Contemporary Classical

Listening Through the Body in the Music of Sarah Davachi

| Tyran Grillo

In the music of Sarah Davachi, sound remains suspended beyond the moment of its apparent exhaustion, gathering strange internal populations as its harmonics fracture and quietly reassemble. What initially presents itself as stasis develops a secret grammar of departures, an entire cosmology folded into the infinitesimal distance between two frequencies. The ear, accustomed to locating movement in the passage from one event to another, must relearn the contours of an event whose distances are buried within it. A barely perceptible alteration in pitch opens a wound across the whole duration, exposing the fragile membranes through which consciousness negotiates its relationship with the audible. Each resonance becomes an archaeology of its own disappearance, a spectral excavation of possibilities held captive within the seemingly immovable. One begins to suspect that time possesses no reliable exterior, that every second harbors its own miniature antiquity, and that listening is the delicate violence by which we break into it. Davachi’s compositions inhabit this ontological fissure with extraordinary patience, allowing sound to become estranged from its origins until even the familiar reveals the exquisite foreignness of its existence.

Such music emerges from an imagination profoundly attuned to the afterlives of instruments, particularly their capacity to preserve obsolete understandings of what it means for the world to vibrate. Davachi’s pipe organs carry the accumulated breath of structures designed to give eternity a physical address, while her electronic instruments disclose a more intimate archaeology of voltage and decay. Her engagement with temporarlity subjects the very possibility of consonance to philosophical scrutiny, exposing harmony as a provisional agreement between matter and the cultural imagination. A chord can preserve the memory of an entire system of listening through which earlier ears organized the permissible universe; a single overtone can dismantle that universe without ever raising its voice. Here the Renaissance continues to dream through the nervous system of modernity, and the boundary between the sacred and the mechanical dissolves into a deeper uncertainty about where human intention ends and the secret autobiography of matter begins. Every perception arrives fractionally late to its own happening, already carrying the faint sediment of something irretrievable. Such belatedness gives Davachi’s work its peculiar tenderness, as she asks the ear to become answerable to events that cannot quite be claimed as present.

Recorded in Los Angeles throughout 2020 and released the following year on her Late Music imprint, Antiphonals retreats from the monumental expanses of Cantus, Descant into a more intimate architecture of resonance and remembrance. Entirely composed, performed and produced by Davachi, its eight compositions draw upon the spectral vocabulary of the Mellotron, whose simulated instrumental voices mingle with electric and pipe organs, harpsichord, piano and synthesizer. These instruments seem to speak through one another’s mouths, each timbre trailing an afterimage that cannot be returned to its source. The title evokes the ancient liturgical practice of alternating voices, yet these exchanges unfold within a solitary consciousness, each utterance answering another across the immeasurable distance between sound and its recollection. One hears the same mind assuming the roles of supplicant and sanctuary, of an unseen singer whose throat has been replaced by corridors. The album’s silences acquire the thickness of walls that have absorbed centuries of prayers without ever understanding a word.

The opening “Chorus Scene” puts a rusted harpsichord on the edge of mutability in the night, its brittle articulations attended by electronic tones that soften the undercurrent with their song. The instrument seems to be reading a letter from the future in an alphabet made entirely of hinges. From this uncertain threshold, “Magdalena” touches us with the organ-shaped song of a thought that finds our secrets, working itself into an iron filament pulled through the marrow. As synthesized wonders reveal their light amid the darkness, we are taken into an inner sanctum that cannot be located on any map of the body. The melodies never quite consent to being possessed. They pass through attention in the very act of teaching attention how to receive them, leaving the heart momentarily stained by colors for which vision has devised no name. A more secular beauty enters by way of “Gradual of Image,” whose folkish accessibility makes room for the wandering soul that might reach out for a melody and discover an entire history of touch concealed inside it.

Yet this tenderness has a shadow. In the distorted reaches of “Border of Mind,” the music brings us face to face with our wounded selves, while “Rushes Recede” offers the uncanny sensation of a stained-glass heart cradling hymnody in its blood-bearing chambers. These interiors are neither wholly consoling nor wholly threatening; their beauty consists in refusing to conceal what the light discovers. Elsewhere, the drones of “First Cadence” and “Doubled Flutes” pour illumination at dream speed, stretching the interval between recognition and understanding until the two appear to have been born in different centuries. Even the withheld motion implicit in “Abeyant” suggests a harmony engaged in the delicate work of self-awareness. Underlying this hushed communion is the suspicion that the ear can encounter its deepest interior only by listening to something it cannot identify as its own.

That suspicion undergoes a more concentrated trial in Basse Brevis, co-commissioned by Radio France and INA GRM and premiered at the 2024 Présences festival dedicated to Steve Reich. In this eighteen-minute enmeshment of organ and synthesized voices, Davachi extends her minimalist investigations into the intricate relationships between timbre and duration, letting the gradual evolution of sonic material become an exercise in perceptual displacement. The distinction between instrument and artifact grows porous, gradually erasing the fingerprints of its own manufacture. Between instrumental resonance and musique concrète, abstraction acquires an unexpected tenderness; each tone feels at once exposed and inaccessible, a piece of matter dreaming that it possesses an inward life. The listener is asked to inhabit a structure whose dimensions change only when one stops measuring them, an acoustic building secretly rearranging its egresses around the person standing inside.

Something resembling an uncovering of sin touches the sky with its highest flames. The music conflagrates into the ashen skeletons of our most untoward thoughts, and for a moment we wish to crush them into powder and throw them into the nearest river. Davachi instead refashions these remains into a subtle yet crucial monument to the life we used to live and from which we now deviate in search of something pure and good. The gesture is troubling precisely because the monument refuses to entertain absolution. It preserves our former selves without granting them the privilege of innocence, allowing the listener to experience memory as a material still undergoing its own composition. Formal exploration and emotional immediacy occupy the same perceptual space; one feels the mind approach its deepest disfigurements by way of almost imperceptible changes in resonance. And while the piece seems to end where it started, a global circulation of thought has occurred, slingshotting consciousness backward in order to move on.

The scale of this investigation expands dramatically in The Will of Tongues, which stretches beyond two hours across three LPs. Thirteen compositions probe the boundaries of harmonic perception, gathering five solo works for historical pipe organs recorded across North America and the Netherlands alongside choral writing and microtonal instrumental encounters. An extended chamber work intertwines a string trio with organ and tape, deepening the inquiry. Musicians including Whitney Johnson and Eyvind Kang enter this field of resonances, with Lucy Railton and ensembles such as Chamber Choir Ireland contributing to its intricate human circuitry. Davachi’s enduring interest in tuning theory assumes an almost biological dimension: musical ideas migrate between instrumental bodies, undergoing tiny mutations until their identities can no longer be secured by the material that first carried them.

