Contemporary Classical

Zsófia Boros: El último aliento (ECM New Series 2769)

| Tyran Grillo

Zsófia Boros
El último aliento

Zsófia Boros classical guitar, ronroco
Recorded March/April 2022, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover photo: Fotini Potamia
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: April 14, 2023

Guitarist Zsófia Boros returns with her third program for ECM’s New Series. Pairing selections from Argentina with those of French composer Mathias Duplessy, the result may just be her most meticulously constructed dollhouse yet. Indeed, it’s as if every track were either a room or a piece of miniature furniture placed artfully within it.

We begin at the entrance with Duplessy’s “De rêve et de pluie.” The use of harmonics here, alternating with liquid arpeggios, evokes an architectural awareness of the surroundings. Boros traces the contour of the doorway, takes her shoes off in the foyer, and steps carefully inside to take it all in. Next, she tiptoes up the stairs built by Joaquin Alem, whose “Salir adentro” cradles a brief rhythmic tapping in its tenderness. It breathes almost dramatically despite the near-stillness, burrowing as an animal preparing for hibernation. From this dreamy escape, we enter the reality of the nursery, in which Quique Sinesi’s “El abrazo” crochets its lullaby. For this, Boros wraps a rubber band around the guitar strings—a muting technique she developed to allow her to practice while her children were sleeping. The effect is warm and familiar.

From there, Boros recedes into the kitchen, where Alberto Ginastera is cooking lovingly at the stove. His take on the “Milonga” is a spider-webbed tango, as savory as it is sweet. Moving on, we are led into the study, where two books bound by Duplessy lie open for our scrutiny. Whereas “Le secret d’Hiroshigé” recalls the sound of the Japanese koto, moving through paper screens as if they were made of air, “Perle de Rosée” is more botanical. With an understated quality that eschews the pitfalls of virtuosity in favor of its grace, it navigates fields of crops on the verge of being harvested. Meanwhile, a fire burns softly in the fireplace, where the kindling of Sinesi’s “Tormenta de ilusión” leaves us to regard some more unexpected turns of phrase. Played on the ronroco (the 10-stringed instrument for which it was originally written), it destroys memories of the past the tighter it tries to hold to them.

As we wander into the gallery, Duplessy treats us to a modest yet captivating private collection. In “Le labyrinthe de Vermeer,” we can sense oils, pigments, and brushstrokes coalescing into a coherent image. Each section has its own fragrance and distinct perspective. His “Berceuse,” the album’s pinnacle, draws a poignant ebb and flow, while “Valse pour Camille” expresses childlike wonder, coming of age in resonant strums.

We end in the greenhouse, where the album’s title piece by Carlos Moscardini casts its light on a bonsai tree. As a marvel of curation, it doesn’t so much mimic its larger cousins but shows what music is capable of at its most cellular level.

Vox Clamantis: Music by Henrik Ødegaard (ECM New Series 2767)

| Tyran Grillo

Vox Clamantis
Music by Henrik Ødegaard

Vox Clamantis
Jaan-Eik Tulve conductor
Recorded March 2021 at St. Nicholas Dome Church, Haapsalu
Engineer: Margo Kõlar
Recording supervision: Helena Tulve
Cover photo: Jan Kricke
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: June 2, 2023

O sing unto the LORD a new song: sing unto the LORD, all the earth.
– Psalm 96:1

Gregorian chant was the experimental music of the medieval era. Here, filtered through the work of Norwegian organist, choir conductor, and composer Henrik Ødegaard (b. 1955), it blends into the folk music of his own country, all tied together by a contemporary classical idiom that takes two steps back for each one forward. In the throats of Vox Clamantis under the direction of Jaan-Eik Tulve, his sound feels as inevitable as the faith that binds it at the molecular level.

The Genesis of this musical Bible is Jesu, dulcis memoria (2014/15). Its dialogue of darkness and light draws from the liturgy of the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus to establish the grandest of all dichotomies. As a drone appears underneath, followed by shifting chords, it opens itself to new shades of the text. Such is Ødegaard’s respectful approach to spiritual building, leading to an interwoven “amen.” From here, we get an even deeper dialogue in the inner heart work of Alleluia, Pascha nostrum. Its tender monophony speaks of Christ’s death, while O filii et filiæ(2015/21) offers Ødegaard’s examination of the resurrection. At its core is a 15th-century paschal hymn, building polyphonically through its refrain. Men’s and women’s voices make contact and separate, each a flock of birds gracing the sky with its murmurations. The Gregorian section concludes with a Kyrie and a Pater noster, the latter from a 13th-century Madrid codex, containing some surprising friction and sound colors.

