John Holloway: Unam Ceylum (ECM New Series 1791)

| Tyran Grillo

Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber
Unam Ceylum

John Holloway violin
Aloysia Assenbaum organ
Lars Ulrik Mortensen harpsichord
Recorded May 2001, Propstei St. Gerold
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Much of what the classical listener hears in recent recordings of Baroque music is cluttered with ornamentation, overbearing virtuosity, and fresh takes on the tried and true. In short, a little too much fuel where already there is fire. Such innovations aren’t necessarily a detriment to the industry, as they can (and do) inspire new generations of listeners who may not have a taste for what they consider to be “staler” interpretations. Still, there is something to be said for the straightforward and the cerebral. Thankfully, the ECM albums of violinist John Holloway are here to provide a happy compromise between the two camps, playing with humility music that is already a raging conflagration amid a growing pile of neglected aural kindling.

Though I am compelled to praise the works of Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644-1704) for their sagacity, inventive scordatura tunings, and an indomitable spirit that seems to leap from every phrase, I am all the more boldly struck by their descriptive qualities. The sonatas on Unam Ceylum are taken from a 1681 anthology and include at least one (No. 84) never before committed to disc. In the company of Holloway and his esteemed colleagues, the composer’s descriptivism is given full reign. Building off the somewhat controversial success of its earlier Schmelzer recording, the trio sets the violin afloat upon an innovative continuo of harpsichord and organ.

Biber has a way of painting full-fledged dramas in but a single stroke of the bow, and indeed these sonatas would seem to thrive on stage, each a different scene in an overarching play. Some depict dancing and courtly romance, while others ooze with nostalgia for bygone days. The Sonata III in F majorprovides our opening act, evoking everything from birdcalls to tempests. The four-handed (and two-footed) continuo adds intrigue to an already fleshy plot. Mortensen follows wherever he is led. Assenbaum adds a touch of vaulted beauty. The latter shares a particularly enraptured passage with Holloway, who then transposes the bass line over a harpsichordic run before ending on a fast, unresolved note at the very peak of emotion. The somber drawl of Sonata IV in D major makes for an undulating segue into Act II, brought to jovial light in the unpublished Sonata No. 81 in A major. Its playful, teasing tone delivers what it promises in dense ascents, diffused by a scattered finish. The Sonata VI in C minortwists itself into a tantalizing climax from modest beginnings. After a positively lovely organ introduction, its rubato journey pulls us through edgier continents, all too soon alighting on forlorn shores. The G-major Sonata VII is a mixture of sadness and frivolity leading us into to the Sonata No. 84. It is here where finality comes to light, allowing Holloway the last word in ecstatic tangents. Yet again we are left hanging in delightful anticipation. This lends the music further commensurability and allows us to return to it eager for new details to emerge, which they inevitably do.

Though I began by downplaying virtuosity a bit, I cannot help but give a heavy nod to these musicians for theirs and the clarity it produces. Through the force of his vision, Holloway plays with this clarity to dazzling effect, never straying far from the printed score. He has completed his survey of the 1681 Sonatas with a follow-up album that also includes Muffat and which deserves a seat alongside this phenomenal start. Played as pristinely as it is recorded, this is a set to be savored.

<< Valentin Silvestrov: Metamusik / Postludium (ECM 1790 NS)
>> Anouar Brahem: Le pas du chat noir (ECM 1792)

Alexei Lubimov: Der Bote – Elegies for Piano (ECM New Series 1771)

| Tyran Grillo

Alexei Lubimov
Der Bote – Elegies for Piano

Alexei Lubimov piano
Recorded December 2000, Radio DRS, Zürich
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The title of Alexei Lubimov’s second recital for ECM translates as “The Messenger,” and perhaps no more fitting sobriquet could apply to the Russian pianist in this collection of ten elegies spanning three centuries. In opening with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Fantasie für Klavier fis-Moll, Lubimov provides something of a meta-statement encompassing all that follows. After a dream-like introduction, both musician and composer throw the listener for a loop with a burst of virtuosic splendor before returning to slumber. The music is rooted at the outer cusp of the Baroque while also far ahead of its time in scope and romantic flair, and pairs surprisingly well with John Cage’s In a landscape. The latter receives a uniquely spirited treatment here. Comparing this to Herbert Henck’s ECM recording of Cage’s early piano music, on which a slower read adds four minutes to its duration, one hears it rather differently. Lubimov’s playful undulations recast the piece’s depth of immediacy in quickly flitting shadows. Either way, it is achingly beautiful, a singular composition from a composer whose melodic humility remains unparalleled.

