Classical

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.

András Schiff: J. S. Bach – Clavichord (ECM New Series 2635/36)

| Tyran Grillo

András Schiff
J. S. Bach: Clavichord

András Schiff clavichord
Recorded July 2018
Kammermusikssaal H. J. Abs,
Beethoven-Haus, Bonn
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Cover photo: Jan Jedlička
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: January 27, 2023

“When I’m at home, my day always begins with Bach. It used to be on the piano, now it’s on the clavichord, even before breakfast. After a few of the Inventions I feel reborn. My ears, my mind, soul and spirit are cleansed.”

Few keyboardic constructions feel as tangible as the clavichord. If only for that reason, it takes getting used to. Yet if you are willing to meet it on its own terms, its internal resonances and breadth of character soon become apparent. As the go-to of Johann Sebastian Bach, it deserves a spotlight in this music—not only for its sound but also for its spirit. For while its intimacy is a given (allowing as it did the luxury of private interpretation for both composers and enthusiasts), and its history and Bach’s relationship to it are well documented, there’s something about letting it sing for itself, and I can think of few hands more capable of doing just that than those of pianist András Schiff, whose humble admission crowns this review.
 
The six-part Capriccio sopra la lontananza del fratello dilettissimo (Capriccio on the departure of a beloved brother) is a delightful inauguration to the instrument’s flavor. Though lesser known than the Inventions and Sinfonias (a.k.a., the Two- and Three-Part Inventions, split between this album’s two discs), they speak nakedly and with the programmatic lucidity required of them. The bigger, canonical collection after them dons new garments (if not sheds old ones) in the present recording. Knowing that Bach likely intended them for the clavichord gives us a renewed understanding of their provenance. The faster movements (cf. Invention No. 4 in d minor, Sinfonia No. 15 in b minor) sparkle, while the slower ones (cf. Invention No. 2 in c minor, Sinfonia No. 4 in d minor) feel more robust than ever. The middle realm (cf. Invention No. 15 in b minor, Sinfonia No. 11 in g minor) gives us the best of both worlds. Such is the magic of the clavichord: Despite its slimmer character and build, it holds its own and then some in a basket woven of lower pitch (a’ = 404 Hz). One highlight in this regard is the lutelike Sinfonia No. 9 in f minor, which walks up a flight of stairs, making the pull of gravity palpable.
 
Between these are the Four Duets (of which No. 3 in G major is especially wholesome) and the Ricercar à 3 from Das Musikalische Opfere, which, along with the concluding Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, is the biggest revelation herein. Whereas the orchestral sensibilities in one are still very much alive, albeit refracted and distilled, the other shows the subtlety of the “Bebung” technique, whereby the performer adds vibrato with vertical pressure of the fingertip. Thus, these pieces’ complexities become more apparent because they cannot hide within the piano’s cavernous architecture. The fugue is a wonder. Feet to ground, it knows where it stands and how to take joy in the life it has been freely given.

Anna Gourari: Paul Hindemith/Alfred Schnittke (ECM 2752 NS)

| Tyran Grillo

Anna Gourari
Paul Hindemith/Alfred Schnittke

Anna Gourari piano
Orchestra della Svizzera italiana
Markus Poschner conductor
Recorded December 2021, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Wolfgang Müller (RSI)
Mixed January 2023 by Wolfgang Müller and Manfred Eicher
Cover photo: Fotini Potamia
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: June 14, 2024

Since making her ECM debut with Canto Oscuro in 2012, Tatarstan-born pianist Anna Gourari has tread a distinct path. On that and two subsequent solo recitals, the breadth of her vision as a musician is matched only by her choice of repertoire, spanning the gamut from Bach and Chopin to Medtner and Kancheli. For the present program, she gives deference to two beacons whose light has often shined at her fingertips.

