Classical

Johannes Brahms: Klavierstücke (ECM New Series 2730/31)

| Tyran Grillo

Johannes Brahms
András Schiff
Klavierstücke

András Schiff Blüthner piano
Recorded March 2021
Kammermusiksaal Hermann J. Abs
des Beethoven-Haus, Bonn
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Production coordination: Guido Gorna
Cover photo: Péter Nádas
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 18, 2026

The distance between Johannes Brahms’s early and late piano music supplies the organizing principle for András Schiff’s latest addition to his ECM New Series traversal of the 19th-century German composer. Schiff begins with the long-lost Albumblatt, written when Brahms was 20 for the friendship album of Göttingen music director Arnold Wehner and later adapted for the Horn Trio, Op. 40. Youthful possibility enters a silent argument with late style, and four intervening decades press upon every note.

Schiff plays a beautifully preserved 1859 Blüthner whose warmth never becomes cosmetic and whose bass register retains an almost archaeological presence. His booklet notes unite personal reflection with close attention to Brahms’s striations, clarifying the interpretive dialogue at play throughout. The instrument extends Schiff’s intimate correspondence with Brahms across earlier ECM recordings, including the Clarinet Sonatas with Jörg Widmann and the Piano Concertos with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. His Violin Sonatas with Yuuko Shiokawa occupy another chapter. Here, the Albumblatt, marked Allegro con espressione, rocks gently beneath phrases of fluid grace. Melancholy passes through sunlit warmth, leaving consolation truer for the pain dissolved within it. Schiff shapes each phrase with the curvature of handwriting, as though the young composer’s hand still pressed against the page.

The Eight Piano Pieces, Op. 76, composed largely in 1878 after Brahms had neglected solo piano music for more than a decade, contract the dimensions of his earlier sonatas while enlarging their interiors. The opening F-sharp-minor Capriccio surges forward, tightened by a fleeting allusion to the finale of Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony that Schiff allows to flicker at the edge of recognition. The jocular B-minor Capriccio rearranges the floor with volatile accents; the C-sharp-minor Capriccio drives every gesture deeper into the keyboard. In the A-minor Intermezzo, an ashen chorale shelters unexpected tenderness. By the ecstatic C-major finale, exuberance carries knowledge of entropy, its brightness sharpened by everything it has survived.

The Fantasies, Op. 116, written in 1892, leave D minor and ultimately return there, each departure altering the point of origin. Schiff lends the opening Capriccio muscular clarity, preserving its contrapuntal grain, while the A-minor Intermezzo finds knowing innocence in folk inflection. The G-minor Capriccio tears open this fragile space with chopped rhythms and distant calls, its ferocity generated through fracture rather than brute force. Brahms originally conceived the central E-major Intermezzo as a nocturne, and its suspended consciousness seems to contemplate contemplation itself. The concluding D-minor Capriccio encloses a vulnerable middle within confrontational outer material.

The Intermezzi, Op. 117, inhabit an even more concentrated emotional world. Brahms associated the opening piece with a Scottish ballad in which a mother laments her absent child, and Schiff lets its rocking motion retain the gravity of that imagined voice. Comfort and grief share one pulse; the lower register answers from beneath ordinary thought. In the B-flat-minor Intermezzo, harmony erodes certainty from within as the phrases darken by degrees. Schiff allows the music freedom to breathe without turning sorrow into theater. Tragedy has been compressed beyond narrative, an ancient text reduced to scorched fragments whose missing sentences outweigh the surviving words.

With the Six Piano Pieces, Op. 118, beauty and desolation become inseparable. The celebrated A-major Intermezzo seems almost too delicate to hold, yet its slow undulation possesses immense structural strength. Schiff sustains its melodic line patiently, allowing inner voices to rise and vanish at their own pace. The vigorous G-minor Ballade, alone among Brahms’s late piano works in bearing that title, expands the dramatic perimeter without breaking the cycle’s inward concentration. By the E-flat-minor Intermezzo, descending figures burrow beneath pitch into a mineral stratum where lament existed before any creature possessed a voice.

Schiff never imposes a single idea of lateness upon this music. His Brahms can be severe or playful, with both qualities transformed by proximity to silence. The Blüthner’s colors disclose the sensual complexity within decay, with the treble carrying an especially pale radiance. Pedaling becomes controlled haunting, one sonority remaining faintly present inside the next. Musical time accumulates rather than passes. Beneath Schiff’s fingers, every chord contains a small excavation of those that preceded it.

The Four Piano Pieces, Op. 119, draw that sentiment toward its most enigmatic conclusion. The opening B-minor Intermezzo begins with descending thirds that Schoenberg praised as evidence of Brahms’s radical structural imagination. The succeeding Intermezzi expose the machinery by which memory converts loss into form, reducing expression to the weight of time bearing down upon intervals.

The concluding Rhapsody in E-flat major initially promises public confidence and heroic breadth, then gradually reveals another intention. Schiff notes the rarity of a work that begins in major and ends in minor. Such a turn overturns the old promise that struggle earns radiance, replacing triumph with a truth too lucid to require consolation. Schiff gives the closing pages a thrilling inevitability, letting five and a half minutes contain the contour of a lifetime without forcing that life into a paltry moral framework.

What begins with a young man writing in a friend’s guestbook arrives at an older man dismantling the mechanisms of arrival. Between them, the piano becomes a theory of consciousness: themes remember futures they have yet to enter, while harmonies age within seconds. Schiff makes this impossible chronology audible, joining pages separated by 40 years through one unfinished act of attention. Time becomes a manuscript written on both sides, its ink bleeding through until every beginning bears the watermark of its conclusion. Somewhere within that translucent page, the 20-year-old Brahms writes a melody for Arnold Wehner, unaware that an old man is listening from the reverse. The older Brahms answers in a minor key whose cadence seals no tomb. He addresses the past as a living stranger, entrusting us with the possibility that memory belongs less to those who have lived than to whatever, across centuries, keeps them alive.

