Tigran Mansurian: Con anima (ECM New Series 2687)

| Tyran Grillo

Tigran Mansurian
Con anima

Varty Manouelian violin
Boris Allakhverdyan clarinet
Michael Kaufman violoncello
Steven Vanhauwaert piano
Kim Kashkashian viola
Tatevik Mokatsian piano
Movses Pogossian violin
Teng Li viola
Karen Ouzounian violoncello
Recorded January-April 2019
Evelyn and Mo Ostin Music Center
of the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, Los Angeles
Recording engineer: Benjamin Maas
Cover photo: Jean-Christophe Béchet
Mastering: Christoph Stickel
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: November 6, 2020

Although “refined” has taken on elitist nuances over the years, Armenian composer Tigran Mansurian cuts to the root by following the true etymology of the word as a return to purity. In this all-chamber program, conceived as an 80th birthday gift by violinist Movses Pogossian and violist Kim Kashkashian, Mansurian’s combination of Armenian and European influences, sacred and secular alike, changes form as if viewed through a kaleidoscope turned in methodical wonder.

In the Agnus Dei of 2006, interpreted here by violinist Varty Manouelian, clarinetist Boris Allakhverdyan, cellist Michael Kaufman, and pianist Steven Vanhauwaert, one can almost feel his presence in the room. The simultaneous awareness of separation and overlap in the composing and the performing allows listeners to take the opening movement in many ways: as a mirror or opaque surface, liquid or solid, past or future. The clarinet is the glue that binds this scripture, the strings dialects, and the piano keys the pages they call home. The second movement indicates stirrings within, cradling dark exultation, while the third movement barely exceeds a whisper. As in the sonic architecture of Alexander Knaifel, the instruments humble themselves at the feet of the Spirit.

The Sonata da Chiesa (2015) bears a dedication to the priest and composer Komitas Vardapet (1869-1935), whose quiet legacy has permeated a range of previous ECM recordings, not least of all Mansurian’s own. In the hands of Kashkashian and pianist Tatevik Mokatsian, the first movement suspends itself before writhing with historical awareness. Kashkashian’s sincerity and Mokatsian’s energetic approach to even the most delicate gestures draws two lines of flight that gradually become one in the second movement. Like hope and reality, they are distant until something sacred finds commonality in them.

The title piece (2006-2007) is scored for two violins (Pogossian and Manouelian), violas (Kashkashian and Teng Li), and cellos (Karen Ouzounian and Kaufman). Being a meditation on Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 13, the viola is of liturgical importance. Incredibly, the higher the tones, the darker the sky grows over its catharsis. Next are the String Trio (2008) and String Quartet No. 3 (1993). If Con anima was closer in mood to Shostakovich, the trio is closer in form, moving ever closer to the shaded drawl of its final movement, while the quartet assumes an inverted progression from subterranean fields to aboveground terrains. Finally, Die Tänzerin for violin and viola (2014) shines a light on Armenian folk dance, bringing Bartók to mind.

As convenient as the above comparisons may be, they do nothing to capture the atmosphere of this music. Mansurian, by self-characterization, creates a crossroads of speech and silence that cannot necessarily be articulated by either. Given the honesty and truth with which he fills his cup, not every question he poses demands an answer. Searching without finding becomes its own gift in a world hell-bent on exploiting destinations.

Erkki-Sven Tüür: Lost Prayers (ECM New Series 2666)

| Tyran Grillo

Erkki-Sven Tüür
Lost Prayers

Harry Traksmann violin
Leho Karin violoncello
Marrit Gerretz-Traksmann piano
Tanja Tetzlaff violoncello
Signum Quartett
Florian Donderer violin
Annette Walther violin
Xandi van Dijk viola
Thomas Schmitz violoncello
Recorded April 2019 at Sendesaal Bremen
Engineer: Christophe Franke
Cover photo: Thomas Wunsch
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: November 13, 2020

Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.
–James 4:3

Since debuting on ECM’s New Series in 1996 with the inimitable Crystallisatio, the humanity of Erkki-Sven Tüür has revealed itself through score after score in search of a purer distillation of his uniquely “vectorial” approach to composition. With Lost Prayers, his first chamber-only program for the label, he may have found his clearest alloy yet in the grander scheme of elements that informs his far-reaching spirit. No stranger to meshing contradictory elements into coherent wholes without capitulating to monolithic dogma, striking a path between mathematical precision and organic flow, he taps into something familiar that allows us to bypass the pleasantries of getting-to-know-you conversation, going straight into dialogues of faith, reason, and love.