The Composers

In this program notes, Roman Brotbeck describes Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) as a listener above all. As “one of the most idiosyncratic and enigmatic composers of the 20th century,” he was a resolute soul who didn’t so much search for sounds that were new but rather expressive of a higher power. In addition to his symphonies, choral works, and various configurations for orchestras and soloists, he wrote prolifically for film, seesawing throughout his life between his German roots and Russian upbringing, all the while examining a deepening Orthodox faith. As well versed in idioms as he was in subverting them, he operated like a linguist parsing morphemes to explore how they might be connected across seemingly insurmountable barriers of genre, style, and historicity. From his early days at the Moscow Conservatory to his later years in Hamburg, Germany, he was as much a polyglot as a polystylist who organically defied categorization.

“The reactions music evokes are not feelings, but they are the images, memories of feelings.” So wrote Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) in his 1952 collection of lectures, A Composer’s World. Like Schnittke, music was a field where he planted two sacred ideas for every secular. He was also a concert violinist/violist, an author, and a committed teacher. His composing was as much a reflection of extroversion as his daily life was of privacy. After studying at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, he served in the Imperial German Army, diving headlong into composing upon his return to civilian life. Fleeing the scourge of Nazism, he founded the Ankara State Conservatory at the behest of the Turkish government, thereafter arriving in America in 1940, where he taught at Yale and Cornell, among other institutions of higher learning, before living out the rest of his life in Switzerland and his native Germany. Throughout his steadfast career, he explored the tonal landscape with fortitude and creative boldness. He also greatly influenced the young Schnittke, whose side of the Venn diagram overlaps Hindemith’s by 29 years.

The Music

Schnittke’s Concerto for Piano and Strings (1979) has a special place in my heart. As a teenager, I discovered his music through the BIS recording label. This piece was featured on my favorite of the series (CD-377), where it was paired with the Concerto Grosso I of 1977 and the Concerto for Oboe, Harp, and String Orchestra of 1971. It wasn’t long before I learned of his death via my local classical radio station.

The opening piano of this gargantuan piece is an exercise not in contrasts but in constructs; the gentle stirrings morphing into giant broken triads and the ethereal entrance of strings are as cohesive as they are episodic. Over 23 minutes, this mashup of, in the composer’s words, “surrealistic shreds of sunrise from orthodox church music” and “a false burst of Prokofievian energy and a blues nightmare” succeeds with an uncanny beauty. As the orchestra attempts to engulf the piano in an almost Purcell-like wave of drama, the struggle feels as real as rain. In the end, the B-A-C-H motif emerges like a blush of red across bare skin, a comet frozen in time, a scar where the light of God shows through.

During the second half of his composing career, Hindemith became firmly entrenched in robust harmonic structures that overshadowed the expressionism of his youth even as they drew from it. In response to Hitler’s growing shadow, he wrote his opera, Mathis der Maler, in which the titular protagonist, Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald, sought refuge in his art from the German Peasants’ War of 1524-25. During that period, Grünewald painted the Isenheim Altarpiece in Colmar, and it was this Hindemith expressed in musical form in this symphonic distillation from 1934. First is the “Angel Concert,” which takes the medieval song “Es sungen drei Engel” (Three angels were singing”) as its central motif. Its tripartite structure is just one echo of the Trinity. Like Schnittke’s own angelic concert, the music is richly varied yet utterly cohesive, if more accessible to lay ears. Next is the “Grablegung” (Entombment), which depicts the mother Mary, Mary Magdalene, and the apostle John mourning the death of their Savior. But that darkness is short-lived as the glory of Christ’s resurrection crashes into the foreground. Lastly, the “Versuchung des heiligen Antonius” (Temptation of Saint Anthony) nestles the patron saint from Padua (and contemporary of St. Francis) in a gaggle of monstrous creatures. Dissonance makes itself known, rendering the marching valiance of its unfolding all the more powerful. Brotbeck notes the significance of this movement’s subtitle (“Where were you, good Jesus, where were you? Why were you not there to heal my wounds?”) as painted into Grünewald’s portrait of Antonius: “Hindemith’s reference to this exclamation shows the autobiographical aspect of the symphony, as Antonius, who withdraws from society and is exposed to satanic temptations as a desert hermit, also reflects Hindemith’s personal situation in Nazi Germany.” Said temptations play out with churning drama.

