoes throughout its architecture, inflected differently by each soloist. A bassoon evokes tears colored by fate, while clarinets drip from the great beyond with tastes of once-forgotten joy. A traditional wedding dance fills the air with bright steps, contrasting almost painfully with the solitude of “Bus,” and lends relative sanctity to Ganz’s recitation in “The Poet.” Yet it is in a little piece called “Borders” that the fluidity of his embodiment is clearest. Through it we realize that harmony needs change.

Like the film itself, the score of Eternity and a Day creates a somewhere far removed from its content yet which is equally cinematic. It is a looking glass unto itself, a kaleidoscope named “then.”

<< Kenny Wheeler: A Long Time Ago (ECM 1691)
>> Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble: Drawn Inward (ECM 1693)

Trio Mediaeval: A Worcester Ladymass (ECM New Series 2166)

February 14, 2013April 8, 2014 | Tyran Grillo

Trio Mediaeval
A Worcester Ladymass

Anna Maria Friman voice
Linn Andrea Fuglseth voice
Torunn Østrem Ossum voice
Recorded February 2010, Propstei St. Gerold
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

It’s astonishing to reflect on the breadth that Oslo’s Trio Mediaeval has represented in just four albums. From sacred choral music of the 14th and 15th centuries to the more contemporary yet kindred writing of Ivan Moody, Sungji Hong, and Gavin Bryars, not to mention a visceral account of Norwegian folk songs, sopranos Anna Maria Friman, Linn Andrea Fuglseth, and Torunn Østrem Ossum have, since their 1997 debut, been at the forefront of a style of vocal blending that also distinguishes the Hilliard Ensemble, under whom they studied to bring out the finest of their abilities.

(Photo: CF-Wesenberg)

For this, their fifth ECM New Series album, they return to their namesake with a 13th-century Mass to the Virgin Mary, reconstructed from manuscripts found in a Benedictine Abbey in the English Midlands. When looking through the Worcester fragments—which survived Henry VIII’s purging sweep in the 1530s only because they were used to bind other codices—the singers found no Credo, and so commissioned Bryars to rectify their absence by contributing one, along with a Benedicamus Domino. As Friman further notes, today interpretation of music from the middle ages is at the whim of the performer and can be far removed from the religious bonds of its genesis. She and her cohorts embrace this severance wholeheartedly as a path to fresh performance, producing music not meant for concert audiences that breathes with its own flair (if not flare).

From the lilting cadence of the opening Salve sancta parens, it is clear that Trio Mediaeval has sculpted a sound-world all its own. In so gathering their winds together, the singers spin a theme for the ages that is at once entrenched in and severed from time. Most significantly, theirs is a space that listeners can inhabit. As two voices lock into a drone for the plainsong of a third, we can already sense the depth of technical achievement required to produce such seamless atmospheres. It is in this respect that A Worcester Ladymass stands out: in these three throats its technical attentions become, like those of the Hilliards, a fully embodied practice. One notices this in the meticulous pacing throughout. Striking enviable balance between interruption and pause, the gaps between phrases are neither contrived nor jarring. This is especially true of the Munda Maria, a vocal round that cleanses us from the inside. In such cyclical pieces as this and the Gloria, our three angels enact a Derridean sort of reiteration—which is to say, not mere repetition but rather a constant reformation of context. The same holds true of the Bryars Credo, which places a gentle stopper on the clock hands of their art, spinning one hand backward and the other forward. And while Byrars does craft a slightly dissonant edge, his changes are no less unexpected than, say, those in the Grata iuvencula of eight centuries ago.

Another remarkable feature is the fluid extension of syllables in the O sponsa Dei electa and the De supernis sedibus. Without falling into these open-mouthed traps, the Trio draws from them new webs of meaning. The brief addition of organ in the Benedicta / Virgo Dei genitrix and Agnus Dei only intensifies the celestial nature of those connecting lines. All of this makes the shorter pieces stand out in greater relief. Together, they form a sonic rondelle, which is illuminated by the light of the Mass interspersed among them. Much of that light is centered in the holy Sanctus. It serves the text as one might pray: kneeling and alone.

