Classical Music

Martin Davids/David Yearsley: In the Cabinet of Wonders

| Tyran Grillo

The organ is a colossus, the violin a slender voice. By sheer mass and volume, they seem destined never to agree. One threatens to drown the air in thunder, the other to disappear beneath it. And yet, in 17th-century Hamburg, they discovered a shared breath. High in the gallery of St. Catherine’s church, they spoke not as rivals but as companions, drawing crowds who came to hear scale converse with fragility. What could have been a contest was a study in equilibrium, like a skeleton learning, haltingly, how to stand upright.

It was in this bustling hub that Heinrich Scheidemann (c. 1595-1663) and Johann Schop (c. 1590–1667) met across air and string. Their sounds descended like thought itself, Scheidemann’s pipes carrying the gravity of heaven, Schop’s bow and strings tracing the precarious outline of the human voice. What emerged was more than music. It was a convergence of opposites: cleric and townsman, traveler and citizen, the enduring and the fleeting. In that reverberant space, the city heard itself briefly whole, briefly hushed, before motion returned and the pulse of everyday life resumed.

Under Scheidemann’s quick, laughing hands, sound sprang outward, ricocheting through stone and space with wit and momentum. The organ became less a monument than a body with many lungs, capable of sudden whispers as well as exuberant exhalations. Alongside this abundance, Schop’s violin did not retreat. It danced. Its lines flashed with surprise, then slipped without warning into shadow, like muscles tightening and releasing beneath the skin. Between them unfolded a living exchange, in which the church itself became a resonant demonstration that opposites, when truly listening, can cohere into a single organism.

This album invites the listener into a corporeal experience, one that breathes, sweats, remembers, and occasionally stumbles forward in exhilaration. The music of Schop and Scheidemann, as reimagined by 21st-century analogues Martin Davids and David Yearsley, circulates like blood through civic arteries, passing between church lofts, dance floors, and private chambers, rarely holding one posture for long. What binds the recording is neither style nor chronology, but a shared faith in music as something handled, inhabited, and exchanged socially. Sound is treated as anatomy rather than abstraction. What we hear are the bones of it all, flexing, testing their reach, discovering what they can bear.

Schop’s Intrada à 5 from Erster Theil newer Paduanen opens the album by wrapping the senses in gauze. The interwoven voices refuse hierarchy, relying instead on mutual dependence. Each line anticipates the others’ weight and direction, like ribs designed both to protect and expand. This is consort music already aware of its future disassembly and reconfiguration, carrying that latent plasticity within it. The partnership feels so complete that separation seems almost injurious. From the outset, beauty is not the goal but the consequence. Expression rests on marrow and sinew, and imagination requires a listener willing to inhabit the charged space between intention and realization.

Much of the album’s gravitational pull lies within the orbit of ’t Uitnemend Kabinet of 1646, where Schop’s violin resurrects itself as heir and provocateur. His reworking of Alessandro Striggio’s Nasce la pena mia unfolds like a slow-motion game of double dutch, the ropes of austerity and playfulness turning with deliberate care, demanding full coordination to avoid collapse.

The Lachrime Pavaen after John Dowland presses further inward. The soul twists into a Möbius strip of emotional transference, sorrow folding endlessly back upon itself without settling. Chromatic figures reach deep into the gut to retrieve a half-digested grief and hold it up for inspection. Yet nothing here feels morbid; instead, it suggests that emotion without physicality would simply cave in, that even pain needs a skull in which to resonate.

Scheidemann answers this inwardness with motion and propulsion. His Galliarda ex D sets fire beneath the feet, insisting on the intelligence of movement. Rarely do both touch the ground at once. The sound remains perpetually mid-step, angled toward what follows. Dance here is a matter of orientation, a way of thinking forward with the entire frame. That energy carries seamlessly into the Canzon in G, whose relaxed atmosphere allows light and shadow to exchange places with quiet charm, the organ responsive rather than domineering.

At several moments, the album reveals its improvisatory foundations. The performers’ Intonatiofunctions as connective tissue, recalling a time when much of this repertoire lived between the notes, sustained by trust, familiarity, and shared risk. This ethos extends into Scheidemann’s setting of Christ lag in Todesbanden. Told in two verses, the first establishes the firm outline of a torso, while the second pencils in the extremities.

The relationship between instruments grows aerodynamic in Scheidemann’s intabulation of Giovanni Bassani’s Dic nobis Maria. The cadence is measured yet generous, giving the violin space to breathe while the organ subtly lifts and supports. Imagined as wind and wing, the pairing becomes a lesson in controlled flight, with ornamentation serving as lift. This play of disguise reaches its height in the Englische Mascarada, where the organ steps forward alone. It imitates viols, recorders, and cornetts, its movements almost tactile. The backdrop assumes the foreground, and scale itself learns to play, shedding weight without surrendering substance.

Schop’s sine titulo from ’t Uitnemend Kabinet may be the album’s quietest act of defiance. Tone, transition, and spirit nourish one another organically, as if the piece were activating its own nervous system mid-flight. The violin’s occasional double stops flare like shooting stars across an otherwise stable sky, fleeting, unnecessary, and wholly persuasive.