After fleeing to the US, Hindemith came to write his ballet score, The Four Temperaments, in 1940 for George Balanchine. However, this theme and variations for piano and string orchestra never received its intended premiere, as the sinking of the Hood of Britain by the Bismarck of Germany cast a pall over composers of the latter persuasion. Nevertheless, we find another space in which politics seems even farther away. Here, we encounter a more metaphysical realm. Whereas the first variation flirts with melancholy and the fourth with jagged relief, the constellations between them blend concerto-like impulses with sonata-esque spirit. Duos, trios, and other combinations abound, each reaching for something familiar.

The Performers

Gourari approaches Schnittke with incredible drive and reflection. In a particularly dramatic middle section, she digs into the piano’s most nutrient-rich dirt, finding equilibrium even amid the drunken sway of violins struggling to maintain their own. She treats the instrument as an extension of herself, ever searching for a means to speak through its many intermediary mechanisms. From jazzy slurs to neoclassical aphorisms, medieval chants to postmodern geographies, she navigates it all with a compass that adapts to every shift of current.

The Orchestra della Svizzera italiana and conductor Markus Poschner work through the fleshly struggles of Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler with appropriate tension. They take stock of flesh and spirit equally, treating them as substances to render the compositional impulse as clay in the potter’s hands. There is a sense of having been somewhere tragic, carrying fragments of some tattered book or relic on the way to a church down to its last candle.

The Four Temperaments combines all of the above. In the second movement (first variation), Robert Kowalski’s solo violin lends a sense of mournful whimsy. Gourari is deeply in character throughout. The orchestra doesn’t act as a massive unit for which the piano is a mere decoration or accompaniment. Rather, it serves as a wellspring of material inspirations from which every key may be gathered.

Delian Quartett/Claudia Barainsky: In wachen Traume (ECM New Series 2743)

| Tyran Grillo

Delian Quartett
Claudia Barainsky
In wachen Traume

Claudia Barainsky soprano
Adrian Pinzaru violin
Andreas Moscho violin
Lara Albesano viola
Hendrik Blumenroth violoncello
Mikhail Timoshenko baritone
Matthias Lingenfelder second viola
Andreas Arndt second violoncello
Recorded October 2021, Abtei Marienmünster, Konzertsaal
Engineer: Friedrich Wilhelm Rödding
Cover photo: Woong Chul An
Album produced by Guido Gorna
Release date: June 21, 2024

Im wachen Traume tells an old story in new terms. The title (“In a waking dream”) references Frauenliebe und Leben, op. 42, by Robert Schumann (1810-1856), whose eight-part song cycle serves as the program’s centerpiece. This setting of eight poems by Adelbert von Chamisso (1781-1838) about a woman’s tragic fate is arranged for soprano and string quartet by late composer Aribert Reimann (1936-2024) for those performing it here—another clue to the album’s name. In 2018, while drifting off to sleep, Reimann heard the song cycle in his head with a string quartet instead of a piano. Unable to relinquish the idea, he completed the present version in under two months.

In his liner notes, violinist Andreas Moscho describes a dual theme of love and death. “None of the works selected here,” he observes, “were originally conceived for string quartet. In all of them, however, the string quartet seems to return home.” Reimann enhances the score with careful yet natural adornments, rendered telepathically by the Delian Quartett and soprano Claudia Barainsky. “Helft mir, ihr Schwestern” (Help me, my sisters) and “Süßer Freund, du blickest” (Sweet friend, you look) lend themselves so organically to the format that one can hardly imagine them any other way. Highlights include the chordal exchanges and trembling cello of “Er, der Herrlichste von allen” (He, the most wonderful of all), the pizzicato accents of “Ich kann’s nicht fassen, nicht glauben” (I cannot grasp it, believe it), and the glassy harmonics of “An meinem Herzen, an meiner Brust” (On my heart, at my breast). Barainsky emotes with a seasoned charm that feels utterly genuine. She is an embodied vocalist who understands that texts must be first spoken to be sung.