Violinist Harry Traksmann, cellist Leho Karin, and pianist Marrit Gerretz-Traksmann embrace Fata Morgana (2002) as a child in need of comfort. The opening violin arpeggios and piano chords over crunchy cello double stops work into a controlled frenzy, indicative of an inner turmoil such as only a fresher soul could lay bare. As molecules join and separate, time loses all shape. Refrains, each a return to self before disembodiment resumes, stand out for their subtlety. Leaping gestures are quickly sublimated by quicksand motifs, pulling the listener into subterranean spaces where notes cease to matter, giving way instead to textural authority. The ending tremors hint more at glory than physical compromise. And while something about this piece leaves me feeling homesick, the same musicians close with a sense of family in Lichttürme (2017), a veritable lighthouse in sound. The violin is the glassy lens through which its glow is magnified, the cello the tower housing it, and the piano a tickle of awareness in the sailor’s cerebral cortex.

Between those poles, violinist Florian Donderer and cellist Tanja Tetzlaff chart points of continuity between night and day in Synergie (2010) before the Signum Quartett’s sensitive rendition of the String Quartet No. 2 (2012), from which this album gets its name. Like a conversation between epochs, it shifts from empathetic and coherent to cross-wired and fragmentary, its answers only becoming clear when taken in the aggregate. At its loudest moments, the notecraft soars; at its quietest, it scuttles along the ground toward agitations of light. 

Tüür’s music is never content with endings. It dwells not in our bodies but in the natural materials our bodies partake of, harvest, and transform. Even as the instruments dip themselves in a font of inspiration, the water’s surface has been sprinkled with the lycopodium of honest self-reflection, leaving them dry. This is Revelation as Genesis: the potter’s vessel of our century broken into pieces and refashioned in the image of revival.

Dino Saluzzi: Albores (ECM 2638)

| Tyran Grillo

Dino Saluzzi
Albores

Dino Saluzzi bandoneón
Recorded February-October 2019
Saluzzi Music Studios, Buenos Aires
Recording engineer: Néstor Diaz
Cover photo: Lisa Franz
Mastering: Christoph Stickel
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: November 6, 2020

Whereas many of us who once painted with fingers as a child moved on to brushes, Dino Saluzzi seems to have ignored that transition. On Albores, an album born of reckoning, Saluzzi renders what Luján Baudino in his liner note calls an “inner landscape.”

“Adiós Maestro Kancheli” opens on a somber note by paying respects to the late Georgian composer, who passed away in 2019. And yet, what we are given is more than a tribute or homage; rather, it is an identity without personhood, a force that animates the spirit of bygone days. Such redemptions of memory are as integral to Saluzzi’s language as sunlight and rain are to crops. The levels of introspection so organically achieved on “Ausencias” and “Íntimo” are what only decades of artistic experience could elicit. Such power of restraint, he reminds us, is foreign to our younger selves. It is the method of a heart that knows only the scrape of life’s cuneiform.

One need only bathe in the waters of “Don Caye” (an ode to his father’s music) to know that if the bandoneón were a film camera, Saluzzi would be one of its greatest living auteurs. “Écuyère” reorients the lens on a larger scale. Its prosaic qualities illuminate characters whose motives, while ancient, feel as familiar as our skins. The same holds for “Ficción,” a more jagged mountain carved by patience. Like “La Cruz del Sur (2da cadencia),” it rises among the very Andes in which it was born.

