ECM New Series Releases

Hommage à R.Sch. (ECM New Series 1508)

| Tyran Grillo

György Kurtág
Robert Schumann
Hommage à R.Sch.

Kim Kashkashian viola
Robert Levin piano
Eduard Brunner clarinet
Recorded August 1992, May and September 1994, Kammermusiksaal Beethovenhaus, Bonn
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

During his lifetime, the idiosyncrasies of Robert Schumann earned him little of the posthumous admiration that now abounds. A Romantic to the core, he found solace in the hollow spaces of his rich musical ideas, manifested to greatest effect in the potent miniatures he left behind. Perhaps no one has inherited this legacy in such a life-affirming way as György Kurtág. In this brilliantly realized album, which pairs both composers in a fortuitous program, we hear not only the bridge that arches between their worlds, but also the river that flows beneath it. Kurtág’s micro-compositional Neun Stücke für Viola solo are threaded by thinnest of intentions and a captivating dynamic contrast between nervousness and lyricism (though, to be sure, what qualifies as lyricism here exists always at the molecular level). The fragment takes on sensory completeness, compensated as it is by the symbiosis of performance and listening, so that even in absence of an audience, the performer remains the immediate receiver of the audible gesture. Jelek (Signs) op. 5 brims with the rich, heady double stops of Kim Kashkashian’s faultless phrasing, ensuring that hidden messages ring with all the robust fragility that surrounds them. Kurtág’s lines are by turns pliant and rigid, vaccinated with moribund attention. Distinctions between “interior” and “exterior” become irrelevant and fold into a shapeless entity with neither. The album is ordered in such a way as to centralize the viola, so that when the piano and clarinet emerge in Hommage à R.Sch. op. 15d, they seem to flank it from all sides. Through this transition, the music becomes more “visible.”

With the Märchenbilder (Fairy Tale Pictures) op. 113, we finally encounter Schumann in the flesh, though “stumble over” might be the more accurate term, as Kurtág’s ghostly echoes release us so effortlessly that we barely have time to breathe. These four vignettes for viola and piano melt into the ecstatic dramaturgy of the Fantasiestücke op. 73, in which the clarinet has its say before merging with the viola in the uniquely scored Märchenerzählungen (Fairy Tales) op. 132. These are profoundly embodied works that render any descriptive words mute to the touch, leaving me with little to offer for all their wonders.

Steady performances from all three musicians—but especially from Kashkashian, whose strings unravel like a mummy in the dusky light of an interstellar awakening—make for an engaging experience from front to back. Therein lies a pyramidal cycle, with the composers at its base, and a thread of life at its apex, pulled ever taut by an unseen alien hand.

<< Wadada Leo Smith: Kulture Jazz (ECM 1507)
>> Egberto Gismonti Group: Música de Sobrevivência (ECM 1509)

Schubert: Trio in Es-Dur/Notturno (ECM New Series 1595)

| Tyran Grillo

Franz Schubert
Trio in Es-Dur/Notturno

Jörg Ewald Dähler fortepiano
Hansheinz Schneeberger violin
Thomas Demenga cello
Recorded July 1995

ECM has nobly benefited the classical music industry by continuing to draw bold lines back to the works of Franz Schubert with consistently thoughtful performances and pairings. Although he never wrote for piano trio until his final year of life, Schubert seems to have put his all into the two masterworks that are the op. 99 and op. 100. For this major release, the latter has been paired with the often-neglected “Notturno,” published two decades after his death.

Harriett Smith calls the Trio in Es-Dur für Klavier, Violine und Violoncello op. 100, D 929 a “bridge between the trios of Beethoven and Brahms,” and was the longest ever composed (it equals, if not surpasses, the average symphony in scope) until Morton Feldman’s Trio of 1980. Penned in 1827, four years into the advancement of his syphilis, Schubert’s second piano trio came about when a close friend, Josef von Spaun, requested the piece for his wedding. Schubert would die in a matter of months after its premier, which reached his ears once before they heard no more.