The one poem not included by Schumann is Chamisso’s ninth, “Traum der eignen Tage” (Dream of my own days), in which the wisdom of old age is offered as a gift to one whose life still lies ahead. Perhaps no more fitting connection could be made to the works by William Byrd (c. 1543-1623) and Henry Purcell (1659-1695) pillowing this Schumannic gem. While these luminaries of Renaissance and Baroque eras might seem unlikely companions, one can hardly deny that the Venn diagram of their shared interest in worldly things makes their spiritual complements stand out all the more.

As the music of Byrd, in arrangements by Stefano Pierini, demonstrates, this dichotomy is crucial. Diametric vignettes like “Sing joyfully” and “Ave verum corpus” are proof positive of the Delians’ uncanny sympathy, while “Jhon come kisse me now” (a bawdy lyric reconstructed from Byrd’s own harpsichord variations) drips with honey from Barainsky’s lips. Meanwhile, the latter’s rendering of “Out of the orient, crystal skies” shines in its telling of the nativity, while the strings evoke the humility of the manger. In the tender “Lullaby, my sweet little baby,” Barainsky is joined by baritone Mikhail Timoshenko to rebuke King Herod’s tragic decree (represented in vocalise) from the point of view of the Virgin Mary.

The two singers join forces further back in time for Purcell’s “Hear my prayer, O Lord.” With Matthias Lingenfelder and Andreas Arndt seconding on viola and cello, respectively, they create a wordless but no less ecclesiastical sense of grandeur. Preceding them are the Pavane and Chaconne, both in G minor, each an interlocking canvas of pastel and charcoal, and between them, “When I am laid in earth” from the opera Dido and Aeneas (also arranged by Pierini). Barainsky lays bare her respect for the tragedy, nevertheless finding beauty in it. And is that not how we survive?

Heinz Holliger/Anton Kernjak: Éventail (ECM New Series 2694)

| Tyran Grillo

Heinz Holliger
Anton Kernjak
Éventail

Heinz Holliger oboe, oboe d’amore
Anton Kernjak piano
Alice Belugou harp
Recorded October 2021 at Radiostudio Zürich
Engineer: Andreas Werner
Cover: Fidel Sclavo
Co-production ECM Records / Radio SRF 2 Kultur
Release date: September 22, 2023

Dear dreamer, help me to take off
Into my pathless, pure delight
By always holding in your glove
My wing, a thin pretence of flight.

The vocalise is a form that, by modern definition, refers to a singing exercise focusing on melody over meaning. If it begs the need for words, it is only because we are accustomed to the notion that songs require them. In this instrumental program, oboist Heinz Holliger deconstructs the concept and reassembles it with apocryphal gems and other building materials from the 20th century. Pianist Anton Kernjak (last heard on Holliger’s Aschenmusik) leads as much as he follows in their co-search for lyrical forms.

It is Kernjak who introduces us to a forest of snow-covered trees in Maurice Ravel’s Pièce en forme de Habanera (1907). Holliger’s oboe is the wanderer who sings only when no one else is around, leaving behind a trail of crumbs not to be found but in the hopes they will bear fruit come spring. Thus, we are shown a way forward. The Sonate op. 166 (1921) of Camille Saint-Saëns, one of his last pieces, cuts across the grain of Romanticism with blades of light. From measured frolic to a march across time, it might just be his truer swan song.

A freshness as of twilight brushes
Against you as you flutter me,
And each imprisoned wing-beat pushes
Back the horizon tenderly.

From André Jolivet, who Holliger cites as the genuine successor to Edgar Varèse, we get the mysterious Controversia (1968). Originally dedicated to Heinz and Ursula Holliger, it replaces the latter with Alice Belugou on the harp. The relationship between the two instruments is one of tension without release. The oboe trembles, and the harp writhes, their dance a language unto itself. Belugou’s harmonics point toward points of starlight, while the double reed takes solace in tracing them for want of images. Holliger’s tone is unparalleled; his window racks but never shatters, offering a kaleidoscopic point of view.