The Outflung Net

| Tyran Grillo

Issued in Germany in 1992, The Outflung Net is a rare six-LP box whose very lack of a conventional catalog number suits its elusive character. The title comes from Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, where a fly cast spreads so widely that it seems to have “a center wherever you look.” That image is an ideal emblem for this gathering of ECM New Series recordings. Arvo Pärt may supply its spiritual center, but every disc becomes a center in turn, each extending a line toward Bach, modernism, improvisation, ritual, and the fertile silence for which producer Manfred Eicher’s label had become known. More than a sampler, the set is a compact aesthetic manifesto.

Pärt’s Miserere (ECM 1430) is its natural threshold. The Hilliard Ensemble under Paul Hillier, soprano Sarah Leonard, organist Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, percussionist Pierre Favre, the Western Wind Chamber Choir, and the Orchester der Beethovenhalle Bonn under Dennis Russell Davies inhabit music whose power lies in the tension between utterance and suspension. In the title work, Psalm 51 advances almost word by word, clarinet responses turning language into dialogue. The “Dies irae” erupts like a storm at the end of the world, yet the performance never mistakes volume for grandeur. Leonard’s ascents, David James’s countertenor radiance, Gordon Jones’s grave baritone, and the Hilliards’ collective purity lead from devastation toward an order glimpsed rather than possessed. Festina Lente spirals with stately paradox, while Sarah Was Ninety Years Old sets voices, organ, and Favre’s drums inside an austere arithmetic of awe. Few recordings make interrupted thought feel so complete.

Two albums by Swiss cellist Thomas Demenga place Bach beside living modernism, not as opposing camps but as mutually illuminating practices. On Bach/Holliger (ECM 1340), he is joined by violinist Catrin Demenga and oboist-composer Heinz Holliger. The latter’s Duo trembles and darts with sibling precision, his Studie über Mehrklänge turns circular breathing and multiphonics into a strangely lyrical anatomy of the oboe, and Trema makes the cello shiver as if pursued by its own shadow. After such exposed nerves, Bach’s Fourth Cello Suite arrives cleansed of familiarity. Demenga plays without decorative vanity, drawing a dark inward song from the Sarabande and allowing every fingerfall and resonance to enter the recording’s crystalline air.

Bach/Carter (ECM 1391) reverses the route, opening with the Third Cello Suite in a performance of warmth, mobility, and improvisatory lift before stepping into Elliott Carter’s quicksilver world. Demenga is joined by flutist Philippe Racine, clarinetist Ernesto Molinari, violinist Hansheinz Schneeberger, pianist Paul Cleemann, percussionist Gerhard Huber, and conductor Jürg Wyttenbach. Esprit rude, Esprit doux, Enchanted Preludes, and Riconoscenza per Goffredo Petrassi sketch compressed dramas of interruption and pursuit, but the Triple Duo is the summit: three instrumental pairs exchange ideas with the precarious grace of an intoxicated gymnast. Carter’s simultaneities can seem like scattered strata until time reveals their underlying geology. Heard after Bach, their density is not disorder but another species of counterpoint.

Gavin Bryars’s After the Requiem (ECM 1424) supplies the box’s most openly elegiac landscapes. Its title piece, written as an instrumental afterimage of the Cadman Requiem, brings Bill Frisell’s electric guitar together with the violas of Alexander Balanescu and Kate Musker and Tony Hinnigan’s cello. Frisell burns slowly through the strings like northern light, his sustained tones less a solo voice than a spirit learning the texture of mourning. Elsewhere, Balanescu, clarinetist Roger Heaton, pianist Dave Smith, Bryars on bass, and percussionists Martin Allen and Simon Limbrick navigate The Old Tower of Löbenicht and Allegrasco, while Evan Parker, Stan Sulzmann, Ray Warleigh, and Julian Argüelles form the saxophone choir of Alaric I or II. Bells, low reeds, spare ostinatos, and corroded melodies make the album feel antique without imitation.

The set then widens beyond the concert-hall frame. Trommelgeflüster (ECM 1249) is Harald Weiss alone on percussion and voice, though “alone” hardly describes its populous theater. Steel-toned steps, melismatic chants, whistles, outbursts, and distant twangs gather into a ritual that continually questions its own regularity. Weiss’s theatrical and intercultural imagination risks pastiche, yet the music’s physical conviction pulls its materials into one breathing organism. Part I moves as if across sun-struck earth before Part II enters darker, more dreamlike territory. The title means “Drum Whisper,” but the album whispers with an entire body.

Walter Fähndrich’s Viola (ECM 1412) closes the collection by reducing the field to a single instrument and opening it onto uncertainty. A composer, improviser, and sound-installation artist, Fähndrich gives his pieces only Roman numerals. Overtones sway, rapid arpeggios climb into spirals, sul tasto passages ring like buried bells, and scratches become avian calls and insect song. His precisely governed bow does not tame these sounds so much as release their inner ecology. The final, expanded return to “IV” refuses neat circularity, leaving the ear at the threshold of another possible performance.

Across these six records, ECM’s celebrated spaciousness is never merely atmospheric. Pärt’s prayer, Bach’s architecture, Holliger’s fractured breath, Carter’s restless syntax, Bryars’s weathered remembrance, Weiss’s embodied ritual, and Fähndrich’s improvisational earth all belong to the same outflung net. Its center is everywhere because attentive listening keeps moving it. Rare as an object and even rarer in the coherence of its vision, this box preserves a moment when New Series seemed less like a label imprint than a new way of organizing musical time.