Hope is most apparent in “Según me cuenta la vida – Milonga,” a language seeking a mouth through which to be spoken. What dances in one moment turns during the next into a forlorn gaze toward a horizon that could have been. And yet, the trajectory that has brought him here feels inevitable. As in the closing “Ofrenda – Tocata,” it has always been inside, waiting to be sung.

Despite its generally slow pacing, there is plenty of verve to discover throughout Albores. Saluzzi’s energy floats just out of grasp so that we are always seeking its next steps. It is also a meditation on the lung capacity of the bandoneón itself. It breathes for those who no longer breathe. It breathes for those who have yet to breathe. It breathes for all who continue to breathe. Hints of light between its buttons are enough to remind us that even as the sun sets where we stand, elsewhere, it is dawn.

Schiff/Widmann: Brahms Clarinet Sonatas (ECM New Series 2621)

| Tyran Grillo

András Schiff
Jörg Widmann
Johannes Brahms: Clarinet Sonatas

András Schiff piano
Jörg Widmann clarinet
Recorded May 2018
Historischer Reistadel, Neumarkt
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Cover photo: Jan Jedlička
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 2, 2020

In the opening gestures of the Sonata in E-flat major, op. 120/2 (1894), for clarinet and piano, it’s difficult not to feel the breath of life that moved its composer, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), to such rapture in the latter years of his life. As the second of two such sonatas and his final chamber work, it is a testimony not only to Richard Mühlfeld, the master clarinetist of his day whom Brahms called “the nightingale of the orchestra,” but also to the self-effacement with which Brahms struggled throughout his creative life. And so, when considering the enduring interpretations here by pianist András Schiff and clarinetist Jörg Widmann, one must understand that without a love for every note, the bars between them would erode. Thus, Widmann gives colorations to the breath at every turn, while Schiff understands the role of the piano in Brahms’s chamber works as more than an accompaniment, giving it the fullness of expression it requires. The second movement, a rousing Allegro appassionato, is quintessential Brahms for its controlled drama and balance of fine motor skills, all tied together with a rustic charm. The final movement works patience into the virtue of exuberance.

The Sonata in f minor, op. 120/1 (1894), is even more dynamic. After a gradual first movement, the second unravels like paint from a brush, finding favor in the final trails of each stroke. The restrained Allegretto that follows sets up a rousing Vivace, the ebullience of which dazzles the senses. Given its symphonic textures, it’s no wonder the piece lent itself so gloriously to Luciano Berio’s orchestral transcription in 1986.

Between these giants of clarinet literature are Widmann’s five Intermezzi (2010) for piano. As tributes to both Schiff (to whom it is dedicated) and Brahms, they show a modern heart in love with the blood of tradition pumping through it. The central intermezzo, at 12 minutes, digs deepest into the spirit of this emotional transference. Throughout, we encounter waking moments in an otherwise dreamlike mise-en-scène. Nevertheless, clarity abounds.

Camerata Zürich: On an overgrown path (ECM New Series 2597)

| Tyran Grillo

Camerata Zürich
On an overgrown path

Camerata Zürich
Igor Karsko direction, lead violin
Maïa Brami speaker
Recorded September and November 2017
Radiostudio DRS, Zürich
Engineer: Andreas Werner
Cover photo: Nadia F. Romanini
An ECM Production
Release date: November 26, 2021

“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.”
–Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Czech composer Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) penned his two-volume On an overgrown path between 1901 and 1908. While its significance in the pianistic pantheon is often eclipsed by canonical predecessors, its inventiveness is marked by nonorthodox shifts in harmony, each a full statement without the need to justify what precedes or follows. Given the music’s history and place in time, few would be up to the task of arranging it for string orchestra with equal fervor, but this is precisely what Daniel Rumler did in 2016 to luminous effect, breathing not new but old life into the lungs thereof.

