Till Fellner piano Orchestre symphonique de Montréal Kent Nagano conductor
Concert recordings, May and November 2008 at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, Montréal
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Produced by Manfred Eicher
In his liner essay, Paul Griffiths rightly credits Ludwig van Beethoven with having given the orchestra “a voice,” and in the composer’s final concertos offered here we have even greater reason to bask in his voluminous discourse, made all the more so for the temperamental piano at its center. These two musical forces, strings and keys, “speak to us by speaking to each other.” Such plurivocity, Griffiths further contends, is only heightened by the performances on this disc. Austrian pianist Till Fellner, who previously graced us with his Bach interpretations, now enacts an equally contested dramaturgy in these mighty, yet ever delicate masterworks. At the podium is Kent Nagano, a personal operatic favorite who treats the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal like a giant chorus far too expansive to be constricted by human throats.
Fellner (photo by Ben Ealovega)
Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major op. 58 (1805/06)
While most concertos of this magnitude would begin with an orchestral prelude of sorts into which the soloist may be dropped like so much creative ink, here the latter opens the floor in the tonic before spreading its fingers into the dominant key. The composer holds our attention throughout its entire 19-minute expanse, a concerto in and of itself; no small feat considering that it twists the barest of thematic cores into a veritable unicorn’s horn of charging force, brought home in the glorious final chords. The second movement entrances us with its attendant imagery of Orpheus taming the Furies before Hades. Having only melody to hold on to in its shadows, we put our trust in this music completely. Our abstruse confusion is over before we know it, and as we are swept up in the ensuing Rondo we find that we’ve been dreaming all along.
Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major op. 73 (1809/10)
Despite having earned the nickname of “Emperor,” this concerto is, Griffiths reminds us, nothing if monarchical. Opening in tutti and with a graceful cadenza, the Allegro charts a formidable exposition through landscapes unchanging and deciduous alike. Dancing configurations in the first half underscore not only a depth of virtuosity, but also of melodic effect, while denser punctuations in the second thread our minds with braids of protracted thematic closure. A pensive Adagio heralds ever so subtly the newly emerging Romanticism of the age. Fellner’s careful pedaling ensures that we get the most out of every phrase as the piano descends toward the lone bassoon that bleeds into the concluding Rondo. One can almost feel the hems of dresses and tailored lapels tracing their grand circles in the air as the instrumentalists engage in a lavish dance. Beethoven sweeps his brush through the piano’s densest colors and uses these to paint a rousing portrait of epic intimacies.
Both of these concertos are dedicated to Archduke Rudolph of Austria (1788-1831), a student of Beethoven’s who would also become a great patron. That such powerful creations might sometimes not exist without likeminded support is a sad yet potent reminder of the invisible tug-of-war between music and economics. Thankfully, ECM’s finely chosen interpretations and engineering betray none of these politics and present the music in all its richness without any strings attached. We see this in Nagano’s palpable free spirit, in the orchestra’s every nuance, and in Fellner’s attentiveness to each cumulative set of notes. He plays the middle movements faster than most, giving them new life for a new century, plowing ahead with the immensity of fortitude and passion that spawned them. Bravos all around.
The seasons have changed And the light And the weather And the hour. But it is the same land. And I begin to know the map And to get my bearings. –Dag Hammarskjøld
I once had a wooden train set. Its tracks dovetailed together like puzzle pieces and each car fit neatly into their grooves, linked by magnets at either end. Said magnets were weak and separated when the lead locomotive was pulled with too much force. So, too, do our changing notions of modernity. Though they may seem linked, each is held by a connection that would just as easily turn into repellence were its nodes reversed. As we open our arms to all things hypermodern, our trains are derailing, our allegiance to space is atrophying, and the desolation of post-apocalyptic landscapes is becoming the new norm by which all others are judged; an epoch in which space becomes its own territory and imbues emptiness with a gravid beauty all its own. This is the liminal scrapbook in which ECM has been quietly pasting its covers for over 40 years. In doing so, it has engendered distinct spatial coordinates through which the physical and the sonic are one and the same.