Special thanks to Bernhard Liebenberg for bringing this collection to my attention.

UnderStories Ensemble: A French Odyssey – Music for two cellos & basso continuo by Rameau, Barrière, Corrette, Boismortier, Berteau & Patouart

| Tyran Grillo

This recording unfolds as a meditation on movement: of peoples, of sounds, of power, and of bodies both musical and political. Forged in the turbulence of the Enlightenment and shadowed by the first tremors of revolution, the repertoire gathered here belongs to a France that was simultaneously consolidating itself at home and projecting itself outward through trade, conquest, and imagination. The 18th century witnessed an unprecedented circulation of goods, ideas, and bodies, and with it came an uneasy reckoning. Curiosity and domination advanced together, and music became one of the most refined sites where that contradiction could be staged, aestheticized, and occasionally questioned.

As Marco Crosetto observes in the album’s liner notes, ports, salons, and theaters absorbed the sonic residue of these encounters. Foreign rhythms, borrowed gestures, and invented “elsewheres” entered French musical language not as faithful transcriptions but as carefully framed reflections of desire and anxiety. The exotic was never neutral. It arrived filtered through fantasy, hierarchy, and control, transforming distant cultures into mirrors for Europe’s own doubts about virtuous progress. Rousseau’s warning that civilization estranges humanity from itself hovers over this repertoire, not as philosophy alone but as sound. What Europe called expansion often sounded like displacement, and what it called novelty frequently concealed erasure.

At the center of this program stands another transformation, quieter but no less symbolic: the ascent of the cello. By the mid-18th century, its depth and resonance began to eclipse the viola da gamba, an instrument long entwined with aristocratic inheritance and established authority. This was not a clean overthrow. Old techniques were adapted, absorbed, and revoiced within new forms. The cello did not abolish the past; it reincarnated it. In that sense, the instrument becomes a metaphor of its time, negotiating between continuity and rupture, inheritance and reinvention.

This philosophy animates the debut of UnderStories, a French-Italian Baroque ensemble that listens downward rather than upward. With Mario Filippini on viola da gamba, Loris Guastella on percussion, Marco Crosetto on harpsichord, Silvia De Rosso on violone, Margherita Burattini on harp, and Bartolomeo Dandolo Marchesi and Clara Pouvreau on violoncello, the group privileges the low register as a site of agency rather than accompaniment. Their approach embraces a Baroque freedom in which instrumentation remains fluid and arrangements remain provisional. The past here is not embalmed; it is negotiated.

Jean-Baptiste Barrière (1707–1747) offers one of the most eloquent articulations of this new cello identity in the Sonata a tre in D minor, No. 2, Book III (c. 1736). The opening Adagio unfolds with restrained longing, its melodic lines reaching outward as though aware of distance itself. The ensuing Allegro brightens the terrain without abandoning depth, allowing the ensemble’s tactile sonority to come fully into focus. Fingers, strings, and wood remain audible partners in the discourse, while the harpsichord gleams with controlled brilliance. The Aria sinks back into introspection, its melancholy exquisitely weighted, before the final Giga steps forward with buoyant resolve, dancing toward a horizon that remains deliberately unattainable.

Martin Berteau (1691–1771), trained on the viola da gamba and later a founding figure of the French cello school, embodies the transformation made audible. His Sonata a tre No. 6, Op. 1 (c. 1748) moves effortlessly between robustness and tenderness, never allowing one to eclipse the other. The harp’s presence lends an enchanted glow while also deepening the harmonic shadows beneath the surface. The central Siciliana stands as one of the album’s most persuasive moments, poised and inward, balancing restraint with warmth. Here, delicacy becomes discipline, and the ensemble articulates Berteau’s lines with refinement. This sonata emerges as a quiet manifesto for continuity through change.

Interwoven among these instrumental works are reflective pauses that clarify lineage. Marco Crosetto’s Prélude à l’imitation de Mr L. Couperin and Margherita Burattini’s Prélude à l’imitation de MM. Rameau et Naderman serve not as interruptions but as footnotes in sound. These solo interludes acknowledge ancestry while refusing nostalgia, reminding the listener that, in this century, imitation was a standard mode of dialogue.

Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764) looms over the program not merely as a composer but as a cultural architect. His opera-ballet Les Indes Galantes appears throughout in carefully chosen arrangements that foreground both its brilliance and its complications. The Ritournelle pour “Le Turc généreux” and the Tambourins I–II, arranged respectively by Bartolomeo Dandolo Marchesi and the UnderStories Ensemble, pulse with rhythmic vitality and folk-tinged energy. Percussion and interwoven strings generate an intoxicating surface, yet beneath the dance lies a careful staging of difference. Rameau’s music constructs the foreign as spectacle, inviting admiration while maintaining control.

This tension becomes more explicit in the Air pour “Les Sauvages” and Air pour “Les Esclaves Africains”, both arranged by Clara Pouvreau, as well as the Air des Incas, arranged by Silvia De Rosso. These pieces dramatize otherness through bold rhythm, percussive force, and ceremonial pacing. They reveal how European music transformed colonized peoples into sonic symbols, vessels for projected fantasies of innocence, savagery, or nobility. The ensemble’s gravelly strings and emphatic rhythms refuse to smooth over this history. Instead, they allow the weight of representation to be felt, asking the listener not merely to enjoy the sound, but to interrogate its framing.