As Thomas Meyer notes in the CD booklet, the title of On an overgrown path references a Moravian wedding song, said path signifying the new bride’s severance from a home to which she can never return. The result is a collection of what the composer called “distant reminiscences” of folk songs and practices. In pieces like “A blown-away leaf,” the underlying connectivity of the notes rises to the surface as treasure from past sediment. Given its basis on the rhythms of the Czech language, we can rightly think of these as “texts” across which editorial marks of prosody and poetry abound, shifting with lyrical abandon from elegy to triumph at the gesture of a bow. Dances (e.g., “Come with us!” and “They chattered like swallows”) testify to the power of memory to reside where it cannot be erased. The spiritual glimpses of “The Madonna of Frydek,” which paints in broad strokes yet with detailed awareness, lean into Janáček’s love for his daughter, Olga, who died in 1903.

Much of this music, however, is divided against itself. For instance, what begins as a frolic in “Words fail!” morphs into uncertain recollections and emotional vulnerabilities. The latter work their way through “Good night!” and “Unutterable anguish” with the wormlike glow of burning steel wool. The strings are especially able to draw out that inner turmoil with maximum acuity. Even the closing Allegro grasps a bouquet of fragmented selves, each a palimpsest of circumstance.

Between the cycle’s two books is a 10-part text by Maïa Brami, dedicated to Thomas Demenga, who was the director of the Camerata Zürich when the orchestral arrangement was being put together (and who suggested the writing of these texts). Brami describes the scene as follows:

“In the evening of his life, Leoš Janáček returns to his native forest. He does know it, but it is the last time. The composer is looking for Otto, the son of his muse, Kamila Stösslova, whom he loves passionately. The boy has wandered off into the woods. After years of passionate correspondence, the young woman finally accepted the first-name as an admission of shared love and came to visit him in his family home. When he met her at a spa in 1917, the artist was at his lowest ebb: he had not recovered from the death of his daughter Olga and his career was not taking off. Kamila, his ‘rose,’ his ‘red flower,’ will resurrect him.”

This panoply of yearnings and recollections (“God how I would love to hold on to the summer,” he cries, “I who waited for it all my life!”) unfolds like a biography in miniature, brilliantly capturing moving images of the composer’s childhood (“Deep down in my suitcase, a pot of honey from my father’s hives, heavy as my grief”), mortal anxieties, and the loves connecting the spaces between. Thus, the composer is able to dip his fingers into the font his creative inspiration. And as the end encroaches on him, he resigns to the fleeting nature of things.

The program is bookended by two kindred pieces. The Meditation on the Old Czech Chorale St. Wenceslas, op. 35a (1914) of Josef Suk (1874-1935) welcomes natural sonorities. Like tall grasses in a windswept landscape, it gives purpose to the elements by making known their otherwise invisible movements. The Notturno in B major, op. 40 (1875) by Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904) closes with grace, folding us into a river’s current in search of an oceanic afterlife.

Matthieu Bordenave: La Traversée (ECM 2683)

| Tyran Grillo

Matthieu Bordenave
La traversée

Matthieu Bordenave tenor saxophone
Patrice Moret double bass
Florian Weber piano
Recorded October 2019, Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Mastering: Nicolas Baillard
Cover photo: Thomas Wunsch
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 25, 2020

La traversée offers the ECM leader debut of French tenor saxophonist Matthieu Bordenave, who first appeared thereon as part of Shinya Fukumori’s 2018 masterpiece, For 2 Akis. This time, he is joined by German pianist Florian Weber and Swiss bassist Patrice Moret. Clearly born for the label, onetime host to his hero Jimmy Giuffre’s band with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow, he allows those early influences to take residence in current practice, each a shade letting in different amounts of light through the windows of his musical soul. The present trio holds its own in the presence of such expectations, ever open to the possibilities of space and unstructured play. Other influences include classical chamber music, especially of the modern French persuasion (think Messiaen and Dutilleux). Classical training indeed comes to the fore in his technical control while his love of jazz spreads across eight originals in the fashion of a spilled glass of water—inching ever closer to the edge of the table but prevented from falling by delicate surface tension.