The first of its dispersed “Interludes” begins with strings whose metallic dissonances hover over fragile harmonies, opening a texture so encompassing that the very distinction between surface and depth seems briefly suspended. Farther along, an answering woodwind meditation restores a more harmonious balance to this cosmos, though its equilibrium never loses the memory of disturbance. When the brass eventually take their turn, their collective breath suggests one larger organism laboring to pronounce a consensus vowel. The movement among these instrumental families produces an antiphony on a scale more bodily than architectural, carrying forward the private exchanges of Antiphonals into a community of resonant flesh. The choral “Songs of the Smile’s Fig” introduce another series of arches, enchantments born of everyday interactions and the small interruptions that arrest us at the fragile edge of life. Their organ ancestry can be heard passing through the human throat, where resonance becomes newly vulnerable to the possibility of breaking. What holds a mirror to the soul here is also capable of cracking it. A voice does not merely occupy a note; it must risk an entire body to keep that note alive.

At the center stands the massive two-part “The Rose Dialogues,” meshing strings and drone with an eye turned on the imperfections of the flesh. Its title opens a botanical wound: thorn enters blood, and the rose begins to resemble an argument between what can be touched and what can only be imagined through touch. The senses negotiate this profound disconnect between the physical body and the metaphysical world by giving us a taste of what lies just beyond their own grasp. The music maintains a delicate interval between corporeal resistance and spiritual appetite, allowing each to reveal the other’s unfinished dimensions. Around this central wound, the organ works pursue their own forms of divided speech. “Canto Solo” and “Canto Duo” undulate at the pace of a tidal shift, in which even one tone can contain the outline of an interlocutor, and even dialogue can disclose the intolerable loneliness of being heard.

Other correspondences develop across the album’s expanse. Separated by the intervening music, “The First Tuning” and “The Second Tuning” appear as windows turned toward each other from different buildings, each illuminating a bright expanse in which the blood drops of the human condition become impossible to ignore. To tune is to admit that there exists a difference between where we are and where we mean to arrive, however minute or unreachable that distance may be. Buried among these proliferating relationships, “Four Narrow Forms” pulls the organ’s breath until it seems to have nothing left to say. Yet this extremity is also strangely generous. The instrument’s apparent depletion exposes the physical effort sustaining what we too readily call eternity, reminding us that even an apparently disembodied resonance depends upon mechanisms that can fail. From this recognition emerges an acoustical codex of hesitation. Listening must remain vulnerable to phenomena too gradual to possess.

Across these works, Davachi stages an encounter between the mortal body and the impossible duration it has invented instruments to imagine. Perhaps the deepest provocation resides in the suggestion that our ears are themselves historical instruments, tuned by choices made before we ever drew breath. Consonance, in this sense, becomes an inherited belief whose laws can be revised by the slightest disobedient overtone. There is tenderness in that possibility, though it carries an ethical question disguised as an acoustic one: Whose future listening are we helping to make possible?

Gidon Kremer/Kremerata Baltica: Pages of a Biography (ECM New Series 2803)

| Tyran Grillo

Gidon Kremer
Kremerata Baltica
Pages of a Biography

Gidon Kremer violin
Geneva Lewis violin
Andrew Pushkarev vibraphone, tubular bell
Kremerata Baltica
Pages of a Biography, Passacaglia, Darf ich…
recorded January 2024
Studio Residence Paliesius, Ignalina
Engineers: Vilius Keras, Aleksandra Kerienė
Kaleidoscope of Lost Time
recorded September 2020
at the Reformation Church, Riga
Recording engineer: Varis Kurmiņš
Cover: Fidel Sclavo
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 30, 2026

Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica continue their long association with ECM’s New Series on Pages of a Biography, a recording in which the violinist’s history passes through the hands of those who have helped to shape it. Georgs Pelēcis and Andrius Žlabys contribute works conceived for Kremer, while Arvo Pärt’s presence reaches back to Tabula Rasa, the 1984 release that inaugurated the imprint. With Kremer approaching his 80th birthday in 2027 and the ensemble its 30th anniversary, the program opens a space in which the commemorative impulse can become strangely permeable. A life told through music acquires entrances its subject could never have built alone. Founded in 1997 to bring young musicians from the Baltic states into a shared artistic undertaking, Kremerata Baltica gives this understanding a collective body.

Pärt’s Passacaglia, heard in the orchestral version prepared in 2007 for Kremer’s 60th birthday, establishes this relationship through the simplest of circular motions. Kremer and Geneva Lewis draw their violin harmonies over the strings with a delicacy whose slightly abraded edges give the music a spirited skin. Andrei Pushkarev’s vibraphone places metallic footprints across a frozen lake, each tone opening a small chamber of depth beneath the surface. There is something almost Vivaldian in the suppleness of the textures, though the lower strings carry a dramatic undertow that gathers its force slowly. Pizzicato figures bring that development inward, registering as minute disturbances in the body’s private machinery. Above them, the violin lines entwine and separate with an ease that leaves room for friction. The recurring harmonic pattern gives each change a place to return to, even as its emotional coordinates shift. Within the circle, belief is allowed to wander; repetition discovers the difference between coming back to a place and becoming available to it.

Pelēcis’s title concerto, written for Kremer in 2007, gives that wandering a more personal geography. Their friendship began during their school years in Riga and continued in the shared quarters of the Moscow Conservatory, where Pelēcis witnessed the preparation through which public achievements slowly acquired their private framework. His score draws on the violin concertos that became decisive points in Kremer’s early career. Brahms and Elgar enter alongside recollections of competition performances; Sibelius and Beethoven provide further points of contact with the interpreter’s developing identity. Yet the quotations remain answerable to the person who once lived inside them. Set among more dramatic episodes, they emerge from the uncertain border between musical inheritance and remembered experience. Pelēcis’s description of the solo monologues as “intimate pages from a personal diary” becomes especially telling here. The diary has been written by someone else, and its subject must read himself into being through a voice that already knows him.

The opening solo feels its way into this territory with the vulnerability of childhood. Kremer gives the line an existence prior to explanation, finding in its exposed grain the authority of something alive. Buoyant orchestral gestures begin to court it, and their exchanges admit dissonance at the margins. Pelēcis lets passages of flowing beauty encounter the abrupt editing cuts of recall, as the pastoral turns its pockets inside out, spilling dark coins into the grass. Throughout the piece’s nearly thirty uninterrupted minutes, the violin speaks from within that complexity, drawing the insistent rhythms of the strings into its own work of discovery. Kremerata Baltica responds with an alertness that gives the broader episodes their cinematic scope while preserving the intimacy of the solo voice. The relationship between them becomes a sustained act of thinking in sound, capable of admitting doubt without surrendering its momentum. Near the close, the vibraphone distils the preceding expansiveness into a peculiarly bare utterance. The violin threads itself through that resonance, a silver filament drawn from a sentence whose meaning has become too familiar for speech.