The musicians superbly evoke the careful tension Schubert has worked into every phrase of the first movement. In its cosmos, one hears the voices of the stars, throttling the engine of space-time in dreamy suspension. A tinge of classicism adorns the Swedish folk song-enriched interior of the second movement, its delicate modality reflected in the pizzicato from both strings. An Austrian country-dance provides the basis for the Scherzo that follows, leading us into a massive Allegro moderato, which inventively brings back the theme of the second movement. Despite the daunting length of this and the first movement, our sense of progression never wavers. Schubert’s magical touches make exuberant experiences out of these longer narratives.

If, in the full trio, we get four worlds as one universe, in the Trio in Es-Dur für Klavier, Violine, Violoncello op. posth. 148, D 897 we get a glimpse into a newborn nebula. This single movement, dubbed “Notturno” (Nocturne) by publisher and composer Anton Diabelli, is believed to have been a rejected Adagio for the first piano trio in B flat major. As fragile as it is taut, it continues to thrive, a gorgeous offspring wrought in filigree and grace.

Jörg Ewald Dähler’s historically informed fortepiano, combined with the profoundly contemporary approaches of resident label cellist Thomas Demenga and the legendary Hansheinz Schneeberger on violin, infuses every moment of these performances with equal parts innovation and ritual. One need only listen behind closed eyes to see the images they recreate.

<< Peter Erskine Trio: As It Is (ECM 1594)
>> Misha Alperin: North Story (ECM 1596)

Helmut Lachenmann: Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (ECM New Series 1858/59)

| Tyran Grillo

The Little Match Girl

Helmut Lachenmann
Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern

Eiko Morikawa Sopran
Nicole Tibbels Sopran
Helmut Lachenmann Sprecher (“Zwei Gefühle”)
Mayumi Miyata shō
Yukiko Sugawara Klavier
Tomoko Hemmi Klavier
Experimentalstudio der Heinrich-Strobel-Stiftung des SWR Elektronische Realisation
André Richard Klangregie
SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart
SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg
Matthias Hermann Musikalische Einstudierung
Sylvain Cambreling Leitung
Recorded July 2003 in Freiburg, Germany

Angst is the necessary form of the curse laid in the universal coldness upon those who suffer of it.
–Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics

Helmut Lachenmann’s Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (The Little Match Girl) is a beguiling, albeit loosely contextualized, redaction of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytale of the same name. The girl in question pedals matches on New Year’s Eve before seeking shelter from the cold. She lights one match after another to keep from freezing, fearing her father’s wrath for not having sold any. With every conflagration, she is visited by visions of warmth, sustenance, and love—the last things she ever sees before the climate takes her life. Lachenmann augments this frigid morality tale with other textual sources: Leonardo da Vinci’s The Desire for Knowledge, in which the artist stands before a volcanic chasm, and the writings of Gudrun Ensslin, Red Army Faction reactionary, and acquaintance of Lachenmann’s, who marked her life with fiery eruptions of her own. Each of these figures, marginally marked by forces beyond their control, cowers in its respective hovel, succumbing to the darkest edges of already shadowed words.

What we have in the present recording is the opera’s “Tokyo version,” which, according to the composer, is definitive. Lachenmann’s self-styled “music with images” is beyond meticulous. Its first part is overwhelming and impenetrable, lost in gusts of scrapings, percussive half-statements, and voices doomed to inhabit the borders of incoherence. A dust storm of pops, whistles, skips, whispers, yawns, sighs, shouts, grunts, flutters, clucks and clicks, open-mouthed slaps, and general aphasia shares a lung with an extra-sensory instrumental constituent. Unrealized dreams are its blood, unformed words and broken promises its skin. Speech curls into itself, like a radio dial constantly tuned from one station to the next, an effect only heightened by the presence of electronics. Every sound disguises indecisiveness as ardent exploration, even while achieving that very thing, inhabiting the mouths and heads of its characters, such that human voices and instrumental utterances become so closely allied that often one is hard-pressed to distinguish between the two (and, in fact, feels no need to do so). The drama comes to a head in “Die Jagd” (The Hunt), leading at last to fully articulated speech in “Auf Allen Fenstern” (On Every Window), before a monumental closure. The second part wavers like a flame caressed by frosty winds, hiccups, and choked sentiments. “In Einem Winkel” (At An Angle) provides some startlingly beautiful moments, of a piece with the alchemical precision of Stockhausen and Ligeti at their most meditative. “Zwei Gefühle” (Two Sentiments) gives us the longest stretch of speech, culminating in a prickly crescendo. The opera finishes with a long drone laced with sine waves and counted in time by the rapping of death at our door. Its barely articulated fade is an epilogue to end all epilogues.