Antiphons from a Scandinavian manuscript of the same century are the basis of the eight-part Meditations Over St. Mary Magdalene’s Feast in Nidaros (2017), which occupies the album’s largest portion. In her liner notes, Kristina Kõrver writes of the work, “It is as if the composer were literally sitting in front of a fragmentary manuscript, filling in the gaps and adding the missing lines, not as a scholar-restorer, but as a poet, a co-creator.” Whether working in tension or harmony with his sources, Ødegaard always seems to be exploring the material as one might repair a piece of old furniture, knowing that even the most seamless integrations will reveal themselves with subtle differences in hue, texture, and quality. The first and last sections are the most personal, revealing the composer’s penchant for unsettled yet cohesive harmonies. Their flow is always restrained so that our ears might be directed inward and our eyes upward.

When encountering Psalm 62 in the antiphonal “Mini osculum non desisti,” we find ourselves not torn but made whole, as if two parts of ourselves walking away from each other have turned around to meet in fellowship. Meanwhile, Canticum Trium Puerorum emerges organically from the chant of “Oleo caput meum non unxisti” as steam from boiling water. As Ødegaard continues to open our hearts to these possibilities, they begin to feel as natural as the souls rendering them. The choir shapes these with such grace as to be stilling in effect. In the setting of Psalms 148-150, a shushing sound feels like the rasp of pages being turned from the pulpit: a reminder that the Word was indeed made flesh. The deepest font is in the Magnificat, merging with “O, Maria, mater pia.” The resulting flow is so alluring that anything floating upon its waters would seem out of place. And that it does—at first. But something transformative happens as the women’s and men’s choirs align to illustrate the gospel’s power to seek, find, and restore unity.

If I were to compare the Meditations to a stained glass window, it would be analogous to the solder that holds together the panels rather than the panels of color themselves. It is a skeleton enshrouded by centuries of worship, made animate by the power of the lungs and the breath of life that fills them with the oxygen of salvation.

Thomas Larcher: The living Mountain (ECM New Series 2723)

| Tyran Grillo

Thomas Larcher
The Living Mountain

Sarah Aristidou soprano
Alisa Weilerstein violoncello
Aaron Pilsan piano
Luka Juhart accordion
André Schuen baritone
Daniel Heide piano
Münchener Kammerorchester
Clemens Schuldt conductor
The Living Mountain / Ouroboros
recorded June 2021
Bavaria Musikstudios, München
Unerzählt
recorded May 2022
Gemeindezentrum Weerberg
Engineer: Christoph Franke
Cover photo: Awoiska van der Molen
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 6, 2023

“At first, mad to recover the tang of height, I made always for
the summits, and would not take time to explore the recesses.”
–Nan Shepherd

The Living Mountain is the fourth ECM New Series album dedicated to the work of Thomas Larcher, whose previous programs have proven the Austrian composer to be, much like his mentor Heinz Holliger, a human magnifying glass. His attention to detail grows only more precise as his instrumental forces increase. Meanwhile, the chamber works unfurl in grand (but never grandiose) imaginings of times and places that we would never experience except through the filter of his awareness of the past. The eponymous song cycle for soprano and ensemble is a particularly vibrant example. Composed between 2019 and 2020, it sets selections from the memoir by Scottish poet Nan Shepherd, whose own penchant for highlighting the intimate in the vast suits Larcher’s sensibilities hand in glove.

From an introductory heartbeat, the landscape pulses with the music of blood flow, visceral and true. Larcher articulates this anatomy with surgical precision on his way to Part II, where we feel ourselves on the verge of falling over. That sense of vertigo—at once glorious and terrifying—sweeps through every crevice. Singer Sarah Aristidou expresses Shepherd’s words as if they were her own. Whether in brief expulsions of accordion breath or the hammering of piano strings, the diurnal reigns supreme. The final movement’s evocation of snow, as sparkling and wind-roused as it is blinding, runs down the text’s spinal cord.

At the other end of this proverbial tunnel is another song cycle, Unerzählt (2019-20), this one for baritone and piano based on the poetry of W.G. Sebald. These vignettes turn stills into moving pictures. Moods range from the programmatic (e.g., “Die roten Flecken,” which evokes the red spots on Jupiter in dramatic fashion, and the prepared piano rattlings of “Wenn die Blitze herabfuhren”) and the morose (“Am 8.Mai 1927”) to the contemplative (“Gleich einem Hund”) and painterly (“Blaues Gras”). One highlight is “Es heißt daß Napoleon,” from which we get this wry piece of historical revisionism:

They say
that Napoleon
was colorblind
& blood for him
was as green as
grass

The delicacy of Larcher’s setting brilliantly toes the line between mockery and empathy. Another standout is the final song, “So wird, wenn der Sehnerv zeerreißt”:

And so, when the optic nerve
is torn, the silent airspace
turns as white as the snow
on the Alps.