When the darkening of “River,” a duet between the bandleader and Weber, makes its gradations known, we find the saxophonist sitting alone in a place of seeming childhood significance. His breathy register is a ghost—not of the past but of the future. At the same time, his sound is antique in that one can taste the patina of his horn. When the character of the bass is introduced in the second scene, “Archipel,” an underlying cinematic implication is consummated. Thus, Bordenave recalls Giuffre but also Charles Lloyd’s muggy charm, cherishing the potential of a dying note as might a sitar virtuoso. All the while, Weber’s forthright pointillism meshes lovingly with Moret’s rounded spacing.

“Le temps divisé” assembles notes as an archaeologist does a skeleton, for great care is required amid the excitement of discovery to fashion a coherent simulacrum of the body it once inhabited. In the wake of that exacting labor, “Dans mon pays” speaks of home as the piano and saxophone nourish each other in the bass’s soil. “The Path” follows with the album’s deepest passage, rewarding the patient listener (like the set as a whole) with moments of sheer lucidity.

Although Bordenave is powerful and direct in his gentility, he understands the preciousness of space. “Ventoux” and “Incendie blanc” are special cases in point. Both are hopeful fascinations, treating yearning as an instructive force. Moret’s bass monologue in the former tune is superb, giving way to galactic light from Weber, whose delicate flames dance across the latter’s terrain. From the ashes of those reactions arises “Chaleur grise,” of which the meticulous fray wavers in reflection. Hence our return to “River,” now in trio form and willingly shed of its skin. A stepwise unison leads to the final note, free yet bound by just enough grit to make the dream feel actual.

La traversée is a diurnal experience, tracking heavenly bodies in a climate all its own. To listen to it is to watch your shadow marking the hours from dawn until dusk.

Oded Tzur: Isabela (ECM 2739)

| Tyran Grillo

Oded Tzur
Isabela

Oded Tzur tenor saxophone
Nitai Hershkotivs piano
Petros Klampanis double bass
Johnathan Blake drums
Recorded September 2021
Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover photo: Sebastião Salgado
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: May 13, 2022

Saxophonist and composer Oded Tzur resurfaces in ECM waters for his follow-up to 2020’s Here Be Dragons, a maiden voyage that, like this spiritual twin, was a musical parable. Rejoined by pianist Nitai Hershkovits, bassist Petros Klampanis, and drummer Jonathan Blake, he examines the fluidity of structural principles and the materials involved in their making.

From the threads of “Invocation,” the quartet sews the binding of its thematic pages in “Noam,” which speaks through melodies that roll off the soul’s tongue. In “The Lion Turtle,” Blake taps the edges of his kit like someone testing the shell of an egg for vulnerabilities (and finding none). Klampanis’s solo feels like an extension of Hershkovits’s (and vice versa). Suggestions of alternate realities fade as quickly as they appear. Tzur’s unraveling is profundity incarnate, gracing the inner circle of every chord change as the tongue might move a morsel around the mouth for proper chewing. The result is more than a conversation; it’s an interactive prayer.

The title track awakens suddenly yet quietly. Love is the universal whisper here, as supple as skin. A near-stillness shifts midway into a locomotive dream before allowing the dawn to have its way. “Love Song For The Rainy Season” whips up the most energetic passages of the album, ending it on a cymbal crash that dissipates in breath.

At 36 minutes, Isabela is quintessentially about quality over quantity. The depth of interpretation promised by repeat listening far outweighs the expectation that a mere profession of duration may court from the skeptical heart. Tzur plays as if shielding his eyes from the sun, seeing in the distance a vessel he might have known as a child yet which is now haggard and without a sail, going only where the water and waves will permit it. He swings and whispers, meditates and shouts, holding each dichotomy as a eulogy.

(This review originally appeared in the May 2022 issue of The New York City Jazz Record, a full PDF of which is available here.)