As the program draws toward its close, its communal heart comes fully into view. Schop’s Præludium, the first work ever published for solo violin, clears the air with intent, a measured breath before speaking plainly. What follows, an improvisatory fantasy on his chorale tune Werde munter, mein Gemüte, unfolds as a conversation restored. The organ answers phrase by phrase, until the violin can no longer remain apart and joins the coda. Harmonies shimmer. What emerges is gratitude, rooted in shared labor. The album concludes with the Pavaen de Spanje, whose stark colors and abrupt shifts return us to orbit.

By its end, the recording has quietly redrawn the boundaries of historical performance. This is no reconstruction, but a living metabolism, a system dependent on circulation, exchange, and constant adjustment. The music does not ask to be preserved so much as inhabited. It leaves the listener with the sense of having moved through a body rather than examined an object, of having felt joints flex, lungs fill, and organs hum in sympathetic response. The final sounds do not conclude so much as release, sending us back into the world more aware of our own inner architecture, and perhaps more willing to trust it when it makes overtures to leap.

In the Cabinet of Wonders is available from False Azure Records here.

David Yearsley: Handel’s Organ Banquet

| Tyran Grillo

Every good meal begins with a premise, and this one opens in the kitchen rather than the chapel. The cover caricature sets the tone before a single note is heard: George Frideric Handel rendered as a hog, snout forward, hunched over the organ in mid-18th-century satire. It is a reminder that iconography and appetite have always shared a table. Organist and scholar David Yearsley accepts the joke with a grin and sharpens it into art, giving Handel not only hands but feet with which to prepare. Since Handel himself rarely bothered with pedals in his scores, save for the Organ Concerto in B-flat Major, opus 7, no. 1 (HWV 306), Yearsley’s approach feels less like historical correction than culinary invention, an act of inspired seasoning rather than academic garnish.

This recording is not about dutifully reheating the classics. It is about tasting them anew, discovering how familiar flavors bloom when exposed to different heat, different hands, different feet. Yearsley plays Handel as one might approach a well-loved recipe, respecting the ingredients while daring to improvise at the stove, if not—at the risk of a poor analogy—allowing a rat to pull some hair under the toque.

We start with a clever pairing: Sinfony from Messiah (HWV 56) combined with the Fugue from Suite in E Minor (HWV 429). The unmistakable opening arrives like a dish you have known since childhood, instantly recognizable, deeply comforting. Yet Yearsley plates it with unexpected accompaniments, adding decorations of improvisational whimsy and alert, in-the-moment thinking. The transition into the fugue is seamless and generous, the musical equivalent of warm bread passed across the table. There is solace here, and a sense of being gently welcomed back for seconds.

As with rosy steps, the morn (from Theodora, HWV 68) follows, a radiant oratorio aria that unfolds theatrically on a stage of its own making. Its inner pulse is sensual and full of promise. The music breathes with unanswered questions and lush excitement, each phrase suggesting that the best bite may still be ahead.

At the center of the table sits the Passacaille in G (HWV 399), the giblet bag of the Trio Sonata in G Major. On the organ (no pun intended?), it acquires a lively delicacy, sumptuous yet never heavy. The lines spiral and turn, dancing themselves toward oblivion with an umami that belies their craft. Time seems to loosen its grip here, as though the dish refuses to cool.

Lord, to Thee, each night and day (another Theodora morsel) returns us to the world of aria, moving with grace through fluid key changes that feel both inevitable and surprising. The progression is palpable in its mouthfeel, each modulation a subtle shift in seasoning. When the turn toward the end arrives, it does so quietly, gloriously, a kind of musical retribution that needs no raised voice to make its point.

The communal platter arrives with O praise the Lord with one consent (opening chorus of Chandos Anthem no. 9, HWV 254). Verdant colors and resplendent textures ply the ear, expanding William Croft’s 1708 St. Anne hymn tune into something plush and enveloping. The result is sonic velour, draping the dining surface in lavishness, even if the organist’s feet are working overtime to keep its stitches from fraying.

With Lascia ch’io pianga (from Rinaldo, HWV 7), Handel’s most famous lament from his first London opera of 1711, the organ sings without words. Its vocal qualities survive the transfer intact, barely eroded. Vegetal stops add depth, enhancing the meaty base without overpowering the line. It is a reminder that sorrow, like flavor, often deepens with slow attention.

The heartier courses follow. The Trio Sonata in F, op. 5, no. 6 (HWV 401) sheds its ensemble skin to become a solo affair, compressed into a single instrument yet expanded by the breadth of Yearsley’s imagination. The central Allegro dazzles with its tessellated structure, each piece fitting snugly against the next, while the subsequent Adagio melts everything down into a rich, savory gravy that coats every note. Close behind comes the Concerto in G minor/G major, op. 4, no. 1 (HWV 289), another full-course meal in a full-course meal of full-course meals. Highlights abound, from the delightful second-movement Allegro to the concluding Andante, a light-footed wonder that dances around the table, refusing to sit still.