It’s dizzying: shivers run through space
Like an enormous kiss, which, mad
At being born for no one’s face,
Can not discharge, nor yet subside.

The Vocalise-Étude (1935) of Olivier Messiaen offers yet another perspective. Holliger once played it in the composer’s presence while rehearsing for a performance of Des canyons aux étoiles he was to conduct. As the story goes, Messiaen’s enthusiasm led him to include it in the Concert à quatre, dedicated to Holliger, Yvonne Loriot, Catherine Cantin, Myung-Whun Chung, and Mstislav Rostropovich. As magical as it is brief, it breathes alongside the Morceau de lecture(1942), an etude for the oboe sight-reading exam at the Conservatoire National de Paris later expanded upon in the song cycle Harawi (“L’Amour de Piroutcha”).

Ravel’s Kaddisch (1914), from Deux mélodies hébraïques, sets the Jewish prayer for the dead. Although it wears a shawl to cover the eyes and mouth, it grasps delicately at light. Its companion is the Vocalise-Étude «Air» op. 105. Written in 1928 by Darius Milhaud, a student of Charles Koechlin, it is a veritable haiku.

Don’t you feel heaven is shy? It slips,
Blushing, a piece of laughter stifled,
Down by the corner of your lips
To hide in my concerted fold.

Syrinx (1913) by Claude Debussy takes on a new guise here. Originally a flute solo, it no longer feels “incidental” (as it was originally played off stage as an interval to a stage production) and dances on its own terms. Holliger chooses the oboe d’amore for this interpretation, as he also does for Koechlin’s Le repos de Tityre op. 216/10 (1948). If one is bone, the other is flesh. Following this dyad are further vignettes by Jolivet, Debussy, and Saint-Saëns, whose Le rossignol (1892)—quoted in the second movement of the late oboe sonata heard earlier—carves its own vessel.

This sceptre rules the banks of rose
And pools of evening’s golden mire,
This flying whiteness that you close
And land beside a bracelet’s fire.

Holliger and Kernjak save the best for last in the Sonate op. 23 (1936) of Robert Casadesus. Better known as a pianist, he remains lesser known as the fairly prolific torch bearer of Fauré and Ravel that he was. As Holliger recounts in the liner notes, he received this hidden treasure in autograph copy form from his teacher, Émile Cassagnaud. Though now in print, it is rarely performed. The piano writing alone is astounding. Airy in feel yet overflowing with imagery, it leans into jazz without ever losing its footing. From the cinematic middle movement to the rousing Allegro vivo that finishes, one cannot help but feel a new emotional horizon being drawn.

Incidentally, the album’s title comes from the poem “Another Fan” (Autre Éventail) by Stéphane Mallarmé, interspersed throughout this review. Like the spines that give the object its shape, these carefully chosen pieces allow the musicians to stretch their projection screens, each the first frame of a biography yet to be told.

Paul Giger: ars moriendi (ECM New Series 2756)

| Tyran Grillo

Paul Giger
ars moriendi

Paul Giger violin, violino d’amore
Marie-Louise Dähler harpsichord, chest organ
Pudi Lehmann gongs, percussion
Franz Vitzthum alto
Carmina Quartett
Matthias Enderle violin
Susanne Frank violin
Wendy Champney viola
Stephan Goerner violoncello
Recorded January 2015
Chiesa Bianca, Maloja
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Guggisberglied was recorded 2021 in Walenstadt
Cover photo: Jan Kricke
An ECM Production
Release date: August 26, 2022

The music of Paul Giger became a part of my blood when I first encountered 1989’s Chartres. Not since J. S. Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas had I understood just how architecturally robust the violin could be, to say little of 1993’s Schattenwelt, which introduced his violino d’amore, a custom instrument with five main and six sympathetic strings. If those early albums were temples of the spirit, then ars moriendi is a waystation of the flesh—if not vice versa. The ambiguity of such distinctions gives the album a timeless charge. Across the pages of its cavernous imaginings, Giger writes a real-time scripture of inspiration, building on echoes of lives before and since.