That interrogation deepens in Rameau’s “L’Égyptienne” from Nouvelles Suites de pièces de Clavecin RCT 5–6, arranged by Bartolomeo Dandolo Marchesi. The piece is a dramatic masterstroke, yet its allure destabilizes admiration itself. Exotic color here becomes a lens of appropriation, reminding us that fascination often coexists with domination. The music dazzles, then unsettles, forcing a reckoning with the cost of its own beauty.

Louis-François-Joseph Patouart (1719–1793) brings the program into remarkable focus with the Sonate en trio pour deux violoncelles et une contrebasse No. 6, Op. 2 (c. 1750), presented here in a world premiere recording. The opening Adagio unfolds with luxuriant depth, the instrumental blend feeling both inevitable and freshly imagined. Gavottes follow with confident verve, their brightness never shallow, while the Minuettos grow from gentle poise into declarative presence. The music seems to test its own balance between symmetry and surprise.

Joseph Bodin de Boismortier (1689–1755) contributes a different energy in the Sonate en trio No. 5, Op. 37 (1732). Its opening movement bursts forward with rhythmic assurance, pressing against borders rather than merely crossing them. The central Largo finds unexpected poignancy, pausing to reflect before the final movement reasserts momentum with dynamic wit. Boismortier’s voice here feels pragmatic yet searching, a composer aware of the pleasures of motion and its costs.

Michel Corrette (1707–1795) closes the journey with “Le Phénix,” concerto pour quatre violoncelles, violes ou bassons(c. 1735). The work’s lively opening ushers the listener into a richly variegated sound world, followed by a tender slow movement that invites collective listening rather than display. The final Allegro rises with confident vitality, its interplay among strings suggesting renewal without amnesia.

By the end of this album, motion itself emerges as the central theme. Instruments migrate, genres adapt, and cultures encounter one another in asymmetrical exchanges that leave lasting marks. UnderStories does not attempt to resolve the contradictions embedded in this repertoire. Instead, the ensemble listens into them, allowing beauty and unease to coexist. In doing so, the recording offers a philosophical proposition as much as a musical one: that history speaks most honestly when we allow its fractures to resonate, and that listening, when practiced with care, can become an ethical act. The past does not ask for absolution. It asks for attention.

Sokratis Sinopoulos/Yann Keerim: Topos (ECM 2847)

| Tyran Grillo

Sokratis Sinopoulos
Yann Keerim
Topos

Sokratis Sinopoulos lyra
Yann Keerim piano
Recorded February 2024
Sierra Studios, Athens
Engineer: Giorgos Kariotis
Cover photo: Jean-Marc Dellac
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 17, 2025

There is nothing quite like the sound of the lyra when Sokratis Sinopoulos takes it in hand. The instrument exhales an ancient soul into the modern air, and few musicians draw from its strings such a fusion of myth and immediacy. From his quartet recordings, Eight Winds and Metamodal, this more intimate duo with pianist Yann Keerim distills their chemistry into an even deeper alchemy of tone and silence. Their collaboration of nearly twenty years has ripened into an art of pure intuition, where melody and freedom speak the same language.

At the album’s heart lies Béla Bartók, whose Romanian Folk Dances serve as both axis and atmosphere. Yet it is in “Vlachia,” one of four original pieces inspired by the Hungarian composer, where their vision truly unfolds, as melancholy and art relate like light through water. The piano’s chords rock gently, a cradle of memory, while the lyra hovers between waking and dreaming, resisting the lull of its own tenderness. “Valley,” by contrast, opens like a watercolor, the soul of the landscape awakening at dawn, when even the smallest stones remember their own luminosity. Between the modally inflected interlude “Mountain Path,” with its blues-tinted horizons, and the quietly breathing “Forest Glade,” the musicians walk among elderly oak, beech, and elm, each exhaling the voices of forgotten peoples, their songs hanging in the air.

The Romanian Folk Dances themselves are reimagined here as meditations on time’s elasticity. “In One Spot,” normally brief and fleeting, becomes a slow unfurling, each phrase examined as though through a magnifying glass instead of a telescope. What was once a dance is now an act of remembrance, a transmission through hands, hearts, and breath. Keerim’s improvisations shimmer with restraint, unveiling the dance as a living organism rather than a set of steps. “Sash Dance” begins like a gift being unwrapped, its introduction a flowering reverie, before the familiar theme emerges, tender as an heirloom passed from parent to child. Sinopoulos’s harmonic touch is radiant, his bow tracing lines that dissolve as soon as they are drawn, while Keerim decorates with the grace of rain gathering on the edge of a leaf.

A solo lyra ushers us into “Dance from Bucsum,” its lament carrying the weight of centuries. Gradually, it finds vitality again, as if memory itself were relearning its steps. The piano’s entrance is light breaking through foliage. “Romanian Polka” delights in this interplay, its bowings and pluckings coaxing the piano into a rhythmic embrace. The music feels rooted in the soil, yet perpetually on the verge of flight. “Fast Dance” is not so much quickened as transfigured. What was once earthy now becomes spectral, its pulse sifted through the mesh between moments.

“Stick Dance” closes the circle, beginning in abstraction before broadening into a spacious terrain of inspiration. There is such reverence here that one hesitates to call it an ending at all. In returning to the first of Bartók’s dances, the album folds time in upon itself, reviving what it has just allowed to rest. It becomes not a conclusion, but a threshold, suggesting that each listening might return us to the beginning with altered ears.

As Sinopoulos and Keerim write in the album’s booklet:

“Our Topos is where tradition meets the present, the Balkan Mountains meet urban space, the music of the countryside meets contemporary creation. Our Topos is where we meet and interact, shaping our individual and common identities.”