With Žlabys’s Kaleidoscope of Lost Time, composed between 2014 and 2020 for Kremer and his ensemble, that inward scrutiny enters a more fractured consciousness. The composer envisioned Kremer’s sound in his earliest sketches, and the violin writing carries the imprint of a particular touch even at its most abstract. Žlabys speaks of giving the sensation of time’s disappearance a more durable form through music, so that beauty and sadness can be visited again. Across the work’s five movements, such revisitation becomes a problem of perception: every return alters the eye through which the past is apprehended. The opening Prelude sets this process in motion through dramatic undulations, its folk inflections carrying something dreamt into the firmness of the pulse. The dance occasionally appears to have misplaced its dancers, leaving their gestures suspended in the strings. Kremer inhabits those absences with a searching intensity, giving the music’s surreal spaces enough physical resistance to be felt. Time acquires joints here, and we hear the strain of their bending.

Scherzacaglia carries its mixed ancestry in its name, inviting musical forms to loosen their claims to separate identities. Along the way, neoclassical poise meets a rhythmic insistence suggestive of Shostakovich. Dissonant hymnody opens fissures in the devotional surface. The performers give each shift a distinct pressure, sustaining the sense of movement through different states as Dissonance gives way to Quarter=87. In Perpetuum, the violin’s flowing beauty opens an expanse so luminous that earlier agitations seem briefly to have been cast by its light. The double basses stir beneath that radiance, pulling its apparent weightlessness toward the body, until the opening dance reenters with the altered gravity of something that has survived its own telling. Žlabys makes this return both irresistible and disturbing.

Pärt’s Darf ich … (1999) gathers these questions into a more intimate register, with Lewis taking the solo violin part beside Pushkarev’s tubular bell in C sharp. The violin has a declamatory force that feels inseparable from its prayerfulness: its address is bold because the act of addressing remains vulnerable. Against the strings, the bell gives that vulnerability a vertical dimension, opening a heavenward passage through the music’s spare physical means. A requiem appears to have been dismantled and its fragments reassembled as a psalm, the weight of mourning redistributed through the possibility of praise. Kremer calls the work “almost a prayer,” understanding it as a reminder that musicians serve a cause beyond themselves. Lewis gives that conviction a voice of her own, making the album’s generational relationship audible in the place where it becomes most exposed. Her final high note is exquisitely breathy, a slender fold in the air holding open the title’s unfinished question. Permission itself acquires a barely material form.

That question quietly rearranges the premises of a recording devoted to one musician’s life. On an album named for Kremer’s biography, the closing solo belongs to another person, and his history finds one of its deepest expressions in her freedom to speak. The friendship encoded in Pelēcis’s concerto and the evanescence Žlabys seeks to preserve have brought us to an ethic of hospitality. Whatever these relationships transmit may become unrecognizable to the giver. Biography begins to touch the obscure responsibilities of parenthood, where a future is nurtured without its face being prescribed. Somewhere an eyelid is forming in darkness, protecting a gaze the past cannot rehearse. To have lived well may be to have made room for that gaze, including everything in it that will never turn toward us.

Kali Malone: Living Torch

| Tyran Grillo

To sustain a flame is to enter into a secret negotiation with extinction, to nourish an illumination whose very existence depends upon its gradual disappearance. In Living Torch, Kali Malone transforms this paradox into an almost unbearable metaphysics of resonance, wherein sound becomes both the vessel and the slow dissolution of its own materiality. Duration wavers between breath and electricity, harmonic inevitability and spectral disobedience. Each sustained tone carries the sediment of another, opening subterranean chambers where the ear must renegotiate its relationship to time. The austere architectures that have distinguished Malone’s compositional language, particularly her excavations of the pipe organ’s interior life, undergo a profound transfiguration. Something once seemingly immovable begins to tremble at the edges of its formal certainty, exposing a vulnerability concealed beneath the mathematics of repetition. Perhaps a structure reveals its deepest truth precisely when it can no longer guarantee its foundations.

Composed between 2020 and 2021 at the Parisian studios of Groupe de Recherches Musicales, that storied laboratory of electroacoustic experimentation, Living Torch extends Malone’s investigation of just intonation and canonic structures into a labyrinth of timbral interdependencies. The trombone of Mats Äleklint and bass clarinet of Isak Hedtjärn merge with Malone’s electronic apparatus, including the boîte à bourdons and an ARP 2500 synthesizer bearing the historical imprint of Éliane Radigue. Commissioned for GRM’s Acousmonium loudspeaker orchestra and premiered in its complete multichannel incarnation at Radio France, the piece treats space as an active participant in the reallocation of acoustic identity. The devotional patience of early music encounters the temporal dislocations of American minimalism, their intertwined genealogies refracted through the material consciousness of musique concrète. Within the sounding body, counterpoint undergoes a molecular reimagining. What survives of the canon is the eerie persistence of one vibration inside another, an inheritance speaking long after its source becomes unrecognizable.

In the first of the work’s two parts, the drone establishes itself as a compass of the heart, spinning in slow motion without ever securing a magnetic north. Its apparent stability is beset by minute discrepancies of pitch, the delicate interference of neighboring frequencies producing pulses that seem to originate beneath the audible surface. Just intonation, far from presenting a frictionless ideal of consonance, exposes the intimate volatility of consonance itself. One tone approaches another and the air thickens with consequences, while an apparently singular presence separates into competing interiors. Äleklint’s trombone contributes a corporeal grain that the electronics can prolong but never entirely domesticate. Hedtjärn’s bass clarinet emerges with a darker, more secretive pressure, its breath inhabiting the lowest registers with a kind of reluctant articulation. Their sonorities fuse with the circuitry, until the roughness of an attack or the instability of an exhalation discloses the laboring organism within. The human respiratory impulse is absorbed into an electrical continuum that nevertheless remains haunted by the possibility of suffocation.

The feeling of this music is intensely circular, caught in a bewildering simultaneity of waking and falling asleep. The internal drone wanders in search of a new body, only to discover the contours of the one it was desperate to leave, returning to the sadnesses that prompted its excursion. Malone’s long tones refuse the consolations of a conventional crescendo. Their concentration arises through microscopic redistributions of anxiety, through harmonic overtones that slip into audibility and retreat. Because the ear cannot settle upon a definitive foreground, listening assumes the uneasy condition of remembering something that has yet to become real. It is the opposite of déjà vu and is where the piece’s canonic intelligence becomes emotionally devastating. The music becomes an apparatus of selfhood, reforming its contours to prevent the body from disappearing while exhausting the impulse that keeps it alive.