For dessert, Yearsley offers his adaptation of the “Amen” from Messiah, recast as a Fuga in D. It culminates in a pedal cadenza that is itself a four-part fugue played only with the feet. The effect is brilliantly virtuosic and deeply satisfying, as organic as farmers market ingredients transformed by a confident cook who trusts the produce and his palate.

A bonus track serves as the final flourish: A Hallelujah Concerto, an improvisation on Handel’s most beloved chorus. Composer and performer seem to spur one another on, whipping the soufflé together until the peaks stand just right. It is exuberant, inventive, and impossible to resist. A finish to end all finishes, at least until the next course.

When the last resonance fades, the table is cleared, and the listener is left pleasantly full. Satisfaction lingers, along with the faint sense that something mischievous and marvelous has just occurred. You may want to keep your napkin as a souvenir. It bears the marks of a meal well enjoyed and proof that Handel, in the right hands and feet, still knows how to cook.

The album is the third release from False Azure Records, an exciting new label where old and new make merry. My ear continues to follow them with keen interest.

ECM New Series: A Compendium

| Tyran Grillo

“I can imagine the New Series in the form of a journey: there is a route mapped out, but it is open to contingency; it does not insist on the shortest or most direct road. It allows for detours that might lead into totally different areas from the original plan.”
–Manfred Eicher

There exists a particular sensibility in recorded music that refuses spectacle, distrusts haste, and listens for what emerges only when attention is sustained. It is an ethos built on patience, on the belief that sound is not merely an event but an environment and that listening is as much a moral as an aesthetic act. Within this sensibility, music is not asked to announce itself loudly or justify its presence through novelty or authority. Instead, it is allowed to exist in a state of becoming. The Compendium at hand arises from this worldview. It does not rush to explain or persuade. It invites the reader into a space where time slows, where artistic intent is inseparable from restraint, and where the deepest meanings are often carried by what is nearly imperceptible.

Producer Manfred Eicher understands classical music not as a fixed inheritance but as a living terrain shaped by memory, silence, and risk. It softens the rigid hierarchies that separate genres, eras, and disciplines, favoring instead a continuity that flows between medieval chant and contemporary composition, between written score and spontaneous intuition, between the concert hall and the solitary act of listening. The guiding conviction is that music’s truth lies not in classification but in presence. How a note is played, how a phrase is allowed to decay, how a recording captures air, distance, and stillness matters more than the lineage of the material itself. The book emerges as an artifact of this conviction, shaped by the same attention to space, texture, and inwardness that has long defined the sound world it chronicles. It stands not as a monument but as a threshold, inviting readers into a cinematic way of hearing.

To situate this volume properly requires a widening of perspective, an understanding of how recorded classical music has historically been framed and mediated. For much of the 20th century, the dominant classical record labels functioned as custodians of authority. Houses such as Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, and Philips constructed a sonic canon through monumental interpretations, star conductors, and a reverence for definitive statements. Their achievements were immense and lasting, yet their aesthetic tended toward the architectural. Performances were designed to stand as reference points, recordings as polished monuments to permanence, history rendered stable and self-assured.

Against this backdrop, the New Series emerged not in opposition but in quiet divergence. Under the wider umbrella of ECM Records, it proposed a fundamentally different relationship between music, performer, and listener. Classical music was no longer approached as a preserved inheritance to be polished and displayed but as a living continuum, shaped by fragility, curiosity, and permeability. The New Series allowed sound to be influenced by poetry, film, sacred ritual, folk memory, and contemporary abstraction without anxiety over category or lineage. It invited unfamiliar accents into familiar forms and treated unfamiliar forms with the same care traditionally reserved for the canon.

The Compendium mirrors this orientation with remarkable fidelity. Its structure resists hierarchy, favoring proximity over ranking, conversation over proclamation. Rather than reinforcing the idea of repertoire as a fixed body of works to be mastered, it presents classical music as an ongoing exchange among composers, performers, and listeners across time and geography. Each page represents a frame in a larger, evolving montage. In doing so, the book articulates a philosophy that classical music remains most vital when it is allowed to remain unfinished, receptive, and alive.

At the center of this vision stands Eicher, not as a figure of authority in the conventional sense but as a listener whose curatorial instinct has quietly reshaped the conditions under which music comes into being. His words from a 1986 interview provide more than an epigraph for this review. They function as its axis. When he describes the New Series as a journey with a mapped route that remains open to contingency, he gestures toward an understanding of artistic practice that values deviation as deeply as intention. Progress is not measured by efficiency or arrival but by attentiveness to what reveals itself along the way, detours the very means through which meaning is discovered.

This conception of music as an exploratory act underlies every page of this volume. One senses its affinities with interior monologues, the long take in cinema, the negative space of modern painting, and the instinctive pacing of the stage. Music, in this framework, does not exist in isolation. It absorbs light, text, gesture, and silence, allowing each to subtly alter its contour. The Compendium reflects this sensibility without didacticism. It does not attempt to persuade through argument or analysis. Its structure mirrors the listening experience the New Series has long cultivated, where coherence arises gradually, and conviction emerges not from assertion but from accumulated attention.