Thus reconnected to the snowy expanse in which we began, we can take strange comfort in its inhospitable nature—which, in the end, makes us all the more human. Pianist André Schuen and baritone Daniel Heide mesh beautifully, allowing bell-like sonorities to percolate through deeper gravel.

Stretching out the darkness between these is Ouroboros (2015). Cellist Alisa Weilerstein and the Munich Chamber Orchestra navigate three movements, opening with a dance of slow-motion detections. Despite the nominal instrumentation, the piano plays a vital moderating role in this relationship. Neither call nor response, theirs is a symbiosis that implies an eternal path to nothingness. The tempestuous middle movement deals in fear with a squealing, unrelenting grind. The conclusion reveals an ethereal balancing act, Weilerstein reaching the most pristine high notes I’ve heard on a cello in a long time before a frenzied crackle of fire and ash consumes itself. As the flame goes out, it moans one last time, just before comprehension and death become one and the same.

Alexander Knaifel: Chapter Eight (ECM New Series 2637)

| Tyran Grillo

Alexander Knaifel
Chapter Eight

Patrick Demenga violoncello
State Choir Latvija
Riga Cathedral Boys Choir
Youth Choir Kamēr
Andres Mustonen conductor
Concert recording, March 2009
Jesuitenkirche Luzern
Engineer: Charles Suter
Assistant Engineers: Urs Dürr, Ruedi Wild
Executive Producer (SRF): Rolf Grolimund
Cover: Eberhard Ross
Co-production ECM Records/Radio SRF 2 Kulture
Release date: March 14, 2025

Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.
–Song of Songs 8:6

The music of Alexander Knaifel (1943-2024) is a chain of lakes in the ECM New Series landscape. In this latest release, consisting of the slow-motion embrace that is Chapter Eight (1992/93), we encounter his setting of the eighth chapter of the Song of Songs. Conceived as a “community prayer,” it places a cello (played here by Patrick Demenga) at the center of three choirs arranged crosswise in a cathedral, itself listed among the instrumentation in the score.

Demenga is the welcomer whose song leads the way as the voices emerge from the wood- and stonework of the space itself, where human hands have left behind forms we can hear, see, and touch. Such tactility is at the heart of everything Knaifel composed. By stretching words and images to their breaking point, he showed how fragile our relationship to sound really is. For that reason alone, we should not be surprised that Chapter Eight is not a straightforward rendering of its source text, as verses are reordered, and not every one is accounted for. Some are also repeated (verse 1 appears six times, verse 6 appears five times, etc.), and by the time we get to the last of the piece’s 32 stanzas, we are reduced to fragments thereof. In that reduction, however, lies the key to understanding the truth we are being given: Scripture is nothing without its orality. And so, by favoring these far-reaching suspensions in his choral writing, the composer is redefining transcendence not as overcoming of the physical but as a manifestation of the liminal. The world seems to stop spinning, the clouds are no longer moving, and the sun is held in its dial. Through it all, the cello is a thread pulled through a veil not of our own making.

Although the passionate dialogue of Song of Songs is often read as a metaphor between the Jewish and Gentile churches at a time when Christ’s reconciliation had yet to be born out through the new covenant, Knaifel goes one layer deeper to highlight such tensions in every believing heart. While the cello and choirs become more unified in vision, they turn rapture into capture, whereby the body-solvent spirit is held gently in place by God’s plan. The repeated verses remind us that we must never leave others behind in our spiritual walk and that salvation is never ultimately about the self but is a means of glorifying the one who bestows it. The lover’s jealousy, therefore, is that of a God who hopes that all of us might lay our heads in his bosom. We feel this when Demenga’s bow falls from its perch (high notes like lasers through the mind) and scrapes the bottom of its fleshly allegiances (low notes like rusty chains through the heart). The singers move methodically, each syllable becoming a verse unto itself, the roles of call and response gradually reversing.

Thus, the pace of time becomes distorted, like seeing the world through a window down which drips a quiet rain. The storm is the language of faith, a test of our immaterial resolve against the material. And when we fail, we are ready to be lifted again and remade in the image of what we are meant for. And as these forces meet in the middle, they stand at the intersection of all things, whispering, “The unfinished statement is where life begins.”

This is music you can leave on to exist on its own terms until it becomes a part of the architecture you call home.