By the second part, this inward circuitry has acquired a more troubled permeability. A sensation of distance enters the sound, suggesting wings gathering an impossible momentum. The instrumental voices seem to strain toward the edges of their registers, rubbing against the drones until the distinction between a breath drawn and a current sustained becomes increasingly tenuous. Low frequencies retain their gravitational authority, but their mass is traversed by finer disturbances, spectral fissures through which an unfamiliar dimension of the composition appears to glance. There is an undercurrent of despair in these migrations, although the music never permits despair the luxury of a settled identity. Each departure produces another return, subtly altering the place to which it leads. The two parts consequently establish a peculiar dramaturgy of circular motion, in which repetition does not close a circuit so much as deepen the wound around which the circuit has been drawn.

At moments, the atmosphere and trembling recall Darrin Verhagen’s Witch trilogy, whose sonic immersions can feel indistinguishable from visitations to the psyche’s hidden territories. Malone, however, moves according to the flickering logic of her own distinct flame. Where terror might be summoned by the arrival of an alien presence, Living Torch locates its deepest unease in the possibility that the foreign has always resided within the familiar. Its resonances move across the threshold where language ceases its habitual tug and asks the body to relearn the grammar of flight. Breath becomes an increasingly abstract measure of being, until the stillness of death seems momentarily audible inside the effort required to remain alive. The music’s spiritual force resides in this refusal to separate transcendence from its physiological cost.

What remains most unsettling is the ethical question concealed inside this choreography of persistence. A flame survives by consuming its own substance; a tone endures only through the continual expenditure of energy. Perhaps the self, too, is sustained through an unacknowledged succession of disappearances, each present tense quietly burning the person who made it possible. Between frequencies, identity ceases to be a possession and becomes a debt toward all the selves we have already extinguished. The torch illuminates no destination. It passes, instead, from one vanishing custodian to another, and the most difficult act of listening may be to recognize, among its vibrations, the unburied voices of those we had to become in order to survive ourselves.

Steve Reich: Recordings on ECM (ECM New Series 2890)

| Tyran Grillo

In Steve Reich’s music, repetition is a method of survival. A phrase returns carrying the microscopic damage of having been heard, while attention acquires an unfamiliar capacity for desire. Recordings on ECM brings that reciprocal transformation back to vinyl, gathering the three albums ECM released between 1978 and 1982. Revisiting the collection issued on CD in 2016, this three-LP edition arrives on October 2, 2026, one day shy of the composer’s 90th birthday. Sourced from the original analogue master tapes, the records reproduce their original sleeves; archival photographs accompany Paul Griffiths’s liner notes. Inside the music, strict procedures open improbable apertures, and counting becomes a form of surrender.

The history behind these recordings retains its own dissonance. Reich had developed an unmistakable musical language before the recording industry found a durable place for it. Manfred Eicher brought Music for 18 Musicians, recorded for Deutsche Grammophon but left unreleased, into circulation through ECM in 1978. His intervention gave a public address to an imagination exceeding the available categories. Across the collection, gestures migrate between works, acquiring unfamiliar consequences in changed surroundings. What initially registers as an insistent surface gradually admits depth, until the ear discovers a staircase folded into a single step.

Music for 18 Musicians establishes this permeability with extraordinary clarity. Its opening cycle of eleven chords provides the harmonic material that subsequent sections expand, and the eventual return closes an immense parenthesis. Pianos and mallet instruments sustain a continuous pulse while voices and winds measure phrases through the limits of breath. The mechanical subdivision of time meets the lung’s finite generosity, allowing rigor to develop a vulnerable interior. Wordless singing moves through the instrumental fabric with translucent tenderness; clarinets continue its contours until the boundary between body and instrument becomes difficult to locate. The ensemble’s collective alertness supplies much of the recording’s emotional force. A shifting accent redirects a passage without disturbing its pulse, while the vibraphone’s cues turn communication into audible structure. Individual timbres retain their grain within a beautifully concentrated field. During the work’s nearly hour-long span, our sense of succession loosens. The clock has entered its own reflection and found soil there to grow roots.

The next album changes the proportions of this experience. Music for a Large Ensemble distributes its activity across a broader instrumental field, maintaining remarkable buoyancy amid the layered motion. Strings contribute a vibrating tension; trumpet chords open luminous pockets above the pulse. The vibraphone’s resonance gives the surrounding activity a polished edge without draining its tactile life. Apparent abundance rests on meticulous relationships, allowing the smallest adjustment to alter the lung capacity of the whole. Every entrance renews the agreement holding this intricate structure together, making consistency an active expression of shared musical purpose.

Violin Phase concentrates the inquiry into a more abrasive intimacy. Its repeated figure slips out of alignment with its doubles, generating patterns through the resulting weave. Shem Guibbory’s bow retains a palpable friction, giving the process an embodied urgency. Reiteration rubs the phrase against itself until hidden contours become audible; an interval opens its mouth, and another melody steps through. Where attention lands determines the shape of the encounter. Octet introduces a delicacy of articulation that feels newly spacious. The flute illuminates the texture from within, while clarinet lines give its motion a supple underside. Its abrupt ending leaves the ear suspended, still furnishing a room from which the walls have vanished.

With Tehillim, the voice assumes the authority of language. Reich’s engagement with his Jewish heritage places Hebrew psalm texts at the composition’s center, allowing their rhythms to determine melodic movement. Meaning inhabits the pulse as an ancestral presence. The opening interplay of singing and percussion has a searching energy, and the unfolding canons give that energy increasingly intricate dimensions. Through the work’s four parts, exhilaration gathers a contemplative gravity; the slower third part suspends the forward impulse without extinguishing its inner motion. The performance gives each carefully shaped phrase an edge of discovery. In the closing hallelujahs, praise becomes bodily expenditure, a word passing through the throat until its syllables seem capable of bearing the singer aloft.

Returning to these performances, I continue to hear excess within the supposedly minimal. Reich makes limited materials sustain an astonishing density of experience, and his musicians give that density a human scale. This vinyl edition offers a renewed occasion to inhabit their concentration. Even the necessary interruptions sharpen awareness of what persists after the sound stops. The mind follows a process until following becomes participation; the body answers before interpretation has finished assembling its credentials. Eventually, a pulse reaches some unlit interior of the listener and finds that it has been expected. Within the groove, the future rehearses its first breath.