Search among the rubble and you may be fortunate enough to stumble across Sleeves of Desire: A Cover Story. Published in 1996, this first collection of ECM cover art is notoriously out of print (I am indebted to Columbia University for providing a library copy for this review) and now fetches exorbitant prices on the used book market. It seems rather counterintuitive that the lucky few should be able to profit by releasing this tome from ownership. Either way, it remains a unique archive of a label that has become known to enthusiasts as much by its clothing as by its underlying physique. Along with label brainchild Manfred Eicher and his design team, Lars Müller Publishers has created a profound, if now elusive, archive of an unmistakable journey.
Lifted from their covers like contact lenses, these images offer clearest insight into themselves, which is precisely how I choose to view them here. They do not merely constitute a “visual poem” that is complementary to the music they adorn. They are also auditory poems in and of themselves. Each sings to us. Take, for instance, the tactile crinkles of The Music Improvisation Company’s self-titled record from 1970 (ECM 1005):
No image would seem to capture the essence of its attendant production more explicitly. Each random line, when viewed from afar, emerges as part of a vaster web of order. But not all ECM covers are so illustrative. Most are, in fact, starting points for deeper contemplation. Another early example is Paul Bley’s label debut (ECM 1003) with Gary Peacock of the same year, only this time we are confounded by a square of tattered canvas in sepia gradations:
Such enigmatic touches would seem to be de rigueur at ECM, but are a far cry from the gimmickry of others who might enslave themselves to an aesthetic without forethought (or, for that matter, afterthought). Just as there is no such definitive thing as the “ECM sound,” neither is there an “ECM look.” Even the briefest perusal of the catalogue spreads in the back of the book is enough to confirm the label’s rather colorful history.
To be sure, the austere black-and-whites of recent decades, such as this iconic shot from Jim Bengston that adorns David Darling’s 1995 Dark Wood (ECM 1519),
and those of many New Series efforts
make their referential albums easily identifiable. Furthermore, Eicher’s monochromatic preferences have come to be reflected in CD reissues, many of which recast old color covers in black and white, if not dispense with them completely in favor of suspended text, as in the Old & New Masters series. Even so, we must reconcile these with the often-scarred collages of photographer Dieter Rehm:
And who can forget Wolfgang Dauner’s infamous Output (ECM 1006, released 1970), courtesy of F + R Grindler:
Even more “illuminating” is the rarely seen back cover,
where we find ourselves wired to the outside world.
One of the most satisfying consummations of the book’s titular desire is the rare privilege of seeing some of the images in their uncropped form, divorced from all typography, barcodes, and packaging constraints. One cannot help but marvel further at the work of Rehm, whose uncompromising commitment to imagistic immediacy is not unlike the melodic urgency of the musicians around which his art wraps. Rehm takes the familiar and obscures it organically, so that the promise of the open road becomes a Peter Tscherkassky-esque exercise in agitation
and the Statue of Liberty loses herself in nocturnal vertigo:
Many of ECM’s most striking covers, however, are strictly orthographic and provide no less potent stimulation for the senses through the skillful appliqué of resident designer Barbara Wojirsch.
Her handwriting has given a visual voice to many an artist, not least of all to bassist Dave Holland, as in these striking mock-ups for 1990’s Extensions (ECM 1410),
not to mention the ecstatic minimalism of Jan Garbarek’s I Took Up The Runes:
As valuable as Sleeves is as an art object, the weight of the images therein is matched word for stroke by the equally considered writings that accompany them. Peter Kemper sets the tone with a careful design of his own in the essay “Along the Margins of Murmuring.” Invoking philosopher Gernot Böhme, he lays out nature as a communicative network in which aesthetic impulses “translate” natural vocabularies even as they encrypt them. Where does a vision like that of ECM, we are led to wonder, fit into such dizzying arrays of retinal information? Yet rather than succumb to postmodern melancholy in his attempts to engage this query, Kemper makes a convincing case for the as yet indestructible efficacy of the visual—asserting that, “in the steady rising flood of images, pictures must still leave something to be desired. Art does not culminate in a virtuoso display of information; on the contrary, art begins where information ends.” Thus do we come full circle to the idea of image as stepping-stone, each incarnation a bubble of surface tension at the lip of sign and signal.