One might feel compelled to criticize Das Mädchen as a nervous wreck unsuitable for any self-respecting listener, but the consistency with which it cracks itself open, like a suicidal egg, is so visceral that any negative reactions fall with it to their doom. It transcends the utterance at every turn, dissecting “taboo” into its meaningless phonemes. Like a workout after years of inactivity, it exercises muscles we never even knew we had. Having never seen the opera live, and with only the booklet’s cryptic black-and-whites to go on, I cannot speak with any surety for its potential production value. Suffice it to say that I will be in the front row should the opportunity ever present itself.

Cikada String Quartet: In due tempi (ECM New Series 1799)

| Tyran Grillo

Cikada String Quartet
In due tempi

The Cikada String Quartet
Henrik Hannisdal violin
Odd Hannisdal violin
Marek Konstantynowicz viola
Morten Hannisdal violoncello
Recorded August 2001 at Sofienberg Church, Oslo

“My music is as I am.”
–Kaija Saariaho

On April 10 of this year, I had the pleasure of meeting Kaija Saariaho after a lecture given at Mount Holyoke College. Her talk covered a range of topics, including her reclaiming of “compositrice” as a self-referential term; the conceptual tendrils that had coalesced into her third opera, Émilie; and the ever-present role of electronics in her music. She also waxed nostalgic about her many influences. Of these, her deep admiration for Witold Lutosławski stands paramount. The Polish composer once told her, “I am the first audience. I need to step back and see if I would accept the music as a listener.” These sentiments have since charged her music with a chameleonic energy, an energy that stems directly from Saariaho’s beloved dreams. Nymphéa (1987), for string quartet and live electronics, is like a breath of spectral wind in the trees. It is a fitting introduction of her work to the ECM catalogue, and one can only hope the conversation will continue. Where Saariaho stands out among contemporary composers is her ability to maintain a dense auditory palette without ever lapsing into distinctly melodic territory. The note becomes movement, a smile, an ankle in the shadows of the trees, a glimpse of a flowing dress upon the water. Together, they become a handful of medicinal tears, cast like seeds onto a lake’s fertile surface. Each gesture of the quartet is magnified in a fiery reverb, as the musicians are bid to whisper verses by Arseny Tarkovsky (father of director Andrei). Shades of Crumb’s Black Angels and André Boucourechliev’s Archipel II comingle in a magical incantation. And, like a whisper, the resulting sounds lay just beyond our reach. At points it flirts with cacophony, a composition in fast forward. A violin cracks its adolescent voice, cradled by echoes of former ghosts, and inaugurates a lilting series of responses, ending at the edge of our conscious field of vision.

After such a mind-altering experience, John Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts (1949/50) wafts like a fragrance, familiar but forgotten. Its four seasonal movements consist of glassy block chords (what Cage called “gamuts”) in lateral formation, each casting a distinct shadow across the whole. Strings are played with minimal bow pressure, flowing with rapt neutrality until the last movement sheds its spring clothing. This makes for a fitting segue into Bruno Maderna’s more serial Quartetto per archi in due tempi (1955). Though one might not know it from this quartet (it is dedicated to Luciano Berio), Maderna much admired Cage and took it upon himself to pen one of the first analytical studies of his music. Here, slow and careful development leads to an increasingly fractured and nervous tale, rupturing into a more forcefully plucked affair before settling back into its quieter beginnings.

In due tempi is an album of transitory spaces, worth the price of admission for Nymphéa alone, after which the others seem to pale in comparison, yet which still provide more than enough intrigue for the open-eared listener. And while my bias obviously leans toward Saariaho, the album is, on the whole, a fascinating one. The Cikada Quartet, who made their label debut on Arild Andersen’s stellar Hyperborean, enact a clear, honed sound that works wonders with the chosen material. An overlooked New Series album, this deserves our full attention.