Indeed, Topos is less a location than a living field, a place where listening itself becomes part of the composition. Between the lines of melody and silence, we, too, are invited to breathe, to dwell, to remember. And as the final tone recedes, one wonders whether the music has ended at all or merely crossed into another realm, where echoes continue to shape the clouds, unseen but never lost.

Windfall Light: The Visual Language of ECM

| Tyran Grillo
Windfall Light

“You wish to see, listen; hearing is a step towards vision.”
–Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (ca. 1090-1153)

The act of looking has long been likened to that of listening. Visual art, by no mere coincidence, is often spoken of in compositional terms, as great paintings and sculptures may be likened to symphonies in complexity and coordination. In music itself, sight reading is the quintessential form of looking as listening: The studied mind can track attention across a score and hear the music without a single musician present. But what of listening as an act of looking? Such has been the ethos of ECM Records since its inception.

Although the label has come to have a certain “look” to its admirers, it achieves in its aesthetic presentation not a look but a sound. One listens to an ECM album cover—be it a somber black-and-white photograph, an abstract painting, or a typographic assembly—by hearing it through the eyes. Although the images themselves are not necessarily reflective of the music, and only occasionally of those performing it, they do provide a framework for the disc sheathed within. As was already demonstrated in this book’s predecessor, Sleeves of Desire: A Cover Story, an ECM album is a liminal reality in which the self before and the self after find cohesion at the intersection of life and art.

In the case of ECM, it’s not the cover that necessarily provides insight into the music but, if anything, the music that provides insight into the cover. One example that comes immediately to mind is the montage that graces Pat Metheny’s New Chautauqua:

What could Dieter Rehm’s photo of the Autobahn between Zurich and Munich have to do with such a distinctly American sound? Perhaps nothing when viewed from that POV. But flip the telescope around, turning it into a microscope, and the open road now becomes a universal call to nomadism and to the magnitude of the unknown, of which Metheny’s music is a maverick flagbearer. And herein lies the attraction of the ECM-album-as-object: It invites us to step outside our skins as a way of more fully inhabiting them.

“In terms of the gaze,” writes Jean-Luc Nancy, “the subject is referred back to itself as object. In terms of listening, it is to itself that the subject refers or refers back.” It may feel natural to separate these two acts. Still, the full package of an ECM album turns closed circuits into open ones, reconnecting us with something childlike, primal if you will, by allowing us to feel that tingle of excitement every time we press PLAY and, after five seconds of anticipation, are thrown into some of the most beautiful dislocations imaginable in recorded music. As La Monte Young once put it to Tony Conrad: “Isn’t it wonderful if someone listens to something he is ordinarily supposed to look at?” Indeed, we can be sure of reuniting with that same wonder when experiencing the unusual harmony that can only be found between such a counterpoint of sound and image. For how can one behold Jim Bengston’s stark monochromatic landforms on Lachrymae and not want to traverse them with Paul Hindemith’s Trauermusik as guide?

Not only is there a relationship to be found between covers and the albums they grace, but there is also much to discover in new juxtapositions. Because the images in Windfall Light are presented somewhat thematically, whether by photographer or visual motif, we are invited to explore associations we might not otherwise have made. One noteworthy spread, for example, pairs Robert Schumann: In Concert with Angel Song, thereby stimulating our curiosity for the unseen electricity between them.

Furthermore, the book contains five richly varied essays to immerse ourselves in.

In “When Twilight Comes,” German journalist Thomas Steinfeld dutifully expresses the viability of ECM’s visual identity as necessarily open-ended: “None of these pictures is an illustration in the narrow sense of the word. None of them refers to either the music or the musicians as a decoration. None of them pretends to give an interpretation or even to be interpreted on its own.” They are, rather, accompaniments. “Each is a hieroglyph,” he goes on to say, “free from much of its potential meaning, a work of dreamlike qualities, taken from nothing, a sudden objection against the profane and its often inescapable presence.” Steinfeld also notes the prevalence of water in ECM album covers—not as a reflective but a dynamic force—in addition to abstracts, street scenes, and less definable paeans to silence. Regarding the rare portraits of the actual featured musicians (Paul Motian, Meredith Monk, Keith Jarrett, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Charles Lloyd, etc.), he wonders: “Is this an accident, an honor, a matter of circumstance, or devotion?”

Author and museum curator Katharina Epprecht goes a step further in evoking the term “Transmedia Images.” By the title of her contribution, she means to suggest that ECM’s covers possess an interdisciplinary adjacency. Rather than being tautological loops, they are part of a “vast puzzle,” each a doorway into other senses and materialities. Thus, it is not the image’s ability to illustrate the music but rather “the immensely refined way that it handles unexpected shifts of meaning” that any listener will inevitably encounter. And while the images may be “based on correspondence to the character and quality of the music,” they are not beholden to it. Hence their potential as catalysts for personal transformation. “[T]he carefully packaged silver discs,” she waxes most literally, “are light and portable companions through life, motivating us to engage in contemplation, to pause for a moment.” In that respect, they allow us to understand more about our place in the world by questioning the many borders we draw around, through, over, and under it. Epprecht even provides a quintessential example of her own in Re: Pasolini:

Of this cover, she observes the following: “All of the gracious Virgin Mary’s senses are concentrated on her child, while the ears of the donkey unconsciously and reflexively register every sound. The instinctive perception of animals is unbiased and undeviating. I can think of no other picture that more touchingly elevates maternal attentiveness and unadulterated hearing to a metaphor.” Therefore, it’s as much the choice of image as its content that inspires us to regard the old as new, and vice versa.