A Worcester Ladymass brings me back to the many early music recordings that enticed me as a novice listener. It finds its essence not in consolidation but through fragmentation, so that each section becomes a votive service unto itself. If the transcendence of the Sponsa rectoris omnium can be said to be representative of the whole, it communicates with an intuitive awareness of temporality that hovers in midair, not quite of heaven or of earth. For ages philosophers have tried to espouse the arbitrariness of the sign, but music such as this proves that the sign is life itself.

(To hear samples from A Worcester Ladymass, click here.)

Gesualdo: Quinto Libro di Madrigali (ECM New Series 2175)

December 5, 2012December 20, 2012 | Tyran Grillo

Carlo Gesualdo
Quinto Libro di Madrigali

The Hilliard Ensemble
Monika Mauch soprano
David James countertenor
David Gould countertenor
Rogers Covey-Crump tenor
Steven Harrold tenor
Gordon Jones baritone
Recorded November 2009 at Propstei St. Gerold
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher

If my grief pains you,
only you, my soul,
can turn it all to joy.

On first hearing madrigals by Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613), English writer Aldous Huxley proclaimed, “These voices—they’re a kind of bridge back to the human world.” In the mouths of the Hilliard Ensemble they certainly are. Baritone Gordon Jones cites the Prince of Venosa as a touchstone of the ensemble’s performing repertoire. And so, it is with practiced appreciation that they return to it as they take on his Fifth Book of Madrigals of 1611 in its entirety. Gesualdo finished his Sixth and final Book (he would leave fragments of an unfinished Seventh) in the same year, penning his first in 1594. Of the Fifth, Jones says, “The whole collection constitutes a gallery of dramatically lit portraits of human emotions with a heavy emphasis on the extremes of joy and despair.” On this note, the addition of soprano Monika Mauch and countertenor David Gould speaks to the range and color required of those extremes, and in this regard the ensemble emotes splendidly.

One can hardly discuss this music without mentioning its bold, mannerist dissonances. Written as it was by a man who had his wife and her lover murdered when he caught them in flagrante delicto and who subsequently receded into his own psycho-sonic cage, this can be no surprise. Even by today’s standards it rattles us. Yet to characterize Gesualdo’s output by so reductive a summation (dissonance, for example, was part and parcel of the madrigal idiom) would be to ignore the textually sensitive traditions of harmonic expansion upon which he built it. Despite being professedly “ahead of his time,” he was no enigma to his aristocratic contemporaries, being a particular favorite of Queen Christina of Sweden. For every gritty texture he loosed, a smoother one was in attendance, and we do well to remember the equal weight in both pans of the scale.

We have the Hilliard/ECM partnership to thank for already having done the composer justice with a sublime and direct rendition of his Tenebrae Responsories for the Christian Holy Week. Here that same trueness to the melodic line remains, and is so magnified by the bareness of its voices, by which the tortuousness we’ve come to expect lives by a more fluid name. If it lives anywhere, it is in the strange tenderness of Gioite voi col canto, which opens the collection with an autobiographical tinge:

Rejoice in song,
while I weep and sigh,
while tears choke my breath.
Alas, wretched heart of mine,
born for grief alone;
weep, but weep so much
that my mistress may be vanquished
by your tears, and then revert to seeing
my grief and pains in her.

The shifting tectonics of tenor lines and dulcet edge of Mauch’s gilding in the words’ weeping evocation is testament both to Gesualdo’s knack for comingling and to the sensitivity of the singers assembled at Propstei St. Gerold, where these works were so lovingly recorded. The charged weight of Itene, o miei sospiri rekindles these considerations, mixing “bitter weeping” with “loving song” in particularly adroit handling from the Hilliards. O dolorosa gioia falls into the same category of “painful joy,” a core theme of Book Five that finds further traction in Se vi duol il mio duolo. In both of these, the pathos of the text comes through tactfully. Death is another trope, as inescapable in the music as it is in us. From the heartfelt appeal of Occhi del mio cor vita (“Eyes, life of my heart”) and the lovesick resignation of Languisce al fin (“He who parts from his life languishes at last”) to the lachrymose accents of O tenebroso giorno (“O darkest day”), the music is practically dripping with it. Yet not all is so morose in this landscape, for there are also the flora of Felicissimo sonno, a heartfelt appeal to dreams as living threads to a love that cannot flourish in waking, and the intoxications of Correte, amanti, a prova (“Vie, lovers, in speed”) to soothe our weary countenances, to say nothing of the optimism that bids us a fond farewell in T’amo, mia vita (“I love you, my life”).