His mythologically tinged Guggisberglied, reinterpreting a popular Swiss folk song of unrequited love and the life one gives up in its name, follows a tracking shot of the human form, shifting in varying degrees of inevitability between innocence and decay. Cradled by the hush of flowing water, what we once saw as shadows are now the shadows of shadows. Such subtlety of framing and placement of subjects is possible only in one whose mind works as a camera. Giger looks within from without, the tones of other cultures beating his drum. The violin body is a percussive force, a multitracked orchestra of emotional instruments. Giger also plucks the lower strings in qanun fashion. Currents of molecular awareness caress the riverbank, praying for a peaceful transition into lifelessness.

The latter sentiment connects to the overarching title. “In the late Middle Ages,” explains Giger in a liner note, “a literary genre of devotional books illustrated with woodcuts flourished under the name ‘ars moriendi.’ They gave instructions on how to ‘die well.’ The purpose of this tradition was to attune the soul to the ‘art of dying’ in order to save it for eternity. Music is also an ars moriendi, an exercise in the ‘becoming’ of a note, of ‘being’ in sound and of ‘passing’ into silence—or into an inner reverberation.” These concepts refer to a triptych of Tyrolean painter Giovanni Segantini, subject of the eponymous documentary by Christian Labhart, for which Giger wrote the music. Selections from that soundtrack take up much of the present album, including three stages of Agony. In the company of percussionist Pudi Lehmann (gongs, singing bowls, frame drum, and conch shell), keyboardist Marie-Louise Dähler (harpsichord and chest organ), and the Carmina Quartett, he builds a tower of wonder one layer of stone at a time until time itself is suspended. As ice dissolves into water and further into steam, the violino d’amore opens light to reveal its individual colors, loosening the bonds of the material within the immaterial through the inherent art of refraction. Zäuerli mit Migrationshintergrund is rooted in the Swiss yodel, harking to 1991’s Alpstein, albeit in far subtler clothing.

Transcriptions of Bach carry over from the film, including two for violin and harpsichord (the choral prelude “Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ” and the Largo from the Sonata No. 4 in c minor), angling the mirror of our lives into a cell of collective memory where melodies play on repeat. There is also “Erbarme dich” from the St. Matthew Passion, as sung by alto Franz Vitzthum in a breathtaking arrangement for violin, chest organ, and strings. Vitzthum’s beauties culminate in Giger’s Altus solo II, stitching ground to sky with threads of silver. In the harpsichord’s tactile light, a mournful catharsis takes shape. Like M. C. Escher’s Rind, it suggests a face. Whether forming, unraveling, or holding its own against a patchwork of clouds, its eyes remain fixed on memory.

Mieczysław Weinberg: Sonatas for Violin Solo (ECM New Series 2705)

| Tyran Grillo

Gidon Kremer
Mieczysław Weinberg: Sonatas for Violin Solo

Gidon Kremer violin
Sonatas Nos. 1 and 2
recorded December 2019
at Studio Residence Paliesius, Lithuania
Engineers: Vilius Keras and Aleksandra Kerienė
Sonata No. 3 recorded July 2013
at Lockenhaus Kammermusikfestival
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Cover photo: Max Franosch
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher

When Polish composer Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996) fled his homeland to escape the Nazis in the early stages of World War II, little could he have known the fate that would befall those left behind. It was Dmitri Shostakovich who eased his way into Russia, where the Stalinist regime would surely have killed him again had not the despotic leader died a month after Weinberg’s arrest for “Jewish bourgeois nationalism” in 1953. With more than a decade separating those events and his composing of the three solo violin sonatas recorded here, by which time his entire family had long perished in the concentration camps, there was yet room in his battered heart to amplify the need for humanity.