<< Morton Feldman: The Viola in My Life (ECM 1798 NS)
>> Keith Jarrett Trio: Always Let Me Go (ECM 1800/01)

Barraqué: Sonate pour piano (ECM New Series 1621)

| Tyran Grillo

Jean Barraqué
Sonate pour piano

Herbert Henck piano
Recorded July 1996, Festburgkirsche, Frankfurt
Engineer: Andreas Neubronner
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The legacy of French composer Jean Barraqué (1928-1973) has at last been given its due berth. Pianist Herbert Henck, never one to bow out from a challenge, went through considerable efforts to annotate a viable score (a task that amounted to no less than 125 handwritten pages) from which he could extract this notoriously elusive piece. As this fine disc clearly attests, these efforts have paid off tremendously. The reputation of Barraqué’s Sonate pour Piano would seem to precede any listener’s (or performer’s) familiarity with its sounds. Composed between 1950 and 1952, it plots the multivalent trajectories of the composer’s foundational Serialism into deeper and more formidable territories. Despite the redactions to which it is often confined—namely, Pierre Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata and Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier”—any kinship therein is immediately overcast by the roiling clouds of the work’s uniquely idiosyncratic climate. Thus is his allegiance to twelve-tone rows selectively severed in favor of an approach that is at once enigmatically liminal and highly integrative, as much about erasure as it is about inscription.

The nearly 50-minute work, in two movements, finds its voice in a Pleiadean cluster, as if one were poking a pin into the balloon of the universe and notating everything that came spilling out. Through this porous barrage of galaxies, binary stars, and black holes, the music can only go where gravity bids it to go. Pianistic lows grumble with the weight of time’s inevitable progression, while highs sparkle like meteorites hitting an invisible atmosphere. What seems at first a perplexing experiment slowly fractures into its own auditory urtext. The sonata’s structure is ever unstable, discomforting, and discontented. In it, we see ourselves stripped of age and ideological concern, dropped headlong into a phantom of aberration. We encounter an increasing number of silences, which only coalesce with time into the piece’s final vacuity.

This is, presumably, not music that you will ever find humming to yourself. Rather, its melodies burrow deep into the subconscious, if not spring from it directly, lodging themselves where no other sound dares follow. Henck negotiates the technical minutiae of this piece with his usual erratic grace. He draws out individual notes with crisp punctuation, such that each emerges as a magnetic node to which the drive of surrounding tones becomes attracted. Every gesture seems to blow harder onto embers that would much rather fade, coaxing as much glow as can be had before ashes are all that is left.

<< Shostakovich/Vasks/Schnittke: Dolorosa (ECM 1620 NS)
>> Cain/Alessi/Epstein: Circa (ECM 1622)

Michelle Makarski: Caoine (ECM New Series 1587)

| Tyran Grillo

Michelle Makarski
Caoine

Michelle Makarski violin
Recorded June 1995, Propstei St. Gerold
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Produced by Manfred Eicher

With such varied artists as Paul Giger, John Holloway, and Thomas Zehetmair vying for the violin enthusiast’s attention, ECM has revitalized the solo program perhaps more than any other label. Yet nowhere has it found such a colorful proponent of new and established repertoire alike as American musician Michelle Makarski. For Caoine, her first solitary ECM effort (she had previously appeared as soloist in Keith Jarrett’s Bridge of Light), Makarski has assembled a unique collection of music to be discovered. The program opens with the formidable “Passacaglia” of Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, a composition whose methods and melodies are one in the same. What seems on the surface purely etudinal breeds its own robust musicality without ever flaunting itself as such. Its ostinato of G, F, E-flat, D is repeated 65 times, each successive variation requiring deeper attention on the part of the performer. Being one of the earliest extant paragons of solo violin literature, it is perhaps the ideal meta-statement with which to begin such an album. Although the piece employs the full gamut of techniques available to the virtuoso at the time of its composition (ca. 1670), the result is solemn and rich in cosmological potency. The visceral title track is by Stephen Hartke, one of America’s most distinctive composers who has seen minimal but vital representation on ECM. The title itself (pronounced “keen,” from which the English word of the same spelling is derived) is a Celtic word referring to, in the composer’s words, the “wail or dirge sung by professional mourners in old Ireland.” Hartke’s almost folkloristic approach nestles comfortably in its surroundings. It seems to round itself into an emotive orifice, projecting its cries through funereal motions with all the tenacity of a genuine inner grief. After this catharsis, Max Reger’s “Chaconne” (1910) returns our attention to the Baroque. While blatantly indebted in Bach, Reger follows his own bold trajectory in this rather demanding piece. Makarski negotiates its many turns with just the right balance of force and finesse, not to mention an expert control of harmonics. Selections from George Rochberg’s 50 Caprice Variations (1970) pave the way to a tender performance of Bach’s first Partita (1720). The Variations speak in their own idiosyncratic vocabularies, never afraid to admonish and alleviate in the same breath. Nos. 41 and 42 stand out for me, the former for its Prokofiev-like syncopation and the latter for its high metallic sheen. These deconstructions of Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 speak directly to Rochberg’s essayistic fixations. As intertextual as they are self-negating, they comprise an homage individually wrapped in bite-sized morsels. As for the Bach, Makarski has felicitously chosen my favorite among the composer’s Sonatas and Partitas. Her performance of the captivating Allemande comes through with refined grace and rhythmic economy through to the sparingly realized finale.