British writer Geoff Andrew takes us yet another step deeper into intersectionality in “Leur musique: Eicher/Godard – Sound/Image.” Here, the concern is with the cinematic awareness that has long been at the heart of producer Manfred Eicher’s approach to mise-en-scène. Because both he and filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard are fond of “juxtaposing, combining and mixing up elements which most people in their respective fields would never dream of bringing together,” it was only natural that Godard’s work would come to be associated with such seminal recordings as Suspended Night, which features a still from his mangum opus, Histoire(s) du Cinema, and Soul of Things, which references Éloge de l’amour:

Where the latter film also gives us Norma Winstone’s Distances, we have the former to thank also for Words of the Angel, Morimur, Requiem for Larissa, Songs of Debussy and Mozart, and Voci.

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Perhaps not surprisingly, these are already borrowings from other sources—quotations of quotations (and is not classical music the same?). Other Godard touchpoints include Notre musique for Asturiana and Passion for Cello and Trivium.

And let us not forget the soundtracks of Godard’s own Nouvelle Vague and the above-mentioned Histoire(s) du Cinema.

One could hardly imagine such a book as Windfall Light without including the perspective of at least one ECM musician, and in pianist and composer Ketil Bjørnstad, we are given a most suitable ambassador. In “Landscapes and Soundscapes,” he looks not at the spatial but at the temporal. In speaking of the timeless quality of the covers, he notes a preference for monochrome and Nordic landscapes and atmospheres. “Being produced by Manfred Eicher is a purification process for a musician,” he reveals. In so doing, he leaves an implied question hanging in the air: Does a cover photograph or painting also undergo a sort of purification process? When disassociated from its original context, does not the image open itself to infinite possibilities? Bjørnstad again: “Just as great composers and painters are recognizable down to the smallest phrase or brushstroke, ECM’s music and visual world are recognizable without the slightest danger of anyone calling this stagnation.” Thus, the more this recognition settles in our gray matter, the more we come to equate the landscape with the soundscape.

Last but certainly not least is “Polyphonic Pictures” by Lars Müller, whose publishing imprint has given us this fine volume. His offering is a relatively zoomed-out perspective on the questions at hand. Going so far as to describe the covers and music of ECM as “libertarian”—at least in the sense that they elide the intervention of power structures that all too often infect recorded media—he characterizes them as “afterimages of memorized circumstances far more than they are depictions of things that have been seen.” In that sense, they grow with listeners in connection to lived experience. This take resonates with me at the deepest personal level, as even one glimpse of a beloved album cover invokes a reel of memories, associations, and impressions. Rather than their technical aspects, it is their eventfulness, their movement in stillness, and their visceral foundations that make them come alive. And so, in his ordering and layout of the images, he has created for us a self-avowed “visual score.” Ultimately, they are only as delible as the paper they’re printed on, and so they can only live on in the mind’s eye, which, if it’s not obvious by now, is more accurately depicted as an ear.

Yuuko Shiokawa/András Schiff: Brahms/Schumann (ECM New Series 2815)

| Tyran Grillo

Yuuko Shiokawa
András Schiff
Brahms/Schumann

Yuuko Shiokawa violin
András Schiff piano
Recorded December 2015 (Brahms)
and January 2019 (Schumann)
Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Cover photo: Nadia F. Romanini
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 11, 2024

In their second full disc for ECM New Series, violinist Yuuko Shiokawa and pianist András Schiff present two 19th-century sonatas of the highest caliber by Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) and Robert Schumann (1810-1856). The first half of the program is taken by Brahms’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in G major, op. 78. Composed in 1878, immediately after his violin concerto, it is affectionately known as the “Regenliedsonate” (Rain Sonata) for references to his two songs, “Regenlied” (Rain Song) and “Nachklang” (Lingering Sound), both gifted to Clara Schumann for her 54th birthday. We can easily share in her gratitude for finding those melodies she so cherished incorporated into a sonata of abundant riches, especially when considering that Brahms burned his early attempts at the genre. “Regenlied” opens the first and third movements, growing from the earth not as a sprout but as a fully formed tree. Like time-lapse photography, it allows us to see an entire life cycle in hindsight before we can fully grasp what is being reflected upon. Between the seamless notecraft in the violin and the piano’s dynamic underpinning, there is an orchestral sensibility at play. Despite the lively development, the outer husk is rooted in melancholy and emotional density. It whispers when it dances, shouts when it prays. The central Adagio is more funereal by contrast. As the violin works its lines from inner to outer sanctum, it never lets the wind get in the way of its grief. Meanwhile, the piano is more insistent and rouses its companion from slumber into the sharper edges of reality, leading it through every turn thereof without so much as a nick. The final stretch works through shaded pathways and hard-to-reach areas with sublime attention to detail, ending on a transcendent double stop.

Although Brahms’ great admirer Robert Schumann had never written a violin sonata, at the urging of Ferdinand David (concertmaster from the Leipzig Gewandhaus and the dedicatee of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto), he eventually relented. However, being displeased with his first attempt, he dedicated the Violin Sonata No. 2 in d minor, op. 121, to David instead. Clara and violinist Joseph Joachim gave its premiere in 1853. A massive piece in four parts, it turns the concept of “chamber music” on its head. Unlike this program’s accompanying sonata, it takes its time to mature (at 13 minutes, the opening movement alone is exactly half the length of Brahms’ entire sonata). It is also a profound litmus test of any duo’s attempts at the form, and in that respect, Schiff and Shiokawa defer to the score instead of their egos. The second movement is a soft burst of energy, giving shape to each motivic cell as if it were a brief dance to be savored before its steps are forgotten. From flowing to syncopated, we are carried through the third movement on the back of a groundswell that always keeps its shape, only enlarging and reducing before morphing into a tender staccato. The final movement is a masterclass in controlled drama that feels made for these four hands.