Violinist Gidon Kremer, who has championed Weinberg’s music on two previous discs with his Kremerata Baltica, offers the present program in reverse chronological order, starting with the Sonata No. 3, op. 126 (1979). Dedicated to his father and ostensibly taking form as a single movement, it is marked by borders that, like those in his life, were blessedly surmountable. It sharpens its blade of experience, forged in the fire of history, across stone-hard double stops before carving its way delicately through softer actions, snaking high lines, and bruised leitmotifs. Kremer navigates every chamber as if it belonged in his home, describing the furniture, curtain, and artwork hanging on the wall down to the last detail.

The concentrated sections of the Sonata No. 2, op. 95 (1967) take on descriptive titles. “Monody” digs up bare bones, while “Rests” shines a light on Weinberg’s brilliant personality. From “Intervals” to “Replies,” we see other sides of his visage—in the former, an angular nose; in the latter, a hair that refuses to stay combed. “Accompaniment” switches acrobatically from pizzicato to programmatic upswings as a magician might shuffle cards. “Invocation” cries for salvation, leaving only “Syncopes” to cut its jagged figure into the air with tactile dissonances.

Last is what came first: the Sonata No. 1, op. 82 (1964). There is a sad ebullience to its opening movement, characterized by alarming calls to action, which then turn on a dime into Bartókian flavors. The Andante is its dark side, churning as sediment in a river, slowed to the pace of a careful hunter. From there, the pointillism of a rotating Allegretto adds more stars to this sky, constellated by pliant bow work. After a multifaceted fourth movement, the final Presto recalls Bartók once again in its soil-scented urgency. Scratching motifs, strummed strings, and insistent harmonies pull each other in many directions, never straying from their handling. They know where they are going, even when everyone else around them is lost or falls behind.

As incredible as these pieces are, they are by no means “pleasant” to listen to. If anything, they listen to us, placing a stethoscope on our collective chest to amplify events we would rather ignore. If Bach’s solo violin works are of heavenly height, then Weinberg’s walk the valley of the shadow of death between them.

Michael Mantler: Coda (ECM 2697)

| Tyran Grillo

Michael Mantler
Coda

Recorded September 2019
at Porgy & Bess Studio, Vienna, Austria
Engineers: Martin Vetters and Juan José Carpio del Rio
Additional recording, mixing, and mastering
November 2019 and June 2020
at Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineers: Gérard de Haro and Nicolas Baillard
Design: Sascha Kleis
Produced by Michael Mantler
An ECM Production
in collaboration with Porgy & Bess
Release date: July 16, 2021

Coda: a concluding statement, based on elaborations of thematic material from selected past works. So does the booklet for this album of Austrian trumpeter and composer Michael Mantler’s Orchestral Suites define its collective title. In that sense, we might point to its reworking of material from his substantial corpus, including elements of 13 3/4, Alien, Folly Seeing All This, Cerco Un Paese Innocente, Hide and Seek, and For Two. Beyond that, it is an inclusive force that attaches its tendrils to outside influences, carved as much on the surface of the present as of the past. Using his favorite ensemble format of flute, oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, trumpet, French horn, trombone, tuba, guitar, piano, marimba/vibraphone, and a string section (here under the direction of Christoph Cech), he walks self-referencing as a path to evolution.

While Mantler’s music has deeply cinematic skin (going back at least to 1978’s Movies), there’s no denying a dramaturgical heartbeat within. This isn’t just recycling; it’s a psychological reforming of the self. A frenetic yet never overbearing energy pulls a punch in the TwoThirteen Suite. The electric guitar of Bjarne Roupé rises from the strings as a phoenix, while pianist David Helbock stirs the ashes left behind. In the wake of this tempered triumph, the Folly Suite interrupts in mid-sentence, opening into a quieter realm where the trumpet emotes from the ledge of a skyscraper, tracking as many bodies as it can on the streets below until it loses count. Effortlessly gliding from one part of the city to another until only memories of gridlines are left, Mantler is the itinerant planner whose leaves his messages like tickets on the windows of every illegally parked car as a reminder of acoustic order in a digital world. The Alien Suite leaves such quotidian concerns far behind as Roupé and Mantler go extraterrestrial. The flute of Leo Eibensteiner adds a touch of unexamined landscapes over tense strings. The overarching sense is that of an oncoming storm that never arrives.