What links these pieces is an appreciation of the originary motif as an aesthetic not necessarily of size, but more accurately of scale, mining the paradox of its highly expansive potential through the process of recapitulation. This is encapsulated most beautifully in the final track, in which Bach unpacks, not unlike Biber, a staggering amount of information from a mere handful of ordered gestures. Makarski’s profound recital is built as much around the variation of theme as around the theme of variation, pulling its red thread gracefully through four centuries of musical history in the span of a single CD.

Alternate cover

<< Egberto Gismonti: Meeting Point (ECM 1586)
>> Louis Sclavis Sextet: Les Violences de Rameau (ECM 1588)

Giya Kancheli: Caris Mere (ECM New Series 1568)

| Tyran Grillo

Giya Kancheli
Caris Mere

Eduard Brunner clarinet
Maacha Deubner soprano
Kim Kashkashian viola
Jan Garbarek soprano saxophone
Stuttgarter Kammerorchester
Dennis Russell Davies conductor
Recorded April 1994 – January 1995
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The music of Giya Kancheli is firmly rooted in emptiness, in those silent spaces between musical gestures where the voice is born behind the words it sings. Kancheli seems also aware that silence can rarely be disconnected from violence, that in our configurations of human relations and conflict there are moments when one’s history ceases to exist in the utterable, moments that animate his musical frameworks with echoes of a distinct cultural memory. Such is the impetus for the composer’s Life Without Christmas cycle, which was begun on Abii ne viderem and is concluded with the present release.

Midday Prayers (for solo clarinet, soprano, and chamber orchestra) opens the album’s trio of compositions with a protracted meditation on Passion texts. An airy wash of sustained tones and rich orchestral timbres is broken by intermittent declarations of hidden sentiment. A certain dis-ease informs the winds, even as strings paint the thinnest veneer of hope. The seasoned Kancheli listener will have come to expect the intense dynamic distance to be found here, the balance of which focuses our attention on the details of quietude and an outburst’s potential to enlighten. A piano gives us the briefest glimpse into a time before strife ravaged a onetime joy. The piece’s sparseness makes its fuller moments shout with the force of an ensemble twice their size.

Caris Mere (for soprano and viola) moves with the same sense of unfolding as Midday Prayers, with the added hint of Medieval monophony. The title means “After the Wind” in Georgian and recalls that of his earlier piece, Vom Winde beweint (Mourned by the Wind). Where the latter expands with the looming presence of an entire orchestra, here we find that piece’s soloist with a voice that isn’t so much added as it is drawn from the viola’s heart. Kim Kashkashian and Maacha Deubner (previously heard to magical effect on Kancheli’s Exil) each carry their own weight, shedding it little by little as they scale new heights with every phrase. This music is arid but alive, the voice its only inhabitant, the lone survivor of a catastrophe immune to erasure.

Kronos Quartet fans will recognize the final piece, Night Prayers, from their album of the same name. This extended version (for saxophone and string orchestra) begins with very deep voices, resounding from the liminal realm that is tape, accentuated by a knotty fringe of strings. As saxophonist Jan Garbarek pierces the gloom with his light, the piece flaps its thematic shutters like a quiet storm. Generally a very meditative journey, though not without its moments of rapture, Night Prayers is a captivating highpoint of Kancheli’s spiral of sound. Jan Garbarek gives due respect to the music at hand, and makes the most of a brief improvisational window in an otherwise precisely notated architecture.