ECM’s visuality sustains what Kemper calls a “poetry of proportions,” and nowhere so vividly as through the work of Wojirsch, who has carried on since the death of her husband, Burkhart, Eicher’s friend and collaborator from day one. Wojirsch’s approach is an alchemy on its own, distilling from the sensorial tides that saturate our lives a most potent ocular tincture. If it results in only a single drop rather than a full vial’s worth, all the better for us at the level of deferential consumer. Each window—through its one of infinite possible intersections of framing, textual overlay, and resolution—is a portal through which boundaries are inexpressible except in the act of looking. It is “the sleeve as the semblance of sound,” the all-seeing ear of Gertrude Stein made manifest.
“Sounds originate in silence, but their goal is the reverberation and metamorphosis generated in listeners’ minds.” So writes Peter Rüedi in “The Audible Landscape,” and for whom ECM might as well stand for “Eicher’s Collected Memories.” Here, we get an even more lucid attempt to describe on the printed page what exists only in vibration. All art is animated by this atomic hum. “The singularity of ECM productions,” Rüedi notes further, “lies in the tension between a spiritual and a material dimension.” The same might be said for the book in which his words appear. On that note, Müller himself offers “It is the second sight that counts,” of which the title says all: There is something in these images that is beyond even the mind’s eye, a mystery far greater than the most windswept plain.
Steve Lake concludes with his comprehensive piece, “Looking at the Cover,” offering a more pragmatic view of the label as process (it also includes the wonderful poem epigraphed above). Lake dutifully reminds us that behind the ECM enigma there are human decisions, logistics, and labors at every turn. He also discusses the effect of titles on images, and vice versa, noting that the few exhibitions of ECM photography have sometimes jarred viewers by their very dissociation.
Eicher’s is a cinematic experience of music. We see this not only in his allegiance to such directors as Jean-Luc Godard
(Still from Godard’s Passion)
and Theo Angelopolous,
(Photos by Giorgos Arvanitis)
but also in the tale every cover tells. The characters may not always show their faces, but we are never in doubt of their voices. In this sense, Sleeves is more akin to a short story collection than a coffee table book. Within its pages lie countless diaries, travelogues, and enough intertextual details to keep one engaged for years. Each of those details is a treasure to be savored. Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that CDs are housed in “jewel cases,” for such is their harnessing of light in the darkening storm of the digital age.
Paul Giger violin, violino d’amore, viola d’amore, footbells Robert Dick c-flute, glissando flute, bass flute in c, bass flute in f, contrabass flute Satoshi Takeishi percussion
Recorded June 1998 and 2000
Modern-day gypsy, musical traveler, melodic nomad: call him what you will, but Paul Giger has created some of the most haunting music to ever grace your ears. Adding yet another branch to the bold tree that began with Chartres and which was expanded in three subsequent projects, the Swiss violinist/composer beguiles us yet again with this more whimsical, though no less trenchant, collaboration. On Vindonissa, he is joined by two outstanding musicians. Robert Dick is a truly revolutionary American flutist and composer who has taken his instrument to new heights. A pioneer in extended techniques, design, and improvisation, he is a welcome presence on ECM. Percussionist Satoshi Takeishi is a kindred itinerant spirit, and has worked with a wide range of musicians, including Anthony Braxton and Joe Zeytoonian. A skilled improviser in his own right, his openness to the musical moment is a no-brainer for inclusion here.
Giger bookends this yawning chasm of life with a meditation on solo violin from which the album gets its name, distilling from the chromatic banality of open strings a potent tincture of dissonance and transcendence. Such lone signposts dot the album with moments of pause, as in the lilting Introitus and Kyrie. The group tracks contrast with open spaces and colorful mysticism. Starting with the pointillism of Oogoogajoo and ending on the likeminded An Ear On Buddha’s Belly, these intersections of time and circumstance seem to grow organically, as if in waves. Dick and Takeishi walk comfortably alongside Giger, bringing vital human energy to the untouchable center of Lava Coils and even greater earthly care to Fractal Joy, the most profound triangle therein. Gloria et Tarantella, in which Giger rocks the viola d’amore to the beat of his own foot bells, is the album’s masterpiece and builds to a frenzy of Tartini-like exuberance. With every note, it burns a root and follows its smoke ever skyward.
Giger is easily one of the greatest violinists of our time, not only because of his technical prowess, but more importantly for his ability to grab hold of a melodic handle and never let go until it asks him too. Such talent can take some getting used to, especially in the presence of other musicians, but I think this is an album in which one can rest assured that a meeting of three bodies, minds, and worldviews can indeed find harmony through sound’s untold alchemies.