The fumbling dance of Tigran Mansurian’s Nostalgia hints at revelry but succumbs to meditation, while the Abschied of Franz Liszt provides our steadiest elegiac thread so far that moves with the sway of windblown branches. Mikhail Glinka blots our vision with nostalgic hues in his Nocturne f-Moll “La separation,“ a faded photograph lost in the pages of a dusty book, in which one may pore over Frédéric Chopin’s Prélude cis-Moll op. 45. It is a tale of sorrow, fading in on the stagnant lake of an abandoned estate, long overgrown with neglect. Beam by beam the mansion crumbles, until fireflies take the place of the footsteps that once dotted its halls: a thousand years of history condensed into six minutes. The abstractions of Valentin Silvestrov’s Elegie are like the ghosts left behind, fractured through the passage of time and made visible by the glow of introspection. In the Elégie of Claude Debussy, we are distracted by a passing mysticism, swept by the wind into the light of daybreak far from our own. Alone and without recourse, we seek shelter in Béla Bartók’s Vier Klagelieder op. 9a, Nr. 1, finding in its sweeping gestures and impressionist fades the key to Silvestrov’s title work that finishes. A gorgeous deconstruction of Mozart in a kind of haunted chamber, it is a touch upon the shoulder from the afterlife. By its last note, one wonders whether it ever really existed.

Lubimov is a pianist who understands music’s humble beginnings. He cradles every note like a wounded bird, nurturing it with grace until it is well enough to fly on its own. Equally intelligent programming makes this a disc to remember, if not forget like the memory of a past too beautiful to reproduce with any claim to faith. But this he does, and with a quiet passion that welcomes us with open arms.

<< John Abercrombie: Cat ‘n’ Mouse (ECM 1770)
>> Juliane Banse/András Schiff: Songs of Debussy and Mozart (ECM 1772 NS)

Ralph Towner: Batik (ECM 1121)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1121 CD

Ralph Towner
Batik

Ralph Towner 12-string and classical guitar, piano
Eddie Gomez bass
Jack DeJohnette drums
Recorded January 1978, Talent Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

There are certain images that seem fail-proof when musically evoked. The “Waterwheel” that inaugurates us into guitarist Ralph Towner’s astonishingly beautiful Batik is one of them. Having since been painted for us by such varied talents as Hamza El Din (see the Kronos Quartet’s Pieces of Africa) and Marina Belica (former leader of the October Project, of which their self-titled debut is a personal all-time favorite), Towner’s particular configuration embodies the best of all worlds with the precision of his fingers magnified to great effect by Jack DeJohnette on drums and soothingly animated by the bass of Eddie Gomez. Towner’s democratic shifts in density allow for solos to shine through the haze unhindered, such as the enchanting bass that darts through his added splashes of 12-string. Towner rejoins in overdubbed costume, while amplified sustains peek like the sun from behind a cloud. Their passage through the sky is marked only by DeJohnette’s delicate metronome, allowing us one final glimpse of its thematic pool. “Shades of Sutton Hoo” is named for an Anglo-Saxon burial ground and haunts us with its reverberant lows and tinkling cymbals. A noticeably freer structure pervades, tracing every mound of earth with archaeological care. This delicate filler leads us up a “Trellis” of melody into ghostly afterthoughts. Gomez’s voice cuts with urgency through Towner’s ornamental stride. Their sumptuous counterpoint continues in the 16-minute title track and sets us down comfortably in Solstice territory. DeJohnette unleashes a noteworthy solo, while Gomez laces his quick fingers to support every hoisted footstep. We end in the “Green Room.” Painted with Towner’s mournful piano, it glows in a wash of potent commentary from bass and brushed drums, crumbling like spring snow into silence.

A classic to the nth degree.