Samuel Beckett: Stirrings Still (ECM New Series 2801)

| Tyran Grillo

Samuel Beckett
Trevor Bača
Stirrings Still

Paul Griffiths narrator
JACK Quartet
Christopher Otto violin
Austin Wulliman violin
John Pickford Richards viola
Jay Campbell violoncello
Recorded 2023 and 2024, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineers: Michael Rast, Lara Persia, and Michael Hinreiner (mix)
Cover photo: Rosemarie Clausen
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 4, 2026

Completed in 1987 and first published the following year, Stirrings Still was Samuel Beckett’s last message in prose, a dispatch from that uncertain border where the voice survives even as the self begins to lose its outline. More monologue than story, it finds an unnamed man whose passage may lead through a vast wheatfield drained into black and white, or deeper into the stumbling grain of memory itself. The distinction gradually ceases to matter. Life and what lies beyond become double exposures on the same strip of film, each haunting the other with the possibility that consciousness is merely the afterimage cast by its own disappearance.

Beckett cherished music, especially the songs and string quartets of Franz Schubert, whose melodies often travel farthest just they seem to be coming back home. Something of that impossible homecoming inhabits Beckett’s prose. His sentences circle their subjects until repetition becomes a form of erosion, each recurrence touching the old wound from another angle. Phrases withdraw before reappearing with their centers of gravity subtly displaced. Meaning flickers among them, less an object to be grasped than a disturbance of breath registered in passing. Stirrings Still is therefore already a kind of chamber work, its developments tightening toward the point where language encounters the silence it has carried within itself all along.

Paul Griffiths’s relationship with this world reaches back more than half a century. His first encounter with Beckett arrived at a decisive age, when the boundary between art and life can still vanish without warning. “A student production of Waiting for Godot was put on at the Oxford Playhouse in November 1965,” he recounts to me via email. “I was in my first term as an undergraduate and had just turned eighteen. It changed my life. Little by little (I was living on a student grant) I bought pretty much everything of Beckett’s that was in print.” That formative shock and stretching of personal resources can be felt in his narration of Stirrings Still. Griffiths does not approach the text as a monument to be admired from a respectful distance. He speaks from within a lifelong proximity, as though the words have accompanied him for so long that they now belong to his private scaffolding. Such familiarity allows him to resist theatrical enlargement. Every hesitation carries its own weight, and each repetition sounds newly discovered in the mouth.

The recording also belongs to producer Manfred Eicher’s longstanding conversation with literature, a dimension of his work sometimes eclipsed by the attention given to his cinematic imagination. Griffiths places the project within a history extending to the origins of ECM New Series: “Spoken-voice recordings were part of the New Series from the beginning, and they trace some part of Manfred Eicher’s literary world, which he also partly shares with some of the musicians he’s worked with—Heiner Goebbels, for example, and Kurtág.” Literature, in this context, forms part of the label’s underlying sensibility, shaping its understanding of voice and the charged intervals surrounding utterance. Eicher’s ear has always extended toward those places where one art begins to think through the materials of another.

The path to this particular convergence was itself Beckettian in its patience. In 2006, Eicher asked Griffiths to seek out a composer capable of writing music that could exist in the closest possible sympathy with a recording of the text, preserving its austere sovereignty while answering its inner music. A decade passed. Then, hearing the JACK Quartet rehearse Trevor Bača’s Akasha at Harvard in 2016, Griffiths recognized that the search had been listening for its own answer. Asked what in Bača’s work provoked that recognition, Griffiths answers with characteristic directness: “Not much more to say about the genesis. To answer in one word: intimacy. His music speaks intimately and is made intimately, down to the finest nuance. Also, of course, the string quartet was the obvious ensemble, and I felt this was music that could withstand and deal with the huge presence of Beckett.”

That final phrase identifies the central danger of the undertaking. Beckett’s presence is indeed huge, despite the spareness of the material. And so, any musical candle lit in its shadow could easily become decorative or subservient, reducing itself to atmospheric confirmation of meanings the prose has already supplied. Bača declines the obedient servitude of accompaniment. His score runs beside the words as a parallel stream with its own depth and darkness, neither illustrating the text nor competing for possession of it. Heard in alternation with Griffiths’s narration, the JACK Quartet enters as another order of consciousness, contemplating Beckett from beyond the reach of speech. The strings draw the listener beneath the semantic surface, into the undertow where words continue to exert their pull after their immediate impact has loosened its grip. Griffiths gives the narrator a voice worn almost to the grain, while Bača opens chambers around it in which solitude can resonate beyond the dimensions of the solitary.

What emerges is a work suspended between articulation and subversion thereof, each dynamic carrying what the other must relinquish. Bača’s finest gestures seem microscopically fashioned, alive to the pressure of bow hair and the tremor released when one surface encounters another. Within these sounds lies a physical knowledge that language can approach but never quite retain. Something continues on the far side of saying, faintly stirring in the dust from which every word is born and to which every word returns.

“One night as he sat at his table head on hands he saw himself rise and go.” Thus begins the world into which we are introduced, accompanied by nearly mournful scrapings from the strings. They touch resonantly upon a premonition of death, though the narrator is granted no consoling return to whatever enchanted him as a child. The circumstance of living forces him instead toward the limits of what can be known. A window remains locked because opening it would expose more than the mind can bear. He is left to imagine a form of intercorporeal travel in which light acquires qualities beyond day and night, while the vagaries of experience fall as rain upon drought-stricken earth.

From this threshold come the most delicate tremblings, poised at the edge of audibility, where mortal questions cease to be asked because the answers must also die if they are to be genuinely felt. Those haunting fringes of strings and fretless fingerboards provide a passage for the ghosts of implication. An insectile agitation enters the instruments, suggestive of animal life. The sound seems to remember some primordial condition before flesh and thought became convinced of their separation. Bača allows timbre to retain that ancient uncertainty. A scrape may be the distress of wood under pressure, yet it also carries the sensation of a body trying to hear beyond itself.

As the narrator, poised between tenderness and robust resignation, continues to riff on the fragility of his own existence, the music reveals a premonitional character rather than a commentative one. Siren-toned descents foreshadow the broken heart of solitude, and whisper-quiet stirrings release the title from abstraction. Appearances and disappearances implicate us in their zoetrope, each open slit a death, with the moment beyond it offering another life begun. Creakings suggest the internal groaning of bone on bone, the expression of a body in retrograde. Flinching angels exchange glances with lock-staring demons in a currency of dangerously intimate proportions, always returning to center before resuming their games of perception.

Once the framework of self-awareness begins to lose its structural integrity, the strings grow more animate. They tremble in real time at the realization that something deeper than vibrational frequency is at play, an almost instantaneous relativity that flies straight into the heart of grief. Every bow stroke appears to alter the temporal pressure around Griffiths’s voice. The quartet does not surround the speaker so much as expose the detachments already contained within him. His pauses widen into territories, and the score crosses them without pretending to know what waits on the opposite side.