John Potter tenor Maya Homburger baroque violin Stephen Stubbs lute John Surman soprano saxophone and bass clarinet Barry Guy double-bass Recorded January 1999, Forde Abbey, Dorset Engineer: Markus Heiland Produced by Manfred Eicher
Weep you no more, sad fountains; What need you flow so fast?
So begins ECM’s first foray into the sounds and songs of John Dowland (1563-1626), Renaissance lutenist and a songwriter for all ages. While many have captures the dance of voice and strings by which he set his chisel to the lathe of courtly melancholia, the group of musicians assembled on this disc manages to carve something refreshingly immediate. Explains tenor John Potter, creative director of what would come to be known as the Dowland Project, “This is the first time anyone’s approached Dowland not from an ‘early music’ angle, but simply as music. We’re working with Dowland as though he were still with us.” The present recording foregrounds early music’s malleability and upholds Dowland as a great improviser. It is precisely this spirit that coheres Potter and his rogues-in-arms. Stephen Stubbs provides the requisite lute, and with it a boundless cache of creative energy for all to share. It was at the suggestion of producer Manfred Eicher that double-bassist Barry Guy and Baroque violinist Maya Homburger were brought on board. Yet the most seemingly incongruous instrumental addition was that of jazz reedman John Surman, who actually ends up being the most conservative of the instrumentalists, providing a steady bass clarinet continuo and smooth saxophonic lines throughout.
For this collection of ayres and other curios, Potter and company have hand picked a fine array for our auditory pleasure. The disc’s crowning highlights come from the First Book of Songs. “Come Again” synthesizes the melodic relay between Potter and Surman with the utmost respect, as do the visceral “Now, O Now I Needs Must Part” and “Come, Heavy Sleep.” Guy delights us with his palpable lyricism in “Go Crystal Tears,” a song in which Surman also succeeds to astonishingly brilliant effect. From the Second Book of Songs, we get two polar opposites. The mournful “Flow My Tears” flows like honey from a wilting hive and makes two appearances on the album. Fine Knacks For Ladies is a more whimsical number. Potter’s quiet refrain of “the heart is true” resounds with genuine delight. The Third Book of Songs gives up two tearful ghosts of its own, of which The Lowest Trees Have Tops walks the most precarious line between laughter and lamentation. Surman’s bass clarinet infuses the title song, taken from A Pilgrimes Solace, and acts like a fulcrum of emotional balance. Potter is at his finest here, caressing every word with ceremonial urgency. Rounding out the program are three selections from Dowland’s Lachrimae, a book of pavanes based on Flow My Tears. Two of these are instrumentals that go straight for the heart, while the final track, “Lachrimae Amantis,” finds Potter slipping into countertenor on a pure and open Ah.
While perhaps not as cohesive as the project’s later albums (those with perfect pitch may stumble here and there in this darkness), In Darkness succeeds with no small humility in looking beyond Dowland’s enchanting, affected veneer and into the vivacious and melodious heart within. All in all, this is an emotionally satisfying start to an intriguing New Series project.
<< John Cage: The Seasons (ECM 1696 NS) >> Dave Holland Quintet: Prime Directive (ECM 1698)
Michael Galasso violin
Recorded October 1982, Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Born in Louisiana in 1949, Michael Galasso picked up his first violin at age 3. After debuting with the New Orleans Philharmonic at 11, he went on to forge a unique and fascinating career. As a longtime collaborator of Robert Wilson, he composed incidental music for a host of renowned productions, including an award-winning 1998 staging of Strindberg’s A Dreamplay, in addition to being involved in numerous sound installations in museums worldwide. Many will have encountered him as the film scorer for Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, and most recently for Martin Provost’s Séraphine, but far too few have heard him on his own terms, divorced from the images he describes.
For his first solo album, Galasso gives us nine numbered “Scenes,” each the facet of an unfathomable jewel. It is an album to which I often played my violin by ear, trying to gain inner sight to its deeper complexities. And indeed, beyond its charming Philip Glassean veneer heaves a pair of expansive lungs that expel far more than they take in. The album has the feeling of a home recording, multi-tracked and with minimal processing applied. Despite being meticulously composed, it is also spontaneous in feel and refreshingly non-perfectionist. Some lines don’t quite sync up, as if what we hear were just a potent coincidence. From the hauntingly enigmatic (Scenes II and VI) to the whimsical (Scene III), we are privileged to stroll through this modest gallery of sound. Scene IV stands out with its boldly syncopated lead and subtle harmonizing. Others, like Scenes VII and VIII, tremble with incidental potential, seeming to spring forth from an as yet unrealized mise-en-scène. But it is the final Scene that remains closest to my heart, for its utter simplicity draws from a groundswell of bliss. Not unlike the solo work of Paul Giger, it has a magic all its own, an uncompromising sense of direction that can never be thwarted once it holds you.