The journey begins, with a sense of inevitability rather than chronology, in Arvo Pärt. His music, austere yet luminous, does more than inaugurate the New Series. It establishes a gravity field around which much of what follows seems to orbit. Pärt’s work reintroduced stillness as a radical force in modern music, restoring silence as something charged with ethical and spiritual weight. Thus, the label’s deeper preoccupations with time, devotion, and resonance come into focus.

From there, the book proceeds composer by composer, each chapter opening onto a distinct interior landscape while remaining visibly connected to a larger constellation. Figures such as György Kurtág, Giya Kancheli, Tigran Mansurian, Valentin Silvestrov, Alexander Knaifel, and Veljo Tormis are presented not as representatives of national schools or stylistic movements but as participants in a shared inquiry into memory, loss, and the fragility of form. Many of these composers write music that feels as though it is listening backward, attentive to echoes of vanishing traditions, while remaining unmistakably contemporary. Their work often proceeds by subtraction rather than accumulation, trusting sparse gestures, broken phrases, and restrained dynamics to carry emotional and historical weight.

Taken together, these composers suggest an alternative modernism, one less concerned with rupture or provocation than with remembrance and inwardness. Their music asks how history survives in sound, how trauma, exile, and cultural erosion might be transmuted into quiet persistence. The Compendium allows these affinities to emerge organically, without forcing comparison, inviting the reader to sense the shared temperature of their work over technical minutiae.

The scope widens further with composers whose practices actively dissolve the boundaries between genres and disciplines. Heinz Holliger and Heiner Goebbels bring to the New Series a heightened theatrical and literary awareness, where music becomes inseparable from text, gesture, and spatial experience. Their contributions underscore the label’s openness to works that exist as events rather than objects. In a different but equally expansive way, Meredith Monk articulates an aesthetic grounded in directness, purity, asymmetry, and transparency. Her music, born of the physicality of the voice and the ceremony of performance, seems to distill the label’s approach into human breath and movement, reminding us that experimentation need not sacrifice intimacy.

Alongside these figures stand composers such as Gavin Bryars, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Thomas Larcher, Dobrinka Tabakova, and Eleni Karaindrou, whose work stands slightly askew from prevailing trends. Their music is neither doctrinaire nor opportunistic. It operates according to an inner necessity, attentive to lyricism, atmosphere, and emotional clarity without yielding to sentimentality. The New Series has provided a home for such voices precisely because it values conviction over conformity, allowing composers to develop long arcs of work free from the pressures of fashion or institutional expectations.

The presence of each is deepened by carefully chosen quotations reflecting on the act of composition itself, paired with portrait photographs and images from recording sessions. These reveal the human conditions under which their creations come into being, the solitude, concentration, doubt, and patience required to bring sound into focus. One senses the rehearsal room, the studio, the long hours of listening and adjustment. In this way, the book affirms one of its central truths: that modern music, at its most vital, is not an abstract system but a lived practice, shaped by time, attention, and the enduring vulnerability of those who make it.

Equally vital to this story are the performers, whose interpretations run through the New Series in quiet refrain. They are not presented as virtuoso personalities imposing themselves upon the music but as mediators who allow its inner logic to speak with clarity and force. Their artistry lies in restraint as much as command.

Artists such as Gidon Kremer, András Schiff, and Kim Kashkashian exemplify this ethic through an almost ascetic devotion to sound itself. Their performances are marked by transparency of texture and a shedding of rhetorical excess, allowing even the most fragile or fragmentary music to retain its integrity. In the case of Keith Jarrett, whose presence bridges the worlds of improvisation and composed music, the New Series reveals how attentiveness can dissolve distinctions between genres, bringing the same intensity of listening to both the written score and being in the moment. Conductors such as Dennis Russell Davies further extend this approach, shaping large forms with a sensitivity to balance and pacing that privileges inner coherence over outward drama.

The ensemble performances documented in the Compendium deepen this perspective. Groups like The Hilliard Ensemble and Trio Mediaeval bring centuries-old repertoire into dialogue with contemporary composition, revealing unexpected continuities across time through their vocal blend and disciplined stillness. The Danish String Quartet exemplifies how chamber music, when approached with collective intelligence and trust, can achieve a rare balance of precision and vulnerability. In these performances, risk is not theatrical but structural, emerging from the willingness to expose the music’s quietest tensions.

Together, these musicians embody the New Series ideal, where lucidity replaces polish and attentiveness supplants display. Their work suggests that, at its highest level, performance is morally shaped. The Compendium honors them not as interpreters of a fixed tradition but as active participants in a living one, reminding us that the future of classical music depends as much on how it is experienced in the moment as on the notes preserved on the page.