<< Bill Connors: Of Mist And Melting (ECM 1120)
>> Enrico Rava Quartet: s/t (ECM 1122)

András Schiff: In Concert – Robert Schumann (ECM New Series 1806/07)

| Tyran Grillo

András Schiff
In Concert – Robert Schumann

András Schiff piano
Recorded at Tonhalle Zürich, May 30, 1999
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Produced by Manfred Eicher

András Schiff returns to ECM with a live all-Schumann recital. Capturing what he sees as the composer’s “burning inventiveness,” the Hungarian pianist allows himself no contrivance in letting the notes speak on their own terms. He jumps right into the deep end with the vibrant Humoreske op. 20 (1838). Written during a time of separation from his future wife, Clara Wieck, in it Schumann incorporates a hidden “inner voice,” which he imagined as Clara’s own. Throughout its invigorating 28 minutes, we are treated to a mosaic of inner passions. Schiff handles its fluid transitions, intermezzi, and stylish moves with requisite grace, allowing plenty of space in the slower passages for the music’s full effect to shine. This is followed by the Novelletten op. 21 of the same year, which comprise the composer’s most extensive piano work. Though distinguished by its exuberant approach, it too embraces Clara’s “voice from a distance” (Stimme aus der Ferne) as a key animating force. Throughout, Schiff captures Schumann’s dynamic range admirably well, teetering between the Apollonian and Dionysian at every virtuosic turn. Yet it is in the “Concerto without Orchestra” that is the Op. 14 Piano Sonata in F minor (1836, rev. 1853) that we encounter the recital’s most luxurious moments. The pianism shines here in a finessed first movement, while making the third (a set of variations on a theme by Clara) sing like love itself. The final Presto rolls off Schiff’s fingers like water. Schumann had originally intended to call an 1839 tribute to his dying brother by the title Leichenphantasie (Corpse-fantasy). Clara convinced him to change the title for publication, thus giving us the Nachtstücke (1839), of which No. 4 constitutes a consolatory, if bittersweet, encore.

This was the first recording of Schumann’s piano music I ever heard, and is one I will always return to for reference. Schiff proves he is just as comfortable with the Romantics as he is with the Baroque masters, and in Schumann has found a most rewarding synergy. The music is, despite its grandiose touches, undeniably intimate, casting one deep look inward for every outward glance. Prosaic though they may be, these performances are anything but analytical. Whatever your familiarity with Schumann, this is an album you will want to hear.

Valentin Silvestrov: leggiero, pesante (ECM New Series 1776)

| Tyran Grillo

Valentin Silvestrov
leggiero, pesante

Valentin Silvestrov piano
Anja Lechner cello
Silke Avenhaus piano
Simon Fordham violin
Maacha Deubner soprano
Rosamunde Quartett
Recorded January 2001, Festeburgkirche, Frankfurt am Main
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

With leggiero, pesante ECM devoted its first entire disc to the work of Valentin Silvestrov, inaugurating an ongoing series through which the label has been documenting a quiet musical path that had, until then, led the composer to great acclaim hardly anywhere beyond his native Ukraine. As one who often works in larger forces, Silvestrov was, I think, wisely introduced to listeners through this program of chamber pieces. To be sure, his statements are no less expansive here, but one sees more clearly in the capillary motifs that so fascinate him, and us, with their inner life.

If the opening Sonata for cello and piano (1983) is a mirror, than in it we catch only fleeting glimpses of faces that, through the magic of performance, are slowed like a film reel until their pathos becomes clear. Intense dynamic contrasts ensure that silences are as full as the notes that cradle them. Pianist Silke Avenhaus and cellist Anja Lechner offer a painstaking reading of this rather difficult piece, which challenges with its need for emotional over technical virtuosity.

If the String Quartet No. 1 (1974) is a breath, then each instrument is a sheltering lung. The first violin stretches its capacity, exhaling a jagged agenda against the linear regularity of the trio from which it is birthed. As these become increasingly convinced of its mission, they join the violin in song, only to fall back into the folds of their complacency, leaving the violin to weep for its lost cause. The Rosamunde Quartett’s performance is transparent and honest and ensures that every stage of this mournful journey is illuminated by salvation.

If the Three Postludes (1981/82) are hands, then each grabs the wrist of the other in an unbreakable triangle. Postludium No. 1 is a swan song for Shostakovich and uses the composer’s DSCH cryptogram to satoric effect. Soprano Maacha Deubner reprises the profundity she brought to Kancheli’s Exil, loosing her angelic rain through a gossamer fabric woven of violin and piano. Violinist Simon Fordham makes of Postludium No. 2 an enigmatic complement, while Avenhaus and Silke return for the delicate charm of Postludium No. 3, honing a brightening edge in an otherwise murky recital.