If the piano in the Cerco Suite is a pile of bones, then the orchestra is the archaeological team putting it back together. The excitement of this discovery veers into a cavern where the oboe of Peter Tavernaro speaks of civilizations drawn into ruin. Whatever voices we might have recovered there are subsumed into the HideSeek Suite. What were once lyrics now become impulses—the physical sensations of the breaths that produced them. As winds and piano hover beneath the heat of the electric guitar, a mature control of tension and release treats the explosive reveals of life as a matter of course.

Mantler has always had a gift for turning melodies into full bodies. More than signatures or calling cards, they hold themselves together in spite of staggered surroundings. Such is the theme of these compressed realities, each a doorway leading to another.

András Schiff: Brahms Piano Concertos (ECM New Series 2690/91)

| Tyran Grillo

András Schiff
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
Johannes Brahms: Piano Concertos

András Schiff piano
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
Recorded December 2019
Abbey Road Studios, London
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Balance engineer: John Barrett
Production coordination: Guido Gorna and Thomas Herr
Cover photo: Péter Nádas
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: June 4, 2021

Following his 2020 release of the Brahms clarinet sonatas with Jörg Widmann, pianist András Schiff continues his exploration of this beloved composer by diving into his formidable piano concertos. With characteristic attention to detail, peeling back layers of artifice to get to the heart of what a score is trying to convey, Schiff seeks appropriate companionship in the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, a period-instrument ensemble that often performs in the absence of a conductor, as it does here. Leading this entourage alongside Schiff is a Julius Blüthner grand piano built in 1859, from which he coaxes an incredible amount of resonance. Thus, he attempts “to recreate and restore the works, to cleanse and ‘detoxify’ the music, to liberate it from the burden of the—often questionable—trademarks of performing traditions.”

It was with Ludwig van Beethoven firmly in mind that Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) wrote his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 1 in d minor, op. 15, even as he tried to step outside the giant’s shadow. Despite its poor initial reception, it has since grown into an experimental full-course spread in the estimation of performers and listeners alike. The opening movement betrays the piece’s transformation from sonata to symphony to concerto, bursting into being with a hit of strings and timpani. Such grandeur, however, is only temporary, as the river’s flow evens out beyond the dam’s reach. When the piano makes its entrance, it dances, carrying with it all the memories it needs to fend for itself in the wilderness. The drama returns only to break the proverbial vessel for a much-needed rebuilding in the Adagio. Brahms marked this movement “Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini” (Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord) in response to the death of Robert Schumann. With unwavering emotional veracity, it shifts from dark to light and back again as unconsciously as breathing. Bringing us out of that pall is a vivacious Rondo leading the final movement’s charge. Schiff emphasizes its improvisational qualities, bringing luminous immediacy to every note.

One might not know that the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 2 in B-flat major, op. 83, is notorious for being one of the most difficult in the repertoire from the pastoral flavor in which it opens. But as the piano’s rubato phrasing proceeds freely over the foundation, pizzicato strings trailing not far behind, the rhythmic complexities become increasingly apparent. The second movement represents some of Brahms’s finest writing. Schiff’s awareness of its textures testifies to his experience and maturity, thus emphasizing the time shift of strings and horns midway through—a resounding call for the future built on the technologies of the past. The wildly inventive third movement (with solo cello lines played by Luise Buchberger) is a lone wolf of expressivity leading us to the momentous Allegretto. The pianism takes striking turns, digging into the lower register before ending on a firmly resolute chord.

Schiff holds these pieces dear to his heart, as should we in being handed the gift of his interpretations.