Beckett’s alter ego is always seeking a way, only to discover that every doorway leads further back in. A quivering harmonic becomes another slipstream into the flowering mind, where wilting and blooming remain equally present. Through a harshly beautiful economy of language, what appears bare on the page acquires in discourse a richness of observation about the human condition. Impulses scrabble in the walls of the subconscious, evading the reach of neurological fingers before falling into the hands of the very soul they describe with unabashed honesty. Griffiths follows these movements without imposing an emotional map upon them. The tenderness of his reading comes from acknowledging how little tenderness the universe itself appears obliged to provide.

Bača’s attention to detail occasionally touches the borderlands explored by George Crumb, another composer drawn toward language at its margins. Yet Bača occupies this territory with a privacy distinctly his own. He listens into the spaces between words, where the tail of one utterance curves toward the head of another in a continuous rotation of exhalation and inhalation. Within the interval separating those breaths, the self becomes perceptible as a rhythm rather than a stable possession. The bow reverses direction while sustaining the illusion of a single note, and consciousness performs an equivalent maneuver, repeatedly changing course while calling the result continuity.

The deepest achievement of this recording may lie in how thoroughly it dissolves any secure division between the witness and the witnessed. The man sees himself rise from the table, Griffiths gives breath to the man, and the quartet listens to that breath from a region his monologue cannot enter. We receive each layer as we add another through the act of attention. Perception becomes a relay conducted across bodies that can never meet, yet briefly inhabit the same uncertainty.

Perhaps the unnamed man is therefore doing more than approaching extinction. In watching himself depart, he invents the witness who might survive him. Beckett entrusted that witness to language, Griffiths lends it mortal breath, and Bača places it within the vulnerable substance of sound. We inherit the man’s vigil without acquiring his identity. For a little while, his consciousness passes through ours, asking for neither rescue nor remembrance. It reveals something more unsettling: that the self may be only the temporary custody of an awareness forever arriving from elsewhere. Our lives are shaped by the voices we shelter, most of whom will never know our names. In this sense, consciousness has always been on loan, and listening is the obscure means by which we return it like a library book we checked out and forgot about long ago.

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.

ECM New Series Collection 1995

| Tyran Grillo

Released in Germany as a promotional anthology, ECM New Series Collection 1995 gathers 26 passages from a fertile landscape. Eleni Karaindrou’s Ulysses’ Gaze (ECM New Series 1570) lays out a path of travel before us with two themes whose cinematic origin loosens into a larger psychic terrain. Kim Kashkashian’s viola draws the personal through the political until both seem filaments of one buried nerve. Mourning gathers speed and reveals dance inside its dark clothing, while instrumental conversation becomes conversion, turning grief toward an exuberance too scarred to call innocent.

That traffic between fragment and world deepens in György Kurtág’s Hommage à R.Sch (ECM New Series 1508), where the dedicatory composer’s miniature forms become living particles. Piano and clarinet gather around the viola in the eponymous Hommage à R.Sch., op. 15d, giving the music sudden visibility. Schumann enters through Märchenbilder Fairy Tale Pictures), op. 113, although arrival proves too stable a word. Its vignettes emerge from Kurtág’s afterimage, each microscopically tuned to affection.

Keith Jarrett’s traversal of Händel’s keyboard suites (ECM New Series 1530) offers a lucid counterweight. The recitative-shaped opening of Suite No. 2 in F Major, HWV 427 carries the vocal Händel in embryonic form before the Fuga opens its intricate gates. The pianist’s telescoped dynamics give ornament ethical weight, as every flourish answers to proportion. Federico Mompou’s Música Callada (ECM New Series 1523), represented here by three selections in Herbert Henck’s grave illumination, carries inwardness past the edge of utterance. Mompou’s “silent music” inhabits the soul’s inner ear, where sound waits inside solitude for the touch that will give it contour. Henck allows the notes to hover at the fringe of incarnation.

Sacred language assumes more labyrinthine form in Christopher Bowers-Broadbent’s reading of Messiaen’s Méditations Sur Le Mystère De La Sainte Trinité (ECM New Series 1494). The French composer’s communicable language encodes Aquinas into the organ, converting theology into an audible grammar whose meaning remains partly sealed. Part VII places density in the upper register, where sin becomes molecular and descends through imagined soil. The Hilliard Ensemble’s Codex Speciálník (ECM New Series 1504) approaches inscription from another century. In natali domini advances in luminous block chords touched by chromatic ornament, while Pulcherrima Rosa unfurls a melodic current whose anonymity feels sovereign. The Prague manuscript becomes a living archive under these voices, crossing five centuries without surrendering its obscurity.

Giya Kancheli occupies the anthology’s most desolate interior. In Exil (ECM New Series 1535), the Paul Celan setting Einmal rises from an alto flute invocation that arrests the heart before Maacha Deubner’s unaffected soprano enters. Tapped bows and glassy harmonics place enormous force inside a nearly vacant field. The related Abii ne viderem (ECM New Series 1510) expands this monastic material into orchestral mass. Staccato eruptions are joined by abysses of silence until a full statement arrives, weighted by the piano’s pulse.

The cello works on Patrick Demenga and Thomas Demenga’s 12 Hommages A Paul Sacher (ECM New Series 1520-21) transform a patron’s name into generative code. The Sacher hexachord is an alphabet evolving into timbre. Henri Dutilleux’s 3 Strophes sur le nom de Sacher gives the dedication a tensile intimacy, with conflict touching agreement within one speaking body. Luciano Berio’s Les Mots Sont Allés opens modest notes into fractal agency, language departing only to discover further chambers inside the instrument. A different dialogue animates Robyn Schulkowsky and Nils Petter Molvær’s Hastening Westward (ECM New Series 1564). In “Pier And Ocean II,” foregrounded cymbals create an aerial plane for Molvær’s trumpet, while deeper impacts lend the scene sanctity freed from doctrine. Percussion supplies a shifting anatomy; trumpet becomes the consciousness passing through it, visible to itself for one impossible instant.

A program dedicated entirely to Sándor Veress (ECM New Series 1555), performed by Camerata Bern with Heinz Holliger, is another homage. Veress taught Kurtág and wrote the Passacaglia Concertante for Holliger, so inheritance here passes in genuine form. A plucked string drops an idea into depth, and viola-rich currents carry its consequences outward as Holliger’s oboe burns through the structure with intimate authority. His own Beiseit/Alb-Chehr (ECM New Series 1540) divides that authority between folklore and verbal fracture. Alb-Chehr recounts a cowherd’s ghostly encounter through playful color shadowed by fatal knowledge, while Beiseit lets Robert Walser’s words dictate their own arrhythmias. Countertenor, clarinet, accordion, and double bass inhabit an intimacy sharpened by the recording site, a psychiatric institute whose walls seem to have retained every unsounded syllable. Und ging briefly turns lyrical, yet lyricism here bears the delicate unease of a door found open in a room no one remembers entering.