The composer himself takes up the piano for his closing Hymn 2001, dropping highs like spores into the instrument’s freshly tilled lows, where they are silently absorbed to begin the cycle anew.

As the album’s title makes abundantly clear, Silvestrov’s music feels light, but in being so is immeasurably heavy. Just when it seems on the verge of fading like a mist in morning light, it curls back from the binds that loop it firmly around our attentions. It is not that these binds are particularly restrictive, only that the music is so much at peace in their gentle capture that its shoes remain unworn.

<< Sofia Gubaidulina: Seven Words / Ten Preludes / De profundis (ECM 1775 NS)
>> Dave Holland Big Band: What Goes Around (ECM 1777)

Trio Mediaeval: Words of the Angel (ECM New Series 1753)

| Tyran Grillo

Trio Mediaeval
Words of The Angel

Anna Maria Friman soprano
Linn Andrea Fuglseth soprano
Torunn Østrem Ossum soprano
Recorded December 1999, Gönningen
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by John Potter

The fourteenth-century Messe de Tournai is the earliest extant polyphonic mass and provides the skeleton for this debut release by Trio Mediaeval. In his accompanying notes, John Potter (who also produced the album) stresses that the survival of such a manuscript is something of a miracle. Written on the backs of ledgers, the mass could easily have suffered the destructive fate to which most such music succumbed in an age where paper was a precious commodity. That it emerged from a war-torn Europe unscathed is likely “because a conscientious accountant couldn’t bear to throw away old financial records.” An overtly Marian theme pervades this disc, as evidenced by the English-sourced motets and sequences leaved between the Mass, and further in a selection of lauds from thirteenth-century Cortona.

Three solos dot the program, each surrounded by luminescent swaths of divine vibrations. Of the chants, Salve mater misericordie is the brightest, and refracts light like a window into the Trio’s further projects. The words “Stella Maris” clearly stand out here, foreshadowing the title of their third album, while the cover art (a still from Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma) cues their second, Soir dit-elle. The Mass itself rests on a delicately consonant edge, ladling our attention between voices and the echoes they project. Nestled like a diamond in an already captivating program is the title piece by Ivan Moody. Dramatic key changes and a snake-like alto core make it one of the most intriguing pieces the Trio has recorded thus far.

Hailing from Norway, Trio Mediaeval honed their craft through focused study with the Hilliard Ensemble, who seem to have passed on not a small amount of adventurous spirit. Often compared with the now defunct Anonymous 4, the Trio walk a striking musical path uniquely their own. Sinuous drones and anchoring lines are gloriously configured, and articulations rendered with vivid care. Words of the angel deserve to be sung by voices of the angel, and here they most certainly are.

<< Andersen w/Tsabropoulos and Marshall: The Triangle (ECM 1752)
>> Kim Kashkashian: Hayren (ECM 1754 NS)

Herbert Henck: Piano Music (ECM New Series 1726)

| Tyran Grillo

Herbert Henck
Piano Music

Herbert Henck piano
Recorded August 1999, Festeburgkirche, Frankfurt am Main
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

George Antheil (1900-1959) caused a stir in October of 1923 not unlike the one provoked by Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps after performing a selection of his sonatas. Only when Erik Satie, in attendance for the performance, voiced his unflinching support did Paris accept him as the self-anointed “Bad Boy of Music.” What incited the audience was the sheer ferocity with which Antheil played, so unsettling was it in its precision. In doing so, he flirted with the Uncanny Valley, taking the human dangerously close to the mechanical. And while his American debut was met with less fruitful derision, Antheil remained convinced that he was as important as ever. Whatever we may think of the man, his tireless spirit (he was known to practice for 20 hours at a stretch) lives on in the keen performances of pianist Herbert Henck, who makes a welcome return to ECM, pairing the French maverick’s sonic factories with the more intimate production lines of American composer and political outcast Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997). The double meaning of the album’s title, Piano Music, gives us clearest insight into its program. Almost instinctively, both composers took to the player piano, treating it as though it were an organism in and of itself. Henck uses the phrase “piano music” as one might speak of “bird song.”