As a physical object, the Compendium embodies the visual and tactile intelligence that has long distinguished ECM’s aesthetic. Its design speaks in a measured voice, austere yet quietly radiant, disciplined without austerity for its own sake. White space is not an absence but a field of attention. Typography, sequencing, and image placement appear calibrated to slow the reader’s pace, encouraging a form of engagement that mirrors the label’s decades-long listening habits. One does not skim this book. One dwells within it, returning to pages as one might return to a recording, attentive to shifts of mood and emphasis that only reveal themselves over time.

In this way, the book becomes an extension of the recordings themselves, another site where listening is shaped by care. It aligns with an idea of art that does not rush to occupy the foreground but waits for the reader or listener to meet it halfway. The reward for this patience is depth, not as density of information but as depth of presence.

In the end, ECM New Series: A Compendium stands as far more than an anniversary publication or institutional summation. It is a sustained meditation on how classical music might remain fully alive in the present without forfeiting its inwardness or historical gravity. By expanding the very conditions under which music is performed, recorded, and heard, the New Series has quietly altered the expectations surrounding classical sound. It has shown that innovation need not announce itself loudly, that progress can unfold through refinement, patience, and a deepening of attention.

This book captures that achievement with a humility that feels inseparable from its subject. It neither proclaims a legacy nor attempts to fix it in place. Instead, it reflects a way of thinking about music as a continuing conversation with time, one that values listening as an act of openness rather than mastery. Like enduring works of literature and art, the New Series does not seek to dominate history or escape it. It listens to it, answers it, and leaves space for what has yet to arrive.

Wu Wei/Martin Stegner/Janne Saksala: Pur ti miro (ECM New Series 2843)

| Tyran Grillo

Wu Wei
Martin Stegner
Janne Saksala
Pur ti miro

Wu Wei sheng
Martin Stegner viola
Janne Saksala double bass
Recorded October 2022
Teldex Studio Berlin
Cover: Fidel Sclavo
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: November 21, 2025

Pur ti miro represents one of those rare convergences in classical music when disparate lineages find themselves speaking, almost accidentally at first, a common language. It begins with curiosity, as violist Martin Stegner and double bassist Janne Saksala, both members of the Berlin Philharmonic, step beyond their usual orchestral frame to meet Wu Wei, master of the sheng. His instrument—an ancient Chinese mouth organ whose history predates all the works played here—has been modified with keys for the modern ear, capable of whispering like breath against glass or expanding in a cathedral-like radiance. When Stegner encountered Wei in 2009, as he recounts in the album’s liner note, he felt something akin to recognition, as if this millennia-old voice, rendered anew, had been waiting patiently to show him a corner of the musical universe he had not yet visited.

Their collaboration began with long improvisations that felt like conversations between strangers who, little by little, discover that they share the same dreams. But the true spark arrived one day when Wei, without announcement or expectation, introduced Claudio Monteverdi’s Sì dolce è’l tormento to the group. The sheng’s timbre, at once reed-like and celestial, enfolded the melody in a new kind of vulnerability. Early music, that echo of distant rooms and candlelit courts, suddenly breathed with a startling immediacy. Hearing it was nothing short of a revelation for Stegner.

From this moment, a desire for a project to nurture that revelation without taming it grew. The idea of a trio emerged: sheng, viola, and cello. Yet Stegner wondered what might happen if the music’s lower roots reached even farther into the earth. And so, the cello was replaced in the imagination by a double bass, and eventually in reality by Janne Saksala, whose warm resonance, playful experimentation, and architectural sensibility offered the perfect counterweight to the sheng’s shimmering glow. What began as an artistic experiment became a living portrait of three musicians drawn together by curiosity, humility, and a willingness to let go of what they thought they knew.

The recording opens, fittingly, with Sì dolce è’l tormento, and one feels immediately the trust between them. The strings do not accompany the sheng, nor does the sheng simply ornament the strings; instead, they dissolve into one another, forming a single instrument with three voices. The mournfulness of Monteverdi’s melody gains new terrain. It feels less like lament and more like a story we have heard so many times in languages we do not speak, whose meanings we may sense only in the pauses between syllables. Here, at last, someone translates them for us in real time.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s Organ Trio Sonata No. 1 in E-flat major follows, and with it an architectural shift. The lively outer movements float and spin with a measured buoyancy, but it is the Adagio that becomes the trio’s proving ground. In that slow movement, the muted viola curls around the bright woodiness of the sheng, while the double bass expands the room so we may step inside the harmony itself. Bach’s geometries reveal themselves as bodies in motion, human-shaped and breathing. The Andante from the Organ Trio Sonata No. 4 in e minor deepens the sense of natural inevitability, a landscape in sound. The sheng is a waterfall glimpsed from afar, the viola a lone bird carving patterns into a gray sky, and the bass the mist that holds all of it in gentle cohesion. And when the title piece from L’incoronazione di Poppea at last appears, we recognize the sensation it carries: that life is forever repeating its own small operas, and we are simply pilgrims passing through the middle of one that has been running since long before we arrived.