Scenes is more than a soundtrack without images. Not unlike the shadow on the cover, its chapters are disembodied. We see only their negative selves, and hear only the sounds that animate them.
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>> Lester Bowie: All The Magic! (ECM 1246/47)
Paul Giger violin, violono d’amore Marius Ungureanu viola Beat Schneider cello Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir Tõnu Kaljuste conductor Recorded June 1998, Niguliste Church, Tallinn Engineer: Mado Maadik Produced by Manfred Eicher
This recording documents a melodious piece of happenstance. Having begun on rather different planes of ECM’s mortal coil, the roving Swiss violinist and the much-in-demand Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir gradually met at the center of a most sonically revelatory circle. The resulting Ignis is a hypnotic experience that reveals new secrets with every listen. For his first label project in seven years since 1992’s Schattenwelt, Giger reworks antique motivic fragments into larger wholes. As such, they become fully formed entities looking inward through the lens of an unparalleled violinism.
Organum,for string trio, inducts us into the album’s haunting universe. Bathed in a luxurious reverb and medieval sentiment, it plunges us deep into the nexus of what’s to come. Karma Shadub, the only original composition here, finds itself resurrected from its appearance on Alpstein to superb choral effect. The EPCC touches every layer with expert care, capturing the arpeggiated flair of the earlier version with a more nuanced legato style. Giger plays like a man possessed of something beyond physical description, filling as much space as the entire choir, if not more.
The following two pieces are drawn from 10th-century Benedictine plainchant. Tropus inverts the spectrum with the violin occupying the central axis around which the other voices reveal themselves. The choir fluffs its feathers, rising from the depths with ascendant violin improvisations, adding harmonic light to an already bursting image. Alleluja is a succinct instrumental statement of utter beauty, and boasts Giger’s skills on the viola d’amore. Last is the astonishing O Ignis. Structured around the selfsame piece by Hildegard von Bingen, it can also be heard on the Hilliard Ensemble/Jan Garbarek’s Mnemosyne. Presently, it is anchored by a gently lilting ostinato in the cello that soon flowers into a supernova of musical activity, carefully controlled by the binding threads of its voices.
This is a radically different sound for Giger, who seems to reinvent himself with every new effort, and one that should provide many discoveries to come. A gray, expansive, and utterly captivating experience awaits.
<< Tomasz Stanko: From The Green Hill (ECM 1680) >> Franz Schubert: Sonate B-Dur op. posth. D 960 (ECM 1682 NS)
David Geringas cello Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien Dennis Russell Davies conductor Recorded July and August 1998, ORF Studio, Vienna Engineer: Anton Reininger Produced by Manfred Eicher
ECM follows up its astonishing debut of Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür with a program of further deconstructions. With his architectonic shovel, Tüür burrows out an idiomatic hovel for himself in the sands of today’s placid musical shores. Every motif is its own voice, building to powerful fruition from the smallest of sparks. To start, the Symphony No. 3 (1997) clicks its tongue with a delicate cymbal. Like the corona of a jazz dream, it wavers through a swarm of failed bass lines and reeds. The lower strings ascend in a brief march before being drowned by a vibraphone. The ensuing cloudbursts recall the composer’s wintry Crystallisatio. Percussion becomes more pronounced as stuttering rhythms break the first movement into pieces. In the second movement, a glockenspiel ruptures the high strings as a snare hit unleashes a brass menagerie. The flute emerges for a solo passage as strings process gently in the background. The string writing recalls Tüür’s Passion, albeit transposed to a different key. The symphony ends with a single note from the vibraphone, dripping like a water clock into mortal darkness.