Of Nancorrow there is little to say, as he spent much of his life in hermetic obscurity (in Mexico, no less, after having been denied reentry into America from Spain, where he took up arms against the Franco regime and professed his allegiance to the communist party), quietly amassing a sizable oeuvre of laboriously perforated pianola rolls, which later astonished the musical world with their depth. Although the selections given here were written before Nancorrow began tinkering with the player piano in earnest, their virtuosity is clear in the autonomy of Henck’s elicitations. Such is the electricity that runs the Three 2-part Studies (1940/41), which “roll” off Henck’s fingers with absolute precision, and do the short Prelude and the Blues of 1935.

The Sonatina für Radio (1929), an infectiously jaunty piece with ragtime flair, is a capricious introduction to the music of Antheil, who makes up the rest of this modest 39-minute album. Among a fine selection of miniatures, some as short as thirteen seconds, are his adroit Second Sonata “The Airplane” (1922) and Mechanisms (1922/23). Where the former employs a host of rotary techniques and melodic turbines, all given upward lift by the aerodynamic contours of its fuselage-like core, the latter is a more enigmatic mosaic of unreachable clusters gilded in consonant frames. This is a piece that asks not which mechanisms are being described, but which are being deployed. One possible answer to that question can be found in A Machine (1932/33), a veritable build-up of static shocks that finds its demise in Sonatina (Death of the Machines) (1922). The (Little) Shimmy (1923) that ends the disc is precisely that, scooting the listener ever closer to an indefinable threshold.

This music was meant to be played by only the most skilled of human performers. Henck handles their notorious challenges with a practical ease nowhere to be found when originally composed, showing us in the process that the animate body is still the most creative machine of them all.

<< Keith Jarrett Trio: Whisper Not (ECM 1724/25)
>> Zehetmair Quartett: Karl Amadeus Hartmann/Béla Bartók (ECM 1727 NS)

Camerata Bern/Zehetmair: Verklärte Nacht (ECM New Series 1714)

| Tyran Grillo

Thomas Zehetmair
Camerata Bern
Verklärte Nacht

Thomas Zehetmair violin and director
Camerata Bern
Recorded 1999 at Radio DRS, Zurich; 1995 at Salle de Musique, LaChaux-de-Fonds
Engineer: Bernd Runge and Eberhard Hinz
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Splendour falls on everything around,
you are voyaging with me on a cold sea,
but there is the glow of an inner warmth
from you in me, from me in you.
–Richard Dehmel, “Transfigured Night” (trans. Mary Whittall)

It’s difficult to believe that the first performance of Arnold Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) in 1901 incited a riot, prompting one critic to report, “It sounds as if someone had smudged the score of Tristan while it was still wet.” Structured as it is around the eponymous poem by Richard Dehmel, in which two lovers test their resolve while wandering in moonlight, the gossamer threads of night are its makeup. Along with The Book of the Hanging Gardens, it is one of the composer’s most visceral works. Not easy listening, to be sure, but nothing worth coming to blows over, either. Its lyrical chromaticism is lush yet opaque and descriptive to the core. Its contours slowly come into focus like a whale from a dark sea, Zehetmair’s violin waiting along with the seagulls for any morsels to escape from its yawning food trap. The Camerata Bern pays strictest attention to rhythm, caressing every beat with its strings. Though branded as a nocturnal affair, the piece also resounds with light. Certain sections sound like a magnified string quartet, while others breathe with the lung capacity of a full orchestra, but always with characteristic insulation. Like Wagner at his most self-effacing, Schönberg emotes with high narrative volume, as though a ballet and an opera had been stripped of words and collapsed into this one glorious whole.

After a glassy stillness that leaves us transfigured ourselves, the Four Transylvanian Dances of Sándor Veress pull us to our marionetted feet with spirited urgency. The second of these, with its finely wrought pizzicato beads, is notably heartwarming, while the fourth contrasts processional ceremony with outright exuberance. I can hardly imagine a better segue into Béla Bartók’s famed Divertimento (1939), of which the opening is perhaps the Hungarian’s most recognizable motif. Lower strings emerge as a major consonant force against the more adventurous uppers, which dance their way into the Adagio with infectious verve. The musicians’ dynamic control is on full alert here, as quiet restraint carries over into a cyclical swell of emotive power. The third and final movement is played to perfection. Its accentuating fingerboard slaps, solo cello, and open-stringed double stops stand out with scintillating clarity, all wrung through an imitative filter before ending with a pizzicato-friendly “micro-ballet.” The Divertimento, a more precise rendering of which I cannot recall, was the result of a commission by patron Paul Sacher, whose importance one can gauge further in ECM’s kaleidoscopic tribute album.