At the center of the album sits Vivaldi’s La Follia, a theme-and-variation playground that allows the musicians to stretch not only their technique but their imaginative reach. Here, Wei’s sheng sounds at times like an accordion leaning into a waltz, at others like a human voice. Meanwhile, Saksala’s bass dances with kinetic clarity. When the trio slips unexpectedly into jazz-tinged territory, we catch a glimpse of what they can do when the score becomes a suggestion rather than a command. Echoes of Gianluigi Trovesi and Gianni Coscia drift through, blooming into a finale that approaches the exuberance of a Romanian folk dance.

Thus, it makes poetic sense to end with a folk song proper: Bruremarsj frå Beiarn, a Norwegian bridal march. The trio plays it with both reverence and wonder. There is a hint of sadness at the beginning, that ache of separation inherent in every union, the leaving of one home to build another. The sheng’s accordion-like hum traces a path between joy and nostalgia. In its gentle call, the future becomes something familiar, while the past turns mysterious and soft-edged, retreating into obscurity.

Throughout the album, even in the most composed selections, a spirit of improvisation remains. The players listen more than they declare. They treat each phrase not as a given but as a question waiting to be answered. And because none of the instruments carries an aggressively sharp tone, the ensemble moves within a spectrum of shadow rather than light. The absence of a violin removes any temptation toward brilliance for its own sake.

It seems no coincidence that Pur ti miro translates to “I gaze upon you.” Listening to this album, one feels watched, not with scrutiny but with tenderness. The music looks at us the way a friend might look across a quiet table, curious about what we will say next. It regards us openly, lovingly, holding its breath just long enough for us to understand that we, too, are part of this conversation.

Zehetmair Quartett: Johannes Brahms / op. 51 (ECM New Series 2765)

| Tyran Grillo

Zehetmair Quartett
Johannes Brahms / op. 51

Zehetmair Quartett
Thomas Zehetmair violin
Jakub Jakowicz violin
Ruth Killius viola
Christian Elliott violoncello
Recorded November 2021
Konzerthaus Blaibach
Engineer: Rainer Maillard
Recording supervision: Guido Gorna
Cover photo: Eberhard Ross
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 17, 2025

After much-lauded recordings of works by Hindemith, Bartók, and Schumann, among others, the peerless Zehetmair Quartett returns to ECM to interpret Op. 51 of Johannes Brahms (1833-1897). In his liner notes for the album, Wolfgang Stähr characterizes the German composer as one who “wrote both much and little.” Cases in point are his string quartets, of which he quilled over 20 in his youth but later destroyed, leaving only the two featured on this recording, plus a third. As Brahms once related to his biographer, Max Kalbeck, “The boxes with those old manuscripts stood in Hamburg for ages. When I was there two or three years ago, I sat on the floor—entire walls were beautifully decorated with my scores, even the ceiling. I only had to lie on my back to admire my sonatas and quartets. It looked rather good, actually. But I tore it all down—better I do it than someone else!—and burned the rest along with it.” Work on these survivors began in the mid-1860s, but it was only in 1873 that his perfectionism conceded to the decision to call them complete. And so, we are left with, at best, mere intimations of what came before, shattered and reworked into collages of a mind slightly more in tune with its self-inflicted wounds.

The String Quartet No. 1 in C minor blossoms into exuberant life from the start, its gentle lead-in masking an almost volcanic energy beneath. This declamatory statement is not the setting of a tone but the breaking of it, snapping us out of a painful reverie into something more immediate—a real crisis rather than the arbitrary melancholy with which we tend to surround ourselves. The constant vacillation between urgency and resignation renders these proceedings a masterful exercise in tension and release. The sheer level of rhythmic and melodic invention is dazzling to behold, evolving into something beyond incidental. The Zhehetmair Quartett navigates every twist and turn with the precision of a film director who nevertheless allows his actors to make every scene leap from the screen.

Such heroism, however, is destined to fall, for even the romantic gestures of the second movement are not offered in hopes of fulfillment but rather in expectation of being forgotten. This undermining is what separates Brahms from the gigantry of such predecessors as Beethoven. He is uninterested in staid forms and inherited expectations. He speaks and lets his sentiments carry the day, rather than deferring to baskets with pretty little labels and easily identifiable contents.

In the third movement, a subdued yet altogether lively Allegretto, he unveils another facet of determination, all the more powerful for being caught in a web of its own making. A particularly gorgeous moment occurs when the quartet coalesces into a pizzicato dandelion, then blows its seeds far and wide. But if anything is left to wander offscreen, it is brought right back into focus with the final Allegro. Here, the camera zooms in, revealing every detail. It is a stunning conclusion that declares itself undeclarable.

While these quartets are quite violin-forward, as proven by the leading voices of Thomas Zehetmair and relative newcomer Jakub Jakowicz, violist Ruth Killius deserves admiration for providing the rudder that steers both vessels. Her sinewy strength is astonishingly present in the String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, of which the opening movement lets her sing with unbridled lyricism. The same must be said of cellist Christian Elliott, for whom this would be his last recording with the quartet before his untimely death earlier this year. His depth of color and texture is felt throughout, especially in the two central movements, where the instrument’s endurance is revealed in tonal breadth, muscular leaps of intuition, and smooth layers of binding energy.