Tüür’s aesthetic is so fractured that the concerto would seem an anachronism, but his Concerto for Cello and Orchestra (1996) epitomizes the very essence of his craft, planting as it does a single generative seed firmly in the soil of introspection. His background as a rock musician comes through noticeably in his bold rhythmic choices, while the piece’s single-movement structure ensures that its signals remain explicitly contained. The vibraphone reprises its vital role, oozing like plasma from an open wound. It is not the soloist that arises from within the orchestra, but much the reverse. And as the vibraphone weaves its way deftly through the orchestra’s open spaces, a single note on strings hints at relaxation. Tüür gravitates toward higher notes here, so that even in descending motifs the apex gains precedence as pedal point. He ends with a celestial cluster, a galaxy spinning out of control until it implodes.
Lighthouse (1997), for string orchestra, is one of Tüür’s most cinematic pieces, which, if we are to take the title literally, would seem to render its eponymous structure from the outside in. We track its light first, and the afterimage it leaves on the screen, only to be given view of the mechanism that turns and amplifies its voice in the night like a siren to the dark ships of its surrender. The lush scoring painfully picks apart and rebuilds the lighthouse, turning it inside out, so that its column is now made of light and its reassuring beam becomes the mortar of its foundation, sweeping its potent arm through the air and knocking everything in its path. This is not a violent piece but a purposeful one, sustained by architectural consciousness. It tells its story in hefty chunks, if always through the fog of recollection. Its agitation enacts a sort of tragedy, a body descending from its topmost rail, flailing its appendages helplessly before the sand engulfs its last breath. Yet the music is anything but morbid, only mournful in the realization of its own complicity in the ending of a life, and the beginning of a new one.
Tüür’s aphasic approach has made him one of the most sought-after composers of our generation, and not without good reason. His stable foundations allow him to build teetering creations that never quite tumble. His music works very much like thought, constantly rationalizing its decisions in hindsight. The most transcendent passages are always stirred so that they become muddled without obscuring individual colors. Despite the seemingly disparate elements of these mosaics, Tüür’s is not a process that imposes itself upon the elements at hand. Rather, it recognizes and values its inner life and the varied ways in which one can externalize it.
<< Zelenka: Trio Sonatas (ECM 1671/72 NS) >> Charles Lloyd: Voice In The Night (ECM 1674)
Gidon Kremer violin Keith Jarrett piano Staatsorchester Stuttgart Dennis Russell Davies conductor The 12 Cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra Tatjana Grindenko violin Alfred Schnittke prepared piano Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra Saulius Sondeckis conductor
Recorded October 1983, Basel; January 1984, Stuttgart; February 1984, Berlin; November 1977, Bonn
Engineers: Heinz Wildhagen, Peter Laenger, Eberhard Sengpiel, and Dieter Frobeen
Produced by Manfred Eicher
“The complex and many-faceted only confuses me, and I must search for unity. What is it, this one thing, and how do I find my way to it? Traces of this perfect thing appear in many guises—and everything that is unimportant falls away.”
–Arvo Pärt (photo courtesy of The Sonic Spread)
The composer
On 11 September 2010, Arvo Pärt welcomed his 75th year. To celebrate this milestone, ECM has rereleased its first New Series album in a special deluxe edition. When it first appeared in 1984, hardly anyone outside the composer’s native Estonia could have known what to expect from this modest cover of muted pastel and block lettering, but Tabula rasa has since taken on a life of its own. Yet behind the iconicity, word-of-mouth marketing, and a few choice celebrity endorsements (not least among them, R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe), Pärt’s music remains as it is: reverence in sonic form.
Paide Castle (photo by Liene Strautmane-Kaze)
Born in the small town of Paide, just outside of Tallinn, Pärt took his first musical steps at age seven and was already composing by his teens. He would later study with Heino Eller at Tallinn Conservatory, where he was characterized as one who “just seemed to shake his sleeves and notes would fall out.” The sixties found him at a critical juncture in his creative life. Disillusioned by the serialism with which his early works engaged, and which had earned him the red pen of Soviet censors, he fell into silence and personal reformation. According to biographer Paul Hillier, this silence has been the alpha and omega of his subsequent musical output. It is the silence of death, a reminder of our spiritual origins and of life’s fragility. Out of this nexus arose his signature “tintinnabuli” style, which finds its harmonic roots in the overtones of the struck bell. One finds its power in every note, and through an allegiance so delicate it knows no other shelter than the human heart.