The sensitive playing, which gives its fullest, most heartfelt attention to every detail, is only matched by the recording. Engineer Stephan Schellmann brings a somewhat distant quality to the proceedings so as not to cloud the listener’s judgment with virtuosity. Instead, we are invited to sit in the back of the room, letting the music find us of its own volition, ready and waiting.

Ludwig van Beethoven: The Piano Concertos (ECM New Series 2753-55)

| Tyran Grillo

Alexander Lonquich
Münchener Kammerorchester
Ludwig van Beethoven: The Piano Conceros

Alexander Lonquich piano, direction
Münchener Kammerorchester
Daniel Giglberger concertmaster
Recorded January 2022
Rathausprunksaal, Landshut
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Cover: Fidel Sclavo
An ECM Production
Release date: November 8, 2024

After a years-long relationship with the Munich Chamber Orchestra, pianist Alexander Lonquich had an opportunity to perform Beethoven’s entire cycle of piano concertos over the course of an autumn evening in 2019. The present recording draws upon that collaboration as a gesture of preservation. Composed between 1790 and 1809, the five completed concertos are what the pianist calls “outward-looking creations” and give us insight into the composer’s depth and breadth of mind. 

Lonquich begins, naturally, with the Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major, op. 19, given that it was written first but published second due to Beethoven’s initial displeasure with it. Although its opening movement immediately calls Mozart to mind, there are plenty of distinctive colorations to enjoy in its ferocious ebullience, and its central departure into more delicate textures is a marvel. The Adagio is haunting for its sustain-pedaled penultima, setting up the final Rondo, which introduces a veritable horse race of energy to reckon with.

The Mozartian flavors continue in both the Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major, op. 15, and Piano Concerto No. 3 in c minor, op. 37. Whereas the former’s martial beginnings (bordering on overbearing with the occasional blast of timpani and brass) and symphonic conclusion speak with the inflection of a true Classicalist, the second movement adopts a romantic sway. Its soliloquy drips from Lonquich’s fingers like moonlit water, while the surrounding brushwork lends dimension to the scene. The wind writing is especially poignant, blending with the soloist as organically as a forest envelops every tree. The op. 37 mirrors this format almost to a T, beginning with another garagantuan Allegro con brio. At 17 minutes, it’s nothing to take lightly and flows more comfortably to my ears than its op. 15 counterpart. Perhaps it’s the minor key, the more mature writing, or a combination of the two, but whatever the formula, it is bursting at the seams with inspiration and invention, not least of all in the cadenza. (It also seems to foreshadow the Fifth Symphony in the same key, to be written five years later.) Between it and the foot-tappingly engaging third act is cradled another beautiful Largo. As an inward turn, it looks to itself as if through a glass darkly. Yearning for the future, it glows like an ember of possibility.

The Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, op. 58, opens with even more resolutely symphonic textures, as winds and brass weave a tapestry of pastoral imagery. At 20 minutes, it is half the length of the average symphony and deserves regard as a universe unto itself. The piano’s entrance is timid, almost mocking, before it exuberantly courts the orchestra in a dance of ambitious proportions. Like the Rondo at the other end of the tunnel, it emerges confident, almost brash, in its virtuosity. The Andante con moto operates at a whole other level at their center. Originally conceived with the Orpheus myth in mind, it is by turns agitated and contemplative. This push and pull continues until the piano unfurls its grief alone in a tangled catharsis.

In his liner notes for the album, Lonquich conceives a title for the Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, op. 73: “Battle, Prayer and Folk Festival.” For while the opening joys seem set in stone, they quickly crumble as more desperate convolutions come to the fore before the piano moves to its highest registers in a rousing meta statement. The Adagio un poco moto, perhaps the most recognizable movement of the collection, is easily heard anew in the present rendering, so crisp are its articulations that the smoothness of their skin feels real to the touch. Beethoven himself in the score marks the piano’s entrance “like the break of dawn,” but as Lonquich notes, what follows “feels to me like the attraction of a nocturnal source of light, which seems to be robbed of its radiance just five bars before the end.” And in that regression, we feel all sorts of trepidations shuffling through the mind until we land on the rousing third movement, where the sun indeed has the last word. Despite its many asides, tempering the sense of victory with that of retrospection, the music moves forward with confidence. Beethoven holds the flowing arpeggios and boisterous dances in constant check so as not to let time rule over space. With a brief yet inspiring finale, it sweeps us away in its arms and runs as far as its legs will carry us.

Keith Jarrett: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (ECM New Series 2790/91)

| Tyran Grillo

Keith Jarrett
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

Keith Jarrett piano
Recorded May 1994 at Cavelight Studio, New Jersey
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Cover photo: Mayo Bucher
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: June 30, 2023

In his 2014 monograph, The Music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, music historian David Schulenberg paints a compositionally focused portrait of Johann Sebastian’s second son. Despite living in his father’s shadow, his influence managed to shine a light through the veil of history by way of his seminal Essay on the True Manner of Playing Keyboard Instruments and the conduit he was purported to have furled between the Baroque and Viennese Classical schools. As a composer of nearly 1,000 works, his oeuvre is nothing to sneeze at, nor his style, as much an example of evolution in and of itself as of eras retrospectively defined. 

As Paul Griffiths notes in the liner text for the present album, which documents Keith Jarrett’s traversal of CPE’s Württemberg Sonatas, the ocean between father and son may seem vast, even as it churns with currents of familiarity in concert with calls from more distant shores. Dedicated to Carl Eugen, Duke of Württemberg, this collection “makes the point about inheritance avoided, or qualificated, or contradicted, or accepted, whether with gratitude or resignation.” Although nominally composed in 1742/43 for the student who would soon ascend to his dukedom, Griffiths observes, “More likely it was for his own fingers he was writing, and for his own ears.” Jarrett, having only heard these pieces on harpsichord, felt compelled to make a piano version, resulting in this home studio recording from 1994, likewise also for his own fingers and his own ears. All the more honored we should feel to have it available three decades later.