In the finale, all signatures come to the fore, each a piece in a larger puzzle upon which light continues to fall. The violins are once again declamatory without feeling desperate, pointing instead to inspirations deeply internal and chaotic, funneled into a sound as interlocking as it is yearning to be free of its own design. Thus, the music leaves us behind, not with a sense of closure but of an ongoing trajectory, an arrow still in light. For in Brahms’s hands, drama has no fixed abode, only the upheavals of time itself, to which we all must ultimately succumb and from which, through performances such as this, we momentarily rise again.

Danish String Quartet: PRISM V (ECM New Series 2565)

| Tyran Grillo

Danish String Quartet
PRISM V

Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen violin
Frederik Øland violin
Asbjørn Nørgaard viola
Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin violoncello
Recorded June 2021
Festsal, KFUM/KFUK, Copenhagen
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Cover: Eberhard Ross
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: April 14, 2023

The Danish String Quartet concludes its nearly eight-year journey pairing Ludwig van Beethoven’s five late string quartets with works by Johann Sebastian Bach and later composers. Looking back, I can’t help but smile at how deeply and patiently the DSQ has fertilized the soil of this project to yield the richness of spring harvest.

As the musicians humbly observe, “Micromanagement is rarely a successful strategy when it comes to late Beethoven.” Therefore, if the music feels almost fiercely detailed, it’s because the relationships between the notes speak up for themselves at every turn. Indeed, it’s impossible to encounter the initial stirrings of the String Quartet No. 16 in F major, op. 135, wherein the composer returns not only to the quadripartite form but also to his astonishment of the past, without blushing. And what, you might wonder, is immediately apparent this time around? Nothing less than the undeniable realization that the late Beethoven deviates from other “standard” quartets of the repertoire (including his earlier own) in how inevitable it feels. Whether in the lucidity of the second movement or the dark pastoralism of the third, every sound takes on a physical appearance. The sheer grit the Danes bring to these contrasts is wonderous. Whereas the faster rites of passage would give little room for personal interpretation in less capable hands, in the present context, they are vessels in which the pudding of proof is artfully mixed. In the final stretch, which begins in gentler territory while also expressing great urgency, the call and response between cello and violins opens the door into a run across an open field where life itself becomes the map leading the way to the other side.

Anton Webern’s String Quartet of 1905 (the second of two he wrote that year) brought about a sea change in the genre. Although played in one continuous 18-minute stretch, it takes on a nominal structure in three sections (“Becoming,” “Being,” “Passing Away”) based on the work of painter Giovanni Segantini. Its shifts between darker and lighter keys, between exhalations and holdings of breath, would seem to mirror Beethoven, while its central fugue casts a shadow further back to Bach. The more one immerses oneself in it, the more fragmentary it becomes. As with the canvases that inspired it, one is tempted to isolate a mountain from land and sky, all the while missing out on the benefit of zooming in further on individual plants, puffs of cloud, and rocky imperfections that can only be described as “hymnal” in shape.

The setting for these diamonds consists of Baroque prongs. Whereas Bach’s chorale prelude, Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit, opens the program as one would wake up from a coma only to realize how much the world has not changed, the Contrapunctus XIV from The Art of Fuguereleases its pollen by the light of the moon, windswept in evening breezes to places we cannot touch until our bodies wither. Being unfinished, it ends mid-statement, leaving the remainder to toss about in the waves of our unworthy fancy. Sometimes, the best way to answer a question is by posing another.

Anja Lechner: BACH/ABEL/HUME (ECM New Series 2806)

| Tyran Grillo

Anja Lechner
BACH/ABEL/HUME

Anja Lechner violoncello
Recorded May 2023, Himmelfahrtskirche, Munich
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Cover photo: Sam Harfouche
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 18, 2024

A solo program is never a solitary endeavor. While it may nominally include a lone performer—in this case, cellist Anja Lechner, in her first such recording—it is ultimately a conversation with the music, engineer, producer, and oneself. And in the trifecta of composers assembled here, we are included in that conversation. Throughout the opening swoon of A Question, one among a handful from former Scottish mercenary Tobias Hume (c. 1579-1645), and its companion piece, An Answer, the beginning and the ending become indistinguishable. (I also like to think that the answer comes unintentionally in the snatch of bird song heard at the end of the latter track.) Harke, Harke features pizzicato colorations and bow tapping—and may, in fact, be the first score to feature a col legno instruction—for delectable contrast. These pieces are from Hume’s 1605 collection of dances and miniatures, “The First Part of Ayres,” welcoming us into a sound-world that begs uninterrupted listening.

German pre-Classicalist Carl Friedrich Abel (1723-1787), another viol master who returned to the form a century and a half later, yields two vignettes in d minor. Where his Arpeggio is an enchantment, shining across the strings in refracted sunrise, the Adagio is a piece of paper blown down a cobbled street by the wind of an oncoming storm.