Kancheli’s music is a hall of mirrors, each one distorting us differently. Ruptures of energy inflict the pain of restriction upon a population that knows only freedom, and we become implicated among the oppressed. This is music that clearly delineates the boundary between the influence of tradition (such as it is conceived) and the power of hegemony.

<< Terje Rypdal: Double Concerto (ECM 1567)
>> Alexandr Mosolov: Sonatas for piano Nos. 2 and 5, etc. (ECM 1569 NS)

Händel: Suites for Keyboard – Jarrett (ECM New Series 1530)

| Tyran Grillo

Georg Friedrich Händel
Suites for Keyboard

Keith Jarrett piano
Recorded September 1993, State University of New York, Purchase
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Georg Friedrich Händel, ever the poster child of the high Baroque, is of course widely known for his large-scale oratorios and chamber music. One sad consequence of such a reputation is the negligence of lesser-known, though no less winsome, works in the composer’s catalogue. As pianist Keith Jarrett notes, “When audiences decide what they think someone is great at, they tend to undervalue other things that same someone does.” Händel actually composed twenty suites for keyboard, though only a handful—known as the “Great Eight”—tend to be grouped together with any regularity. Jarrett chooses four of these, in addition to three outliers, for a single disc filled to the brim with life-affirming music. His unique euphonic sensibilities represent a vivid attempt to rescue these significant works from our ignorance.

This is Jarrett’s finest Baroque recording on ECM. As much as I adore his stately and humbling Bach, one finds a markedly different approach in the Händel. There is a sort of exuberant intimacy that scintillates with Jarret’s every articulation, a solemn poetry that undercuts much of the flowery prose for which Händel is more often appreciated. The opening Allemande of the Suite in G Minor is characteristic of the whole, seeming to leapfrog Bachian counterpoint while maintaining its own melodic robustness. Indeed, the buoyancy of Jarrett’s Allemandes throughout distinguishes him from hunt-and-peck performers who seem content with relatively forced segregations of bonded lines. Each Suite tells its own story, complete with problem, climax, and resolution. The G Minor continues its meditations on the transience of the creative process, made all the clearer by the brief Gigue that closes it. The Suite in D Minor coats this resignation with translucent regret, working through the latter by retreating into one’s fondest memories, only to flee in a cowardly flash. Fortunately, Suite No. 7 in B-flat sings a more joyous song and lifts the spirit with its gorgeous trills and frolicking syncopations. Nestled in the album’s center is the Suite No. 8 in F Minor, where we find ourselves in a more funereal mode, regressing further and further into the childhood of the one we mourn. We recall that prime of life, when innocence and circumstance walked hand-in-hand to a music that was both familiar and beyond present understanding. There is only beauty to be had in Suite No. 2 in F. The recitative-like introduction of its Adagio gives us a glimpse of the vocal Händel in utero before launching into the album’s most compelling Fuga. Suite No. 4 in E Minor opens in a flower of ivory and jubilation, marking a confident path into the finishing Suite No. 1 in A, of which another resplendent Allemande and sprightly Gigue highlight the tropes so firmly embedded in the Suites’ overarching brilliance.

In the presence of Händel, Jarrett is in top form. He pours his telescoped dynamics, fluidity of playing, and impeccable sense of rhythm (shown to greatest effect in the mid-tempo movements) into an attentively ordered program of quiet splendor. One need bring expectations of neither composer nor performer, but simply bask in the music’s ability to work its way into the bloodstream of a stressful day.

<< Krakatau: Matinale (ECM 1529)
>> Jarrett/Peacock/Motian: At The Deer Head Inn (ECM 1531)

Giya Kancheli: Exil (ECM New Series 1535)

| Tyran Grillo

1535

Giya Kancheli
Exil

Maacha Deubner soprano
Natalia Pschenitschnikova alto and bass flutes
Catrin Demenga violin
Ruth Killius viola
Rebecca Firth cello
Christian Sutter double bass
Wladimir Jurowski conductor
Recorded May 1994 at Propstei St. Gerold
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“When a person goes into a church, synagogue or mosque where there’s not service going on, there’s a special kind of silence. I want to turn that silence into music.”
–Giya Kancheli