A small handful of these 21 madrigals stands out. The snaking turns of Mercè grido piangendo (“Have pity on me! I cry weeping”) showcase the coolness of the Hilliard’s peerless blend to the utmost, while the prototypically Gesualdan Tu m’uccidi, o crudele (“You are killing me, o cruel woman”) pulls out all the stops in its affective toolkit, achieving moments of sublime light. Finally, Se tu fuggi, io non resto, with its fluttering vowels and tight syncopations breathes with expert realization, even as its narrative voice bids us leave on the wings of cruelty.

Due to the subject matter and sheer variety of invention, and despite the pitch-perfect performances, this is no mere soundtrack for an idle afternoon. It asks us to steep in its brew until we begin to take on a bit of its flavor. Those who find beauty in the Tenebrae may encounter discomfort in these secular woes. But if this discomfort has anything to teach us, it is that the act of living depends on that very thing.

Jean-Marie Leclair: Sonatas – Holloway (ECM New Series 2009)

November 26, 2012November 26, 2012 | Tyran Grillo

Jean-Marie Leclair
Leclair Sonatas

John Holloway violin
Jaap ter Linden violoncello
Lars Ulrik Mortensen harpsichord
Recorded November 2006 at Propstei St. Gerold
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher

The biographies of composers can sometimes outweigh the notoriety of their music. Jean-Marie Leclair (1697-1764) is one such case. Born 1697 in Lyon, he left the city in his mid-twenties for Turin, where he sharpened his eye (and ear) for theatre and ballet and returned to Paris in 1723 to make a name for himself as a composer. Within a decade he was one of the most exciting violinists of his time, a pioneer in the French school of his instrument. By 1758 he had fallen on hard times. After leaving his wife, Leclair rejected the offers of his patron, the Duke de Gramont, to instead take lodgings unbefitting of his station in an unreputable part of the city. Six years later, a gardener would discover the composer stabbed to death in his vestibule. The gardener himself and Leclair’s nephew emerged as primary suspects, but no conclusive evidence was ever brought upon either (the most recent scholarship fingers the latter). One might think, in the wake of this tragedy, that the fruits of his endeavors would have bounded of their own accord into the public eye. This was not to be, and it is only with the advent of recording that his chamber works have grown into the recognition they deserve beyond musicological interest.

In a conversation included in the CD booklet, John Holloway is quick to place Leclair alongside the great violinist-composers under the bow of his acclaimed earlier ECM recordings: Biber, Muffat, Schmelzer, and Veracini. With cellist Jaap ter Linden and harpsichordist Lars Ulrik Mortensen, the British violinist takes on five selections from the opus 5 of 1734. Among the composer’s finest, the set yields a surplus of charm and virtuosity. While Holloway’s Leclair reads more conservatively than the fiery licks of his Biber, these sonatas are more about consistency than drama. To achieve this is no small feat, and requires fluid concentration of the musicians. That being said, the uniformity of dynamic patterning and phrasing will tire some listeners, who may feel it better suited as a light soundtrack to their activity. All the more reason to give it a deep listen the first time around.

Leclair’s time in Italy clearly rubbed off—not only because he follows the four-movement model of his predecessor, Arcangelo Corelli (in Turin, Leclair studied with Giovanni Battista Somis, himself a pupil of Corelli), but also because his deft blend of the Rococo and the Baroque sets him apart from the Parisian pack and speaks of a continental (known then as the gouts réunis, or “mixed taste”) perrsonality. The sonatas chosen here boast some of his subtlest inflections, and nowhere more so than the whimsical opening of the Sonata VIII in D major. This gives way to spirited color changes as the harpsichord continuo drops out for the tender Aria, only to make its triumphant return in the stately Andante before bristling with sprightly atmospherics in the dancing Allegro. Those wanting stronger excitements need look no further. This theatrical edge continues in the Sonata VII in a minor, in which a straightforward beginning yields two winged Allegros. Captivating harmonies between violin and harpsichord add to the airborne feel and give extra shine to Holloway’s trills.