Across this rare compilation, the New Series ideal emerges as an art of attunement to what has not fully entered the world. ECM’s celebrated spaciousness consequently feels less acoustic than ontological. These recordings suggest that consciousness may itself be a form of chamber music, each self sounding only because another presence has drawn a bow across its silence.

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

Heiner Goebbels: Walden (ECM New Series 2878)

| Tyran Grillo

Heiner Goebbels
Walden

Ensemble Modern Orchestra
Peter Eötvös conductor
Bob Rutman voice
Recorded November 1998
at Philharmonie Köln and Alte Oper Frankfurt
Engineer: Udo Wüstendörfer
Recording engineer: Wolfgang Packeiser
Cover photo: Gérald Minkoff
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: June 6, 2026

A cabin can become a machine for myth. Once built, it gathers meanings faster than wind and rain can darken its boards. The small house Henry David Thoreau raised beside Walden Pond in 1845 no longer exists solely as a physical structure. It has become a subheading under the cultural imagination, a place to which each generation returns carrying its own fatigue. Yet its apparent simplicity conceals privileged contradictions and dependencies. Its solitude was never absolute, its wilderness never untouched. Walden Pond lay close to Concord. The railroad cut audibly across the surrounding landscape, and Thoreau’s retreat unfolded on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The woods were not another world but a temporary clearing inside this one.

That permeability matters because Walden exceeds both a hymn to nature and a manual for abandoning civilization. Its solitude is crossed as much by steam whistles as by birdsong, by axes and distant human voices. Thoreau withdraws from the town, yet the town continues to arrive acoustically. Its presence enters without knocking, carried through the air. John Cage, for whom Thoreau’s perception of the world became a lasting source of inspiration, recognized in this radical attentiveness a music preceding composition: “Thoreau was a great musician, not because he played the flute, but because he didn’t need to go to Boston to hear a symphony orchestra… His sensitivity to the sounds of nature was probably greater than that of most performing musicians…” The symphony is already taking place; the difficult art is learning how to receive it.

Heiner Goebbels’s Walden emerges from this expanded idea of music. The composer’s modest description of the work as a series of musical sketches inspired by Thoreau’s book is accurate only insofar as a map indicates a location while withholding the effects of erosion and the sensation of becoming lost in the undergrowth. Written in 1998, the score expands the orchestra around a speaker and unconventional instruments. Goebbels releases Thoreau’s ideas into a different millennium, in which the 19th-century woods reappear as a haunted acoustic terrain where memory tangles with machinery and imagination.

Despite Cage’s suggestion that Thoreau required no orchestra, Goebbels returns him to one. Its traditional borders have been loosened to include samplers and keyboards alongside electric guitars. The cimbalom rubs against didgeridoo; koto and harmonium sound against African percussion. Several of Bob Rutman’s steel cellos and bow chimes enlarge the metallic anatomy of the ensemble. Table guitars of Fred Frith’s design lie flat like workbenches for the manufacture of unfamiliar resonances. The daxophone, devised by Hans Reichel, draws creaks and cries from a length of wood, some of them nearly human. These instruments reshape the conventional body and change what it can imagine itself to be.

The Ensemble Modern Orchestra, under Peter Eötvös, accordingly becomes an acoustic habitat. Its openness mirrors the permeability of Thoreau’s cabin, an enclosure that never entirely excludes the surrounding landscape. Within this enlarged body, the contradiction of Waldenbecomes audible. Sampled rhythms and distorted percussion scatter hard metallic light through the orchestral canopy, while horns bend and wail as if carrying the nocturnal breath of a city from somewhere beyond the pond. Goebbels avoids a clean opposition between nature and civilization, allowing them to stain one another.

Rutman commands this unsettled landscape, reciting Thoreau with an oracular force that justifies amplification. His voice travels through the music rather than riding above it. At one moment it emerges like a human figure from fog; at another it hardens into sounding matter. He trades roles with instrument and environment until it becomes difficult to say who is speaking and what is being spoken through.

“Where I Lived, and What I Lived For (Simplify, Simplify!)” acts as a prelude, opening with drones drawn from metal and wood threaded with wire. They ferret out inner voices, which the older folktales understood far better than their modern Disneyfied counterparts. Those voices are inherently dark. The tangle of horns and multiphonics draws out an inward knowledge we fear to express openly: human thought naturally tilts negative. Thoreau’s asceticism reflects an awareness that we are filthy inside, as expressed by the sounds of rattling bottles and other detritus of life under the banner of technology, turned over and shaken until all our loose change falls out.

This slinks into the jazzier depths of “The House,” where Rutman’s narration, with its enchanting Herzogian lilt, breaks down the walls of the collective unconscious. A slinky guitar and restless trombone widen the emotional register, their exchange revealing Goebbels’s microscopic care for color.

In “The Ponds,” Goebbels entwines plugged and unplugged technology with a strange hopefulness. The croaking of giant toads and lyrical strings trade places with plucked piano innards and bending electric guitar. The water’s surface is frighteningly evoked like a distant, exotic thing, dirty in today’s parlance yet all the more alluring for its nostalgic whiff. As Rutman interacts with the amphibiousness of his own soul, splashed through the netting of Thoreau’s masticatable prose, we emerge worn and suspended in wonder.

Drop it! he then commands in “Reading,” a movement built on less imperative forms of communication. Atmospheric mystery and noir-ish smoke gather as the music saunters through city streets, recalling a vanished possibility before the trees threw down their arms and scooped our souls up ahead of the flood. Hammered dulcimer and slick drums reflect a social mirth that outlives them.

History has altered the charge of “The Ice List” (a title that resonates far differently in today’s sociopolitical climate), in which Thoreau describes the commercial ice harvesting operations on Walden Pond. His account of hundreds of laborers cutting and shipping thousands of tons of ice to the American South and India turns commerce into a meditation on human intellect and the enduring purity of nature. Goebbels adds touches of faraway climates to show us what places seem to those who have never actually been there. Through them, the colonial gaze embedded in that commerce gradually surfaces while the music retains its ambiguity.

At just under 14 minutes, “Spring” is the gargantuan epicenter of this slow-motion sonic earthquake. Theremin-like tones and floating dissonances introduce a flanged sample of 80s-esque rhythm guitar. Cymbals and horns house creepy-crawly things, turning the season into a cage yearning to open and unleash itself upon an unready world. That sardonic promise curdles in Rutman’s recollections of cold and hardship, as “Winter Visitors” gives its plectrum-centered language over to a mind ready for self-destruction. A Shostakovich-like string quartet rears its deformed head, letting mice of circumstance run through the corridors of our hearts.