Original cover (ECM New Series 1275)
The music
Of the significant body of Pärt’s works represented by ECM, this album came relatively late in my listening. Nevertheless, its visceral power and openness to interpretation have yet to wane, for it has only grown with me. It is 1 a.m. as I sit alone in my study, listening to this seminal recording once again. I find myself filled with words but faithful to none of them. Each seems to go right through the music’s liquid surface.
We are graced with two strikingly different variations of Fratres. One of Pärt’s most successful compositions, it exists in many versions. The first represented here is for violin and piano (1980). The combined intuition of Gidon Kremer and Keith Jarrett shades this interpretation with frail determination. What begins as an energetic swoon of arpeggios soon coalesces into a dirge of heartrending poignancy in which pizzicato bursts puncture the visual landscape like dying flames. These percussive rituals are common to all incarnations of Fratres, and act as tactile pedal points. Passages bordering on the vocal swoop down to graze the piano’s gravid footsteps, even as we watch from a place neither near nor far. This is a space in which our ears and our emotions become one, and in this respect Fratres is an anthem for the spirit unafraid to drink its own tears. Title aside, for me there is something divinely maternal about this piece, especially as played by the 12 celli (1982) heard two tracks later. This version brings to light a clearer sense of the piece’s mathematical anatomy. The low grumbles of the piano are replaced here with the tapping of cello bodies. The air inside them is heard on its own terms, unfettered by the strings that lay just outside its escape routes. The cellists begin in whispers before proclaiming their tentative motif with due conviction. Each mirrored descent is a caress in a restless night, the knocking of wood like a boat listing slowly in darkening waters.
Bowing humbly between these two “brethren” is the Cantus In Memory Of Benjamin Britten (1977), a rarer secular piece from Pärt, who once said, “I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me.” Nowhere is this truer than here, where a single tubular bell sounds that single note (an A) throughout, reflecting both the tonal and emotional veins of the piece. Having the score before me also reveals the silent beats that circumscribe the piece. Like the dead space between stars, this silence breathes with the potential for creation. Thematically the music is laid bare and layered with dizzying resolution, the sympathetic bell ringing as if from a great void. As homage to a composer in whom Pärt sought a kindred spirit, Cantus thrives with anguish and adoration. In its brief five minutes, it manages to reach past the listener into a realm where personhood is no longer relevant and music thrives on its own performance.
With Tabula rasa (1977), Pärt does more than wipe the proverbial slate clean, but spins from that same emptiness an open web of tangible effects. The title is both philosophy and mantra. Structurally speaking, none could be more appropriate. Violins circle one another like birds in flight before being awestruck by the haunting chimes of a prepared piano (played by the late Alfred Schnittke). Each successive eruption is deeper than the last, carrying with it the ghost of all that has come before. This piece is famous for having boggled its musicians on paper (“Where’s the music?” they are said to have cried), so bare did the score seem to them before being committed to fingers and bows. But once the music was given voice, it was clear that what had originally appeared porous was in fact pregnant with life-affirming rapture. Tabula rasa undergoes a dramatic change in its latter half as the violins begin to fade into the surrounding architecture. The carillon-like refrain of the prepared piano drops a child’s handful of crystals into water, naked and unassuming while also strangely coercive. By the end we are left in the company of solemn double basses, whose commentary seems but an afterthought to an experience that lies just beyond the grasp of words.
The book
In his original accompanying essay, Wolfgang Sandner describes the music on Tabula rasa as a “curious union of historical master-craftsmanship and modern ‘gestus.’” The same might be said of this handsome Special Edition. Housed in a 200-page hardcover book, the album is given the royal treatment with full study scores for all four works therein, two facsimile autographs of its title work and Cantus, and a new introductory essay by Paul Griffiths. As an artifact it is a tangible intersection of passionate commitment to detail from all angles.
The scores in particular offer even non-musicologists vast insight into their inner workings. We see clearly before us the peaks and valleys of Fratres in chamber form, and the drone strung below its cello counterpart like a safety net. We see also the cosmic structure of the Cantus, like binary stars bound by mortality. And we can experience for ourselves that confrontation with emptiness that must have so perplexed the first interpreters of Tabula rasa. A cursory glance reveals further shades of understanding. For example, we find that, in Part 1 (“Ludus”), sometimes only double basses accompany the two violinists with no noticeable loss of orchestral density, and each ascent on the prepared piano in Part 2 (“Silentium”) stands out like a stairway into light.