Mark Turner: Return from the Stars (ECM 2684)

| Tyran Grillo

Mark Turner
Return from the Stars

Mark Turner tenor saxophone
Jason Palmer trumpet
Joe Martin double bass
Jonathan Pinson drums
Recorded November 2019 at Sear Sound Studio, New York
Engineer: Chris Allen
Mixed September 2021 at Studios La Buissonne
by Manfred Eicher and Gérard de Haro
Mastering: Nicolas Baillard
Production coordinator: Guido Gorna
Cover photo: Thomas Wunsch
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: March 25, 2022

Admirers who have traced the influences of Mark Turner will know of his interest in science fiction. More than the inspiration for an evocative title or two, the underlying ethos running through his work like dark matter in a timeslip could come from no other genre, articulated as it is in a language that feels as spatial as it does temporal. As Stanisław Lem wrote in Solaris: “We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors.” In the bell of Turner’s tenor saxophone, one indeed finds a mirror for scrutinizing our egos in melodic ways.

Return from the Stars puts Turner back on the ECM map, carrying over bassist Joe Martin from 2013’s Lathe of Heaven and adding drummer Jonathan Pinson and trumpeter Jason Palmer for eight originals. The lack of keyboard allows for two crucial things to happen. First, it opens the ears to Turner’s compositional prowess, graceful yet given to unexpected turns and shades of meaning. Second, it opens space in the recording and exchanges between the musicians. The resulting music, smooth without filling in every gap, invites listeners to ruminate and appreciate the inner workings at hand. Against a rhythm section digging its heels only when needed (and without ever overstating the issue), interplay between horns unfolds organically (Turner is always moving from one terrain to the next while Palmer seems to work his awl into the wood of his thinking, uncovering ever-deeper layers of meaning). Sitting among the evocative gems of “Bridgetown” and “Nigeria II,” tracks like “Terminus” and “Lincoln Heights” walk in places that have been lived in. Throughout, the writing is suggestive rather than declamatory. The titles of “It’s Not Alright With Me” and “Unacceptable” evoke a playful gray area between frustration and freedom from it. The blurring of such dichotomies is a sign of maturity: letting emotions speak for themselves rather than shouting in their place. In “Waste Land,” too, I get the feeling that these pieces are always growing and that we are privy to some of their prime phases.

(This review originally appeared in the April 2022 issue of The New York City Jazz Record, a full PDF of which is available here.)

Scenting ECM: A Fragrance Review

| Tyran Grillo

Likely anyone who has been listening to ECM for a significant amount of time knows the Gertrude Stein quote that follows the label’s ever-expanding catalog like a shadow: “Think of your ears as eyes.” But here is a rare instance that asks you to think of your nostrils as eyes. Introducing Notch Code, a niche perfume house from South Korea dedicated to creating scents based on artistic works: in this case, two images by photographer Woong-Chul An, which should be familiar to ECM fans as the covers for Anja Lechner and François Couturier’s Moderato cantabile and Jack DeJohnette’s In Movement. After reaching out to the company, I was grateful to receive a discovery set with matching blotter papers for this review.

Moderato cantabile is the inspiration for Soleil Tuberose. Featuring notes of cardamom, pink pepper, rose, black pepper, tuberose, musk, sandalwood, and cedarwood, this evocative fragrance almost lingers on the tongue. The elements are respectfully combined, with enough separation to seek them out individually. Each asserts clarity as part of a collective sound that blurs the lines between them. The pink pepper hits the nose first, followed by the rose and tuberose, before the woody base steps into the foreground during the dry-down period. Fans of tuberose who want a softer feel of this difficult-to-balance ingredient will find much to savor.

In Movement finds new olfactory life in Musk Eternity, a choral blend of musk, frankincense, orchid, and jasmine. The floral elements work synergistically to elevate the normally darker musk and frankincense into fruitier territory. This one immediately evokes the crystalline masterpieces of UK perfrumer Thameen (especially The Hope). Such low warmth and intimacy deserve to be called twilight in a bottle.

The sillage of both perfumes is gentle yet noticeable. Longevity is modest (around three to four hours on my skin), making it suitable for casual wear or for situations in which an understated entrance is required. Like the fine albums with which they are associated, each must be put on to be remembered.