One hears Italian pigments seeping through the opening Adagio of the Sonata I in A Major, the Aria of which weaves the more sensitive writing on this disc, as do the Largo and Aria of the Sonata III in e minor. The Sonata IV in B-flat Major carries this tender mission further in its Adagio, which sparks a fuse of complex proportions in an exhilarating Chaconna, a sonata unto itself.

This may not be as thrilling as Holloway’s previous recordings for ECM, and not one the newcomer may wish to start with, but Leclair’s music lives by its own rules of contrast. The intuitiveness of his harmonization and counterpoint, Holloway notes, begs for that same attentiveness in the performing. This becomes more obvious with each new listen, enfolding us in the depths of a music that breathes as it sings.

Veljo Tormis: Litany To Thunder (ECM New Series 1687)

November 13, 2012January 27, 2026 | Tyran Grillo

Veljo Tormis
Litany To Thunder

Veljo Tormis
Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir
Tõnu Kaljuste conductor
Recorded August 1998, Estonian Concert Hall, Tallinn
Engineer: Teije van Geest
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“I do not use folk song. It is folk music that uses me.”
–Veljo Tormis

Since the 1992 release of Forgotten Peoples, the first major survey of Veljo Tormis to be released outside of Russia, ECM has paved an international appreciation of the Estonian composer, whose choral output exceeds 500 pieces. More than number, it is the melodic and textual content of those pieces that asks of the listener attention to source, meaning, and atmosphere. Although so much of Tormis’s work is drawn from Baltic folk traditions, his project is more one of expression than of preservation. He paints a distinct amalgam of texts and motifs, so that what we are left with is a sonic trajectory that moves ever forward. There is no group more qualified to follow that trajectory than the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. Under the direction of Tõnu Kaljuste, these intensely talented singers breathe the music on Litany To Thunder as if it were their own.

dear girls dear maidens
where shall we go before the night sets in

How Can I Recognize My Home begins the program with a runo-song. This form finds its charge in the pre-Christian beliefs of the Baltic Finnic region, linking stanzas in a two-part round. On the surface a paean to nostalgia, it is more deeply a cartography of origins in which the voice becomes the thread that grows thinner with life and snaps only in death. Between the fatigue of travel and the cold springs that gurgle in wait of parched throats, the moon shines through it all like a maternal eye.

When the boys sang on the ship,
the girls thought it was an organ playing.
They could not imagine that the boys of their village
could sing so well.

Singing Aboard Ship (1983) is an Ingrian-Finnish folk song that features a call-and-response framework welded tight by the contralto of Karin Salumäe. The EPCC’s restraint is in full flower here, lapping at vessel’s edge with the reverence of lips pursed to a holy relic. It is an important setting, for it proves the power of song to be a guiding light through adversity. That the Finnic peoples exiled by the Soviet regime in the wake of World War II managed to preserve this tale is testament to that very fact.

You are earth-born, I am earth-born,
we are both black boil.

The Kalevala-inspired Curse Upon Iron (1972) showcases Tormis’s uncanny ability to soak us in a feeling. With its shamanic drum and tense use of silence, it peers into the heart of elemental forces and further into the human condition, which too often seeks to render those forces into tools of harm. The words reduce iron to its blood, to the evil that is its parasite. They even draw a line of affiliation to modern warfare, to the bane of technology. The furnace becomes a symbol of hatred fueled by temptation. Tenor Mati Turi and bass Allan Vurma bellow its fires, sustaining themselves through (if not on) sirens and shrieks of indignation.

And I, the child, then learned and learned,
I, little one, picked up the words.

In the wake of this aural forge, The Singer’s Childhood (1966) emerges as one of the most ethereal choral compositions to ever grace the ear. It is not only that its relative beauties are gentle enough to break apart from a sigh, but also because its appeal to nature as a source of art pulls our eyes from the upward swing of industrial and social progress and returns them to the wealth of activity and inspiration we have yet to regard on the ground.

The sea has fed us, the sea has watered us,
the sea has taken away many men from us.

Songs Of The Ancient Sea (1979) is overtly programmatic. Its technical admixture of whistling winds, cackling seagulls, and calling of shipmates lure the imagination from land. This piece is akin to performance storytelling, whereby the listener is not only engaged but also implicated in the action. A particularly moving section comes halfway through, when the tenor soloist laments a brother’s loss to the waves.