Sonata I in a minor is glorious from the start. There are moments of intense poignancy, as in the Moderato, while the faster outer layers elicit feelings of joy that are always undercut by what Griffiths calls a “sad grace” throughout (I might also call it a glorious melancholy). The final movement, marked Allegro assai, carries astonishing depth in tow. What seems a lightly articulated dance has room for so much more than the listener can calculate. Jarrett brims with vitality and precision without ever letting go of the improvisational spirit for which he is known on the jazzier side of things.

The sheer clarity of Jarrett’s voicings, a profound match for the younger Bach’s own, is fully displayed in Sonata II in A-flat major, of which the concluding Allegro is especially vibrant for its multifaceted joys. Like a brick wall, each layer staggers, parallel to every other layer below and above it, adding strength to the overall design and function.

The opening of Sonata III in e minor is perhaps the most glorious of them all, revealing its heart from the first sweep of the second hand. The Adagio is nostalgia incarnate, while the Vivace—the briefest movement of the collection—peels itself away with unfiltered love. The pauses in Sonata IV in B-flat major make for passionate contrast, yielding an Andante of great beauty. Working in stepwise formation, it is a DNA helix surrendering to melodic sequencing.

The more these sonatas develop, the more they veer toward Father Bach, especially in the Adagio fugue of Sonata V in E-flat major. With sweeping intimacy, it pieces together its puzzle between gusts of wind and spirit. The final Sonata VI in b minor is another inwardly focused distillation that defends variegations of light and shadow. The clocklike Adagio is a gem, while the final Allegro glistens in the setting sun. Each is a different keyboard, two eddies in a bay coming together harmoniously, speaking the same truth but with different tongues.

Duo Gazzana: Tõnu Kõrvits/Robert Schumann/Edvard Grieg (ECM New Series 2706)

| Tyran Grillo

Duo Gazzana
Tõnu Kõrvits/Robert Schumann/Edvard Grieg

Natascia Gazzana violin
Raffaella Gazzana piano
Recorded November 2021, Reitstadel Neumarkt
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Cover photo: Luciano Rossetti
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: November 18, 2022

A new recording from the Gazzana sisters—Natascia on violin and Raffaella on piano—is always something to celebrate. But what they now present may be their finest in terms of programming, thoughtfulness, passion, and self-control. Making a special case for this assertion are the subtle shades of Tõnu Kõrvits’s Stalker Suite (2017), one of two pieces written for the duo by the Estonian composer. Despite being an homage to Andrei Tarkovsky’s eponymous masterpiece, the music occupies a world unto itself, not least because of its performers’ unobfuscated humanity. From the soft metallic pianism that introduces “Into The Zone,” we relive at least some of that journey, which seems to go deeper vertically the more it proceeds horizontally into abandoned areas of non-existence and timeless looping.

Kõrvits doesn’t so much describe the imagination of cinema but rather the imagination incinema. When the film’s characters, for instance, enter “The Room,” their musical equivalent doesn’t seek to recreate those dilapidated walls, the waterlogged detritus of lives unlived, or the ringing phone. Instead, it lives in the quiet unrest of a mind led by the hand to a mirror in which images disappear as quickly as they manifest.

As the Stalker notes in his “Monologue,” what we call passion is the friction between souls and the lives of the bodies they inhabit. Weakness, he goes on to say, is the companion of birth, whereas strength is the accompaniment of death. Thus, every note wavers in the delicate metaphysical tension between the two. Rich and pliant yet fiercely resolute against the blinding light, it touches the periphery that is no periphery. If anything is programmatic here, it is “Waterfall,” but even this comes with an implied proviso: You must not treat the image as an idol, for faith comes by hearing, not seeing. The Zone has been internal all along.

Notturni (2014), also in four parts, delineates another porous architectural enclosure. Kõrvits’s penchant for brevity is philosophically and hermeneutically suited to these pieces, which take ideas not as excuses for grand expounding or soliloquizing but as poems in miniature. And if a nocturne is supposed to be about the night, then these modern examples of the form show us that a darkened sky reveals what the daylight obscures with its glare. The relationship between piano and violin is especially profound in the third piece, where fluttering high notes in the keys mesh genuinely with lower voicings in the bow.

Between these modern ores lies the polished gemstone that is Robert Schumann’s Sonata No. 1 in A minor, op. 105, of 1851. In its flowering opening movement, the violin’s G string resounds like an alto in the forest. In the Gazzanas’ hands, it feels as natural as sunrise. Although formally divided into three movements, the central one being the most searching in its cautious approach, it finds resolution in the recession of its character. The folk-like qualities of its final act are a testament to the inner struggle of a composer wanting to look to the soil without having to trip over those buried therein.

Finishing out the program is the Sonata No. 3 in C minor, op. 45 (1887) by Edvard Grieg. For this rendering, they default to the composer’s own copy, which differs from the first published edition. The differences accentuate the Norwegian character, drawn by flowing brushwork and sometimes-gnarled textures. If the first movement is a robust ode to origins, then the second, marked “Allegretto espressivo alla Romanza,” is a contemplative gush of loving kindness. Moving in slow motion, it calms us before the storm of the final dance revels in a palette’s worth of colors. The Gazzanas masterfully navigate every twist and turn in this lush and yielding landscape. At once songlike and exuberant, they allow every glint of meaning to shine through to the rousing end.