To say that Tabula rasa has held up perfectly would be misleading, for it would imply that it possesses physical substance to be upheld. As a whole this album is more about spaces: of mourning, of self-reflection, of impermanence, of privacy in a violent world, of virtue and history, of weakness and flesh, and ultimately of life itself. It is the undoing of forced representation. It is the challenge of confession. It is the hardship of conflict and the joy of affirmation. It is the silent rendered audible, and the audible rendered silent.
It is you.
It is I.
It is.
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Rosamunde Quartett Andreas Reiner violin Diane Pascal violin Helmut Nicolai viola Anja Lechner violoncello
Recorded December 2007, Historischer Reitstadel, Neumarkt
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Produced by Manfred Eicher
If you continue to dream Forgetfulness will close your heart’s wound: The soul sees its sufferings And itself floats by.
–Nikolaus Lenau
Othmar Schoeck (1886-1957) was a Swiss composer whose musical journey came to a head in Notturno, his most intensely personal work. Schoeck was one of a generation of artists who set out to establish Switzerland as a major presence in European music. Like his contemporaries Arthur Honegger and Frank Martin, he sought to break free from the Brahmsian idealism with which many associated his countrymen in favor of a darker, more tragic stripe of sonic culture. An orchestral conductor and piano accompanist by profession, Schoeck was no mere dabbler in the compositional arts. Yet despite the fact that no fewer than eight operas, four hundred songs, and a smattering of instrumental works flowed from his pen, we hear so little of him on the concert stage. Says Chris Walton, author of Othmar Schoeck: Life and Works and of the album’s liner notes, “That Switzerland should have been home to the cutting edge of art might at first seem odd; but as much as it look to us to be at the center of the map of Europe, it has, in a real sense, long been situated at its ‘borders.’” Such contradictory geography is the seat of Schoeck’s output. At once gravid and untetherable, its rejection of overt nationalist or folk tendencies ripened the composer for easy dismissal during the inter-war years. Though staunchly allied to his homeland, his anti-cosmopolitan music is characterized more by its impermanence than by any socio-cultural currency.
Notturno was composed between 1931 and 1933, and sets the world-weary verse of Nikolaus Lenau (1802-1850) and one fragment by Gottfried Keller (1819-1890) for voice and string quartet. The cycle is threaded by an elusive leitmotif of regret over a failed extra-marital affair. There is a mournful quality to this music that one also finds, as Heinz Holliger points out in an introductory note, in the tearful lyricism of Alban Berg and Arnold Schönberg. Over the course of five movements, we find ourselves lost in a forest of shadows, hoping for any sign of moonlight to break the silence with its song. All we get, however, are words dripping with liquid night, each a cloud waiting to burst into storm. Replete with moisture, flora, and withered emotions, Lenau’s sentiments range from cynical (“In consternation I desired / That we both should die”) to resigned morbidity (“I love this gentle death”), but always with an “unmannered” (to borrow Holliger’s term) sadness. Bavarian baritone Christian Gerhaher shapes each syllable like a blind carver: that is, as if with his hands and in darkness.
The music is not without its twinge of hope in the fifth movement, in which Keller’s words drip like honey from Gerhaher’s lips. Listen to the gorgeousness of his high note, lifting us ever so briefly into dawn in the final lines:
My soul is as undefiled as a child and will not weigh down your shafts of light. I will keep my sights set on those distant places to where we will travel.
as the violins pour down like those very shafts of light, and try not to be moved. Still, by this point we have grown too used to Lenau’s tattered garments to shrug them off. We also know, as in his last words, that only sadness awaits us in place of sadness, such that solitude seems but a fantasy:
Oh, loneliness, how willingly would I drink From your fresh forest bottle!
For all its darkness, this is a translucent recording. The performances are raw and impassioned, the Rosamundes adding to an already exquisite résumé. But the real merit here is its voice. Surely, the choice of Gerhaher was not accidental, as the young baritone perfected his technique with the great Liedermeister Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who happens to have been one of Schoeck’s most ardent interpreters. His presence establishes an unbroken chain between composer, score, and studio, at last linking the fortunate listener to nothing short of a hallmark achievement.
Michael Galasso
Between Sound and Space: ECM Records and Beyond 