A hundred swordless men,
a thousand sworded men,
all the men from under a hill,
from the black earth.

The Bishop And The Pagan (1992/95) tells of Bishop Henry, whose death by the hands of a Finnish pagan farmer in 1158 is told from both sides. On the one hand is the memorial feast in Henry’s honor; on the other, an alliance with the victor. History changes places like shuffled cards, each obeisance a faltering shadow of reconciliation. In its careful balance of monastic solemnity and outright vilification, the vocal weave grows more resilient the more it is pulled.

Pour, Thunder, pour

The 1974 title composition for male choir shares similar touch points of battle, turning them into emblems of sacrifice. The meadows, overrun with chaos, funnel like sand through an hourglass, leaving a perfectly formed mountain of time.

I stepped into the house
a chair was brought to me
made of the bones of my geese

The Lost Geese is the forlorn tale of a maiden who must look after the geese on her family’s farm. The task proves more difficult than she imagined, however, when her geese are chased by demons into a spooky manor, where she is offered a meal of her charge. She throws their blood to the earth, where grows a tree populated with wildlife. This and How Can I Recognize My Home comprise the Two Estonian Runo-Songs, composed between 1973 and 1974. Sung as purely as the words are crystalline by sopranos Eve Härma and Kadri Ratt to the unobtrusive commentary of Marrit Gerretz-Traksmann at the piano, they wander without pause.

Tormis’s vitality and aesthetic properties connect the peoples of this music as the shore connects land and sea, establishing a fluid relationship between fields of geography and tradition. Images transcend linguistic barriers. In so being heard, they live anew.

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Arvo Pärt: Adam’s Lament (ECM New Series 2225)

October 27, 2012November 6, 2012 | Tyran Grillo

Arvo Pärt
Adam’s Lament

Latvian Radio Choir
Sinfonietta Riga
Vox Clamantis
Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir
Tallinn Chamber Orchestra
Tõnu Kaljuste conductor
Recorded November 2011 at Niguliste Church in Tallinn by Peter Laenger and Stephan Schellmann, except for Estonian Lullby and Christmas Lullaby, recorded May 2007 by Margo Kõlar
Mixed at Rainbow Studio in Oslo by Arvo Pärt and Manfred Eicher with Jan Erik Kongshaug (engineer)
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“The text is independent of us; it awaits us. Everyone needs his own time to come to it. The encounter occurs when the text is no longer treated as literature or artwork, but as reference point or model.”

If the above is any indication, Arvo Pärt is one who understands text for what it is: a stepping-stone. With an attention equaled perhaps only by Alexander Knaifel, he holds words like votive candles, giving them flame by the touch of his gift for sound. Whatever we bring along the way is welcomed as it is, broken and hungry for a voice to lift its spirits. To this end, the writings of Saint Silouan (1866-1938) again form the touchstone for a program shaped as much by lips and tongue as by the Holy Spirit that guides them. If we never forget Silouans Song, the strains of which bled through the Estonian composer’s groundbreaking Te Deum recording of 1993 with especial scintillation, it is because its source had already been surpassed by the first draw of a bow. On Adam’s Lament, texts come to us as travelers with distant knowledge in their satchels. For ECM’s thirteenth program devoted to his art, Pärt builds on the tintinnabulation that shrouded his work of the eighties and nineties. He looks even more internally, seeking not only the echo’s path but also its unknowable spark.

(Photo by Kaupo Kikkas)

Paradise as Adam knew it may be lost, but in the eponymous piece we find our own. Though it is an illusion made possible by reverberation and microphones, its power rings beyond the circumscription of its capture. Here, Pärt works from the inside out, finding in every contour of its ecclesial Slavic text a vision of flesh and nature. Holding these together is the touch of one whose own humility exceeds him. And is not humility the greatest mystery to be enhanced through the act of putting pen to staves? It is, says Pärt, an enigma to the stained mind: “like marble, its beauty radiates from its depths.” The locus of that beauty takes form through the body’s destruction. Even then, its reality is partial. To be sure, the gaze of science goes far in this regard but stops at the threshold of something invisible. In the absence of eyes to see, the Lord’s grace gives us receptacles to hear.