Verklärte Nacht scores another hit for Zehetmair, whose quartet album pairing Hartmann and Bartók made a concurrent appearance to equal acclaim. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have both on your shelf.

<< Michael Galasso: High Lines (ECM 1713)
>> Heinz Holliger: Schneewittchen (ECM 1715/16 NS)

Leos Janáček: A Recollection (ECM New Series 1736)

| Tyran Grillo

Leoš Janáček
A Recollection

András Schiff piano
Recorded January 2000, Schloss Mondsee, Austria
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“And it floated along on the water that day, like white swans.”
–Leoš Janáček, on tossing his score for the 1905 Sonata into the Vltava River

Intimacy and the piano make for an inseparable pair. At its best, the instrument paints an image of a composer in solitude, forging from its complex array of mallets, strings, and keys a music of one’s own. This is especially apparent in András Schiff’s peerless recital of Leoš Janáček (1854-1928), at last given the ECM makeover it deserves. Drawing from Moravian folk melodies and less discernible influences, Janáček’s pianism, by way of Schiff, is all about heart.

The Andante of In the Mists (V mlhách), composed in 1912, plays like a guitar, strings pressed rather than plucked, given renewed life in surroundings of waning visibility. One immediately notices the delicacy of the Schiff touch, and beneath it the supremely robust evocation of the melodic line that balances its way throughout the program’s remainder. He continues pulling at hidden energies in the Adagio that follows, working magic in small bursts. Each emotion falls with the insistence of late summer rain toward the transfixing Presto. One finds here the incredulity of the melodic gesture played out against itself in a roiling sea, where darkness lives only in our dreams.

The Sonata 1.X.1905 (From the street) is an incomplete work written, we are told, in memory of Frantisek Pavlik, a young Czech carpenter bayoneted during a Brno demonstration on 1 October 1905 in the name of higher learning. Dissatisfied with the result, Janáček burned the third movement, a funeral march, and cast the first two into the Vltava. It might have been lost forever had not Ludmila Tučková, who gave its premier in January of 1906, announced that she still had a copy in her possession. Each of its survivors is a mirror of the other, a long and soulful stream that leaves us lost and without company at their conclusion.

The miniatures of On an overgrown path (Po zarostlém chodníčku) form a pinnacle of the composer’s chamber output. Book I of 1908 is the more programmatic of the two. With such titles as “Our evenings” (Naše večery) and “A blown-away leaf” (Lístek odvanutý) at the outset, we are never in doubt as to what is being described. Yet even without these, we can feel our toes spreading in wild grasses, hear the music of autumn drifting across the dawn. The lovely reverberations of “The Madonna of Frydek” (Frýdecká panna Maria) and “Good night!” (Dobrou noc!) linger throughout later vignettes, such as “In tears” (V pláči) and in the call and response of “The barn owl has not flown away!” (Sýček neodletěl!). These last paint an emotional portrait of a composer bereaving the premature death of his daughter, Olga. Such diaristic approaches to musical experience are furthered in Book II (1911), where an Orphic, undulating Andante sits beside a bipolar Allegretto. The concluding three sections fall under the subtitle “Paralipomena” (or supplements), of which the Allegro leaves the most indelible mark.

A recollection (1928) plays us out with the grace of a sunflower bending to the wind.

Although the music of Schiff’s third ECM album evokes so much in the way of sight and sound, it rests firmly on silence insofar as it worships the internal impression, which is ultimately inarticulable. Try as they might, these lips produce nothing worth hearing in light of the music at hand, and so I type instead, hoping that my arbitrary dance of fingers on a keyboard of a rather different sort have done even a modicum of justice to what can more easily be known from buying this superb album and experiencing it for yourself.

<< Luciano Berio: Voci (ECM 1735 NS)
>> Vassilis Tsabropoulos: Akroasis (ECM 1737)