Against this backdrop, the Cello Suite No. 1 of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) is a piece of a fallen star. In the Prélude, there is enough shadow to remind us that even the most joyful discoveries depend on sorrows, rendering their contours all the more pleasurable to behold. Lechner wields her bow as the weaver does a shuttle. From where she sits, the frays of the tapestry’s backside are within reach, while from our perspective, it is richly and coherently patterned. As the Allemande shapes the clouds and sky, the Courante and Sarabande populate the valley below with equal measures of vibrance and infirmity. In the Menuet, we encounter the tinge of old age, where eyes still sparkle with the naivety of youth even as they are tempered by the cataracts of regret. The final Gigue frees the soul from its cage.

Given how heartfully Lechner renders all of this, moment by precious moment, how can one not reflect upon her spirit of exploration and improvisation through a career as varied as her repertoire? We are all the more blessed by her ability to pull life from her instrument as one draws water from a well. Like the composer himself, even when repeating the same format in the Cello Suite No. 2, she holds the power of variation incarnate. This Prélude is a drop of ink preserved in water, holding its color and identity no matter how much the Allemande may jostle it. Lechner maintains a level voice, holding firm to the horizon so that the occasional flight toward the sun or dive toward the ocean floor feels all the more novel. In that sense, the Courante is as vivacious as the Sarabande is funereal, each a stage setter for the final footwork.

Further aphorisms from Hume, each addressing a different facet of the human condition, conclude the recital. By turns playful and sensual, they delight with such titles as Hit It In The Middle and Touch Me Lightly. The strongest musculature is reserved for A Polish Ayre, which reminds us of just how physical the cello can be. Throughout these interpretations, Lechner is ever the shaft of light to its prism, splitting a spectrum of mastery that can only flourish behind closed eyes. The result is an act of great intimacy built over years of trust with ECM and its listeners, giving her soil to plant a variegated garden of nourishment. She has the dirt under her nails to prove it. Let the water of our high regard be its rain.

John Holloway Ensemble: Henry Purcell – Fantazias (ECM New Series 2249)

| Tyran Grillo

John Holloway Ensemble
Henry Purcell: Fantazias

John Holloway violin
Monika Beer viola
Renate Steinmann viola
Martin Zeller violoncello
Recorded March 2015 at Radiostudio DRS, Zürich
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Cover photo: Thomas Wunsch
Produced by Manfred Eicher
An ECM/SRF2 Kultur coproduction
Executive producer (SRF): Roland Wächter
Release date: September 22, 2023

Henry Purcell (1659-1695), best known for his operas, was no less a formidable composer of instrumental music. His Fantazias are the pinnacle of the form, rich in their intermingling of counterpoint and polyphony. By the time Purcell put these to paper in 1680, the fantasia was over a century old. Despite being honed into a science by such estimable predecessors as William Byrd, William Lawes, John Jenkins, and Matthew Locke (whom Purcell replaced as “composer in ordinary with fee for the violin to his Majesty,” Charles II), it had fallen out of favor. Violinist John Holloway calls the present collection “a personal farewell to a kind of music, which in Purcell’s own chamber music would soon be superseded by sonatas.”

Leading an ensemble that includes violists Monika Beer and Renate Steinmann and cellist Martin Zeller, Holloway regards these 12 gems through a jeweler’s glass, cherishing every occlusion as a testament to its crafting through time. We encounter them here out of sequence, beginning with the river’s flow of No. 10. The sound is both creamy and metallic, sometimes allowing dreams to peek above the surface while at others pushing them into the mysteries of the current. Like No. 4, it affords a special sort of grace, pivoting from a seamless introduction into an intricate unfolding without changing skins. The ensemble matches with a palette that is equal parts shimmer and shadow.

Indeed, while these strings owe much of their grace to the composing, one cannot discount the players’ lifeblood. Like actors in a stage play, they embody these “characters” from within. In No. 6, for instance, Holloway’s violin laments like an agent of mourning while the others cross-hatch that inward focus with extroverted streaks of illumination. This dynamic reverses as the urgency heightens, and Holloway grabs hold of the future while the lower strings keep vigil to avoid forgetting the past. No. 9 is its companion in spirit: Even when it dances, it casts hedonism into the fire. Nos. 7 and 8 are equally wondrous in their contrasts, and their slips into dissonance reveal an improvisatory heritage, making them feel spontaneous, raw, and passionate.

In his liner notes, Holloway says, regarding the English composer’s handling of the form, that Johann Sebastian Bach “would certainly have acknowledged it as equal to his finest achievements in this art.” This is perhaps nowhere more obvious than in No. 5, the knotwork of which immediately suggests The Art of Fugue. Sitting on its right hand and left are Nos. 11 and 12. As translucent as they are viscous, they constitute a trinity of resolution that begs for more yet offers salvation only through silence.

While the above pieces are in four parts, Nos. 1-3 are in three. More intimate in form but no less expansive in scope, each is a dip into the heart of a creator whose font ran dry too soon.