Pärt’s microscopic approach sees us as something more than the sum of our parts. Shouldering the vagaries of time, we drag our feet toward a light on the horizon. Its name is stillness, and we are its destroyers. Strings and voices do not so much blend as talk with one another, finding synchronicity through varying degrees of unrest. Paradise, then, lives on as an idea of its former self. And perhaps it was never anything more. It was the voice of generative silence. Only through its fall—which looms wispily at best in the violins—can we look back to our infancy.

Adam’s Lament is about lineages: of us as descendants of Adam, of our future as reflection of the decisions we make today, of that single thread still being spun from the breath of its Creator. As the newest of the present recording, it looks back on a singular catalogue of sonic truth-seeking and self-reflection. The handful of older pieces reworked thereafter shine like the inner circle of its rosette.

My soul wearies for the Lord, and I seek Him in tears.

“The feathery lightness of Beatus Petronius and, by contrast, the potency of Statuit ei Dominus are two sonic worlds,” says Pärt, “like the two sides of God, which I tried to touch, to trace in these works.” Composed in 1990 and revised in 2011, both embody the architectural wonders of their service. In offering themselves so directly, they take off their masks of freedom in search of the real thing. Their departure balances on the apex of a steeple, poised for the coming of sun and moon. In their brevity lies the secret to faith: never waste your words. Every syllable becomes a community in and of itself, bustling with activity in trade with those around it.

The Lord made to him a covenant of peace…

The composer imagines his Salve Regina (2001/2011) as a funnel, turning in progressively smaller circles until its center manifests like a dwarfed star. That he manages to evoke such cosmic brilliance in earthly terms is barely short of the miracle it so ardently expresses. It draws lines from cloud to soil in ways that transcend all obstacles. Starlight trades footprints with human history, filling each with enough hope to light the way in darkest night. Astonishment comes nowhere near to describing its effect.

To thee do we send up our sighs…

The Alleluja-Tropus (2008/2010) sets liturgical words devoted to St. Nicholas of Myra (270-345), whose relics absorbed its first performance in Bari. The refrain is key to this jagged string game of antiphony. Although short in scope, its feathers engage in a spectral bit of play as they float free of their bones toward skies clouded by ash and fear.

A rule of faith and a model of meekness…

L’Abbé Agathon (2004/2008) tells the story of St. Agathon, whose carrying of a leper—later, it turns out, a testing angel—is evoked in the music’s heavy gait toward awareness. A soprano of infirmity spills like ink across the baritone’s selfless paper. The resulting patterns are what the strings fill in. Like onlookers to moral awareness, they take in what is before them, realizing only later the folly of their inaction.

“For mercy’s sake, take me forth with you.”

The Estonian and Christmas lullabies (2002/2006) are, according to their composer, “for adults and for the child within every one of us.” Both arise as if of their own volition. The use of pause and reflection is genius, allowing us to bask in the delicacy of a border-crossing nostalgia while adding to it the lessons of our lives.

And she brought forth her firstborn son…

If Tabula rasa was a revelation and Te Deum a call to harmony, then Adam’s Lament is the birth of our Messiah, wrapped in Christ child’s swaddle. The association sets me to marvel at my own firstborn sleeping next to me as I attempt to recast this music into meager sentences, to seek in his contented face the promise of a time when the world will no longer hold a knife to its own throat. The manger smells of song, and its name is Love.

(My 2-month-old son basking in the warmth of Christmas Lullaby)

All of this puts a finger on the pulse of a divinity beyond the prescription of any religion, which necessarily flows in opposing directions as an embodiment of universal balance. Were it not for the bleakness of our transgressions, such music might never find our hearts, but simply flow through them, unnoticed, as part of the hum of Time. That it comes to us so undeniably is due to many talents, including engineers and producers. Yet we must thank above all Tõnu Kaljuste and the musicians at his cue. Their undying commitment to Pärt’s mission has yielded one of the most indomitable partnerships in music, classical or otherwise. One hardly needs to reiterate the fact that, as with every label project, Pärt participated fully in all stages of this production. His contact is palpable in what we hear, reaching for us like a grandfather we never knew we had and whispering a story into our souls. Much of that story has already been written. The rest is for us to inscribe.

(To hear samples of Adam’s Lament, click here.)

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