In “The Beanfield,” which throws an oboe onto a heap of discarded shopping carts and other unwanted vehicles of commercialism, reading becomes the surest way to reckon with oneself, precisely the task Thoreau avoided at first during his stay. This music threatens to take us away from the flesh, as embodied by the drum machine. The final movement, “The White Pond,” presents a glassine mirror disturbed by little more than a breath exhaled in fitful sleep. The drone returns, and Rutman’s animalistic onomatopoeia offers the sole indication that human hands ever touched the ground on which we stand.

Recorded during the work’s November 1998 premiere performances at the Philharmonie Köln and Frankfurt’s Alte Oper, the album preserves its elusiveness as an event. Thoreau becomes a living disturbance in Goebbels’s hands, his text producing new forms long after its world has disappeared. Perhaps we return to the woods because distance sharpens buried frequencies. Goebbels leads us toward that imagined clearing, then fractures it beyond recognition, crowding it with pieces of the very civilization it was built to resist.

And so, American Transcendentalism acquires material weight, a heavy-laden basket filled with the unfinished stories that make up our lives.

Duo Gazzana: Prokofiev/Pärt/Schnittke (ECM New Series 2854)

| Tyran Grillo

Duo Gazzana
Prokofiev/Pärt/Schnittke

Natascia Gazzana violin
Raffaella Gazzana piano
Recorded February 2025, Reitstadel Neumarkt
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Mixed September 2025
by Manfred Eicher and Michael Hinreiner (engineer)
Cover photo: Michael Kenna
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: April 17, 2026

Since 2011, Duo Gazzana have occupied a rarefied space within the ECM New Series realm, where sound is uncovered as a relic from beneath layers of listening. Across their previous recordings, the sisters Natascia and Raffaella have cultivated a language of intimacy that resists spectacle, drawing the ear inward, toward a threshold where precision meets vulnerability. Their artistry thrives not on assertion but on trust, a quiet confidence that what is essential will endure without artifice.

This latest album extends that ethos while threading it through a program shaped by endurance, fracture, and the fragile grace of survival. The chosen composers speak across time not through stylistic unity but through shared confrontation with hardship. As Stefano Carucci observes in his booklet essay, these figures, despite their divergent origins and trajectories, all encountered forms of sociopolitical suffering that threatened to silence them, and yet found in music a passageway beyond constraint. What emerges, then, is not merely a collection of works but a meditation on resilience. Each piece becomes a chamber where pressure resonates.

Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953)
Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 in f minor, op. 80

Written under the oppressive weight of the Stalinist regime, interrupted by war, and completed in 1946, this sonata bears the imprint of a mind navigating both external censorship and internal unrest. The opening Andante assai does not so much begin as seep into being. The piano murmurs from its lower depths, a shadowed resonance that seems to remember something it cannot name. The violin responds with a tremor, not quite a voice yet no longer silenced. Their exchange unfolds like a fragile correspondence between distant selves, each phrase arriving slightly worn by travel.

Textures accumulate slowly, their friction almost tactile. One senses thought grinding against itself. Then, unexpectedly, a glint of irony surfaces, a crooked smile glimpsed through fog. The piano drifts into an impressionistic shimmer, while the violin traces an erratic line above, a figure balancing along a fence that refuses stability. A final whisper of pizzicato settles the air before the Allegro brusco asserts its presence, not with brute force but with a taut clarity that holds its ground. The Gazzanas render this movement with astonishing poise, maintaining a paradoxical separation. It feels as though violin and piano inhabit parallel rooms, their dialogue conducted through walls that neither obstruct nor reveal entirely.

The subsequent Andante opens a window. A stream appears, modest and unassuming, its flow uninterrupted by spectacle. Yet even here, unease lingers beneath the surface. The music twists subtly, its beauty edged with something watchful. By the time the Allegrissimo erupts, the earlier calm reveals itself as prelude rather than respite. Motion accelerates into a language of leaps and surges, returning to earlier motifs not as closure but as transformation. The ending resists finality. It suggests continuation beyond hearing, as though the sonata persists in some unseen dimension, spiraling outward long after the last vibration fades.

After such intensity, the arrival of Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel feels like stepping into a space where time loosens its grip. This work, among the first articulations of Pärt’s tintinnabuli style, invites a relinquishing of self. The performers become vessels rather than agents, their gestures stripped of excess until only essence remains. The piano’s arpeggios unfold with crystalline patience, while the violin sustains a line that seems to hover between presence and absence.

In this interpretation, the Gazzanas uncover a depth that resists articulation. The music breathes within a threshold where the physical dissolves into the ineffable. It carries the faint suggestion of something sacred, not declared but intimated. Each note appears as if reflected in another, a mirror that does not duplicate but reveals hidden dimensions. The simplicity is deceptive. Beneath it lies an infinite regress, each tone containing the seed of another, extending endlessly into silence.

Prokofiev
Five Melodies, op. 35a

Originally conceived as vocalises for soprano and piano in 1920 and later transcribed for violin, these miniatures form a bridge between tradition and innovation. They are concise yet expansive, each piece a self-contained world that flickers into being and vanishes before it can be fully grasped. The Gazzanas approach them with a sensitivity that honors their dual nature.

The second melody stands out in particular. Its opening pizzicato gestures evoke a tactile immediacy, as though the music were being plucked directly from the air. The flowing ostinato that follows transforms this grounded beginning into something buoyant, almost dance-like. Yet the energy never settles into predictability. It shifts, folds inward, then reemerges with altered contours. The final Andante non troppo balances restraint and exuberance, its voice alternating between whisper and exclamation. The conclusion does not resolve so much as dissolve into a state of luminous equilibrium.

Alfred Schnittke (1934–1998)
Gratulationsrondo

Schnittke’s polystylistic language introduces a different kind of tension. Here, contrasts are not reconciled but allowed to coexist in uneasy proximity. Familiar gestures are tinged with unease, while dissonance acquires an unexpected radiance. The Gazzanas navigate this terrain with a delicacy that reveals the work’s inner vulnerability. Beneath its shifting surfaces lies a candid exposure, as though the music has shed its defenses and stands unguarded before the listener.

What ultimately defines Duo Gazzana’s performance throughout this album is a quality that might be called bareness, though the term hardly captures its fullness. Their playing does not impose meaning. It creates space for meaning to emerge. Each phrase feels unencumbered by expectation, as if the music were discovering itself in real time. Their sisterly connection is evident, yet it is not the focal point. Rather, it is the organic foundation upon which a more profound dialogue unfolds.

And perhaps this is where the album leaves us. Not with answers, nor even with questions, but with a shift in how we attend to sound itself. These works, shaped by hardship and carried forward through fragile persistence, remind us that music is not merely an object of listening. It is a mode of being, a way in which experience transforms into something that can be shared without being diminished. In the end, what lingers is not the echo of suffering but the realization that even in silence, something continues to resonate. Whether we call it memory, spirit, or simply presence, it carries us forward with hope.