Anyone who reads my reviews regularly will have noticed my penchant for the word “beautiful” when describing the music of ECM. And while I do invoke the word sincerely whenever I use it, at the risk of diluting it even further I should like to make a case for it in the context of this album over all others, for nowhere have I heard music that takes the concept to a level beyond even itself. For composer-in-exile Giya Kancheli, beauty is romantic only insofar as it stems from nostalgia, recognizing as it does the stoic enchantment in all that emerges from destruction. Exil (1994) draws its humble sentiments from, and sketches its permeable borders around, biblical Psalms and the poems of Paul Celan and Hans Sahl, and is scored for soprano and mixed chamber ensemble. Within the latter, alto and bass flutes constitute a vivid presence.

When my uncle, Anthony Grillo, was on his deathbed, losing his battle with stomach cancer, the sound of his brother’s voice reading Psalm 23 were the last he ever heard before his passing. Exil came into my life soon after. And so, when I first received the album, only to see that the selfsame Psalm was the basis for its pinnacle composition, I took solace in the confluence of its arrival. The opening alto flute invocation of Kancheli’s setting stills my heart every time and brings with it a host of angels. The tapping of bows and subtle violin accompaniments throughout extract an immeasurable potency from the depths of Maacha Deubner’s unaffected voice. I imagine the score looks just as empty as, say, that of Pärt’s Tabula rasa, but it is precisely those spaces that Kancheli seems intent on populating with pensive, unmoving figures. Listeners will recognize much of the thematic material from his Life Without Christmas cycle in crystallized form, and indeed it would seem to be the backbone of his entire oeuvre. It enacts a profound sense of development, flexing with every prostration. A distinct instrumental economy makes the work’s one explosive moment that much more jarring. As the music moves, so does its heart, borne along like a coffin in a slow and steady procession into sunset.

Deubner’s boy-like soprano haunts the divine understandings of Celan’s postmodern verses that follow, while Sahl’s reiterative “Exil” lends equal weight to pause as to utterance. Like the gaps between rosary beads, one cannot exist without the other. It brings that sense of hope, of sanctuary, back into view, symbolized by glassy harmonics on strings. And as the music reacclimates to the central theme, it curls into itself and sleeps in almost Messianic hibernation, awaiting the moment when it can spread its joy across the universe like a supernova unbounded.

This was one of my earliest New Series acquisitions and came right on the heels of my already profound exposure to the work of Arvo Pärt. My mother had heard “Psalm 23” on the radio and was so moved by it that she ordered a copy of the CD and sent it to me as a surprise. And what a surprise it was, for it opened my internal eyes to things I never thought expressible in human terms. The voice of Maacha Deubner is a revelation in and of itself. Stripped of its ornamentation, it sings a seemingly unmitigated song, shaping each phrase with the practiced lips of a priestess. The supporting musicians match her delicacy with an astonishing blending of tone and register. Performances such as these place a stethoscope to the divine and make audible the heartbeat that binds us all. The music’s sacredness speaks beyond printed pages and the ideological glue that binds them. It is the kind of music that makes one feel supremely grateful to have been born in an age where one could hear it.

(Session photo by Roberto Masotti)

As with many ECM releases, the accompanying liner notes include photographs of the recording session. Of these, one image remains permanently etched into my mind: that of engineer, musicians, and producer listening to playback, and the shattered depths of their faces. Many are on verge of tears, if not shedding them already. It makes me want to have been there, not only as a fly on the wall but particularly as a musician, to have had a hand in contributing to something greater than the sum of one’s musical parts. This photograph allows us a unique insight into that very dynamic that those of us on the consumer end of the recording process almost never get to witness, much less experience firsthand. Kancheli’s music nevertheless reveals, on its own terms, a juggernaut of spiritual proportions that comports itself with the gentility of a newborn lamb, its head struggling to look up into the light as it learns to negotiate those divine forces that shape its balance into being. This is music we humble ourselves before, yet which demands nothing of us.

For what it’s worth, this is my favorite ECM release thus far and belongs in the collection of anyone seeking the expansion of heart and mind that only art can bring. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I can only feel blessed for having beheld this.

<< John Surman Quartet: Stranger Than Fiction (ECM 1534)
>> Lena Willemark/Ale Möller: Nordan (ECM 1536)