Gidon Kremer: Songs of Fate (ECM New Series 2745)

| Tyran Grillo

Gidon Kremer
Songs of Fate

Gidon Kremer violin
Vida Miknevičiūtė soprano
Magdalena Ceple violoncello
Andrei Pushkarev vibraphone
Kremerata Baltica
Weinberg/Kuprevičius
Recorded July 2019
Plokštelių studija, Vilnius
Engineers: Vilius Keras and Aleksandra Kerienė
Šerkšnytė/Jančevskis
Concert recording July 2022
Pfarrkirche, Lockenhaus
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Cover photo: Thomas Wunsch
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: January 19, 2024

The word fate comes from the Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to speak, tell, say.” In its Latinate forms, it took on the nuance of that which was spoken by the divine. Both senses give us doorways into the present disc, in which Gidom Kremer leads his Kremerata Baltica through the works of Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996) by way of living composers from the Baltic states. “This program,” Kremer notes, not coincidentally, “is meant to speak to everybody, reminding us of tragic fates along the way and that we each have a ‘voice’ that deserves to be heard and listened to.” In his brilliant liner notes, Wolfgang Sandner speaks of Kremer as an artist of multiple voices, having a “Jewish first name, German surname, Swedish ancestors, Latvian birthplace, three mother tongues, a love of Russian culture, and an imposed Soviet socialization.” And yet, these categories, he observes, dissolve the moment we utter them, for they are creatively inferior to the music that constantly defines (and redefines) the violinist and conductor’s sense of self.

For the past decade, Kremer has been a fervent champion for Weinberg via ECM (see, most recently, his traversal of the solo violin sonatas). Now, he reveals more obscure works by the Polish composer whose fragmentary yet coherent identity mirrors the interpreter’s own. From the dream-laden Nocturne (1948/49), arranged by Andrei Pushkarev for violin and string orchestra, to the dancing Kujawiak (1952) for violin and orchestra, a tapestry of sounds and textures blesses the ears. Between them are the tempered joys of Aria, op. 9 (1942), for string quartet, and three selections from Jewish Songs, op. 13 (1943), for soprano and string orchestra, on Yiddish poems by Yitskhok Leybush Peretz. The latter, originally published as Children’s Songs to avoid Soviet detection during the war, constitute a moving picture of thought, life, and action translated through the weakness of the flesh. Soprano Vida Miknevičiūtė navigates their pathways—by turns folkish and dramatic—as a needle in the dark.

Giedrius Kuprevičius (*1944) yields an equally substantial sequence bookended by two movements from his chamber symphony, The Star of David. The Postlude thereof is a duet between Miknevičiūtė and Kremer, in which David’s mourning for Saul and Jonathan funnels itself into introspection, connecting and gathering the soul. Between them are two refractions of the Kaddish, or Jewish prayer for the dead. In both, the mood implodes even as the heart struggles to contain every last molecule of sadness.

Before all this, we begin with the tremors of This too shall pass (2021) for violin, violoncello, vibraphone and string orchestra by Raminta Šerkšnytė (*1975). In listening (and we mustlisten) to Kremer’s lone voice emerging from an expanse that threatens to swallow us whole, we find cellist Magdalena Ceple joining not as an ally or hero but as a fellow questioner, one who throws kindling of doubt into the fireplace of mortality. Vibraphonist Andrei Pushkarev speaks of snow at first but soon reveals the language to be that of ice, thin and prone to breaking should one dare to overstep. By the time the orchestra shines its light, Kremer’s recitative has already laid bare the foundations of a story dislocated by memory. The world tries desperately to lock it into place, but it refuses—not through violent resistance but through the peace that comes from knowing who one is.

Concluding this fiercely intimate mosaic is Lignum (2017) by Jēkabs Jančevskis (*1992). Scored for string orchestra, svilpaunieki (ocarinas), chimes and wind chimes, it bids us to listen again, no longer to the instruments themselves but to the materials of which they are made. The violin’s dissonant entrance is the friction of leaves in an orchestral forest. Much like Erkki-Sven Tüür’s architectonics, Jančevskis looks to nature as a source of internal dialogue. As chimes grace our periphery just beyond the treeline, he reminds us that every word lost to the wind has a place to return to.

Evgueni Galperine: Theory of Becoming (ECM New Series 2744)

| Tyran Grillo

Evgueni Galperine
Theory of Becoming

Evgueni Galperine electronics, sampling
Sergei Nakariakov trumpet
Sébastien Hurtaud violoncello
Maria Vasyukova voice
Recorded 2021/21, Studio EGP, Paris
Engineer: Aymeric Létoquart
Mixed November 2021, Les Studios de la Seine, Paris
by Evgueni Galperine, Manfred Eicher, and Aymeric Létoquart
Cover painting: Lorenzo Recio
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 21, 2022

If a composer is an author, then Evgueni Galperine is one who allows characters, actions, and places to speak themselves into logical corners, then breaks those corners to let the vacuum of space have a say. Based in Paris since 1990, the Russian/Ukrainian composer cites the language of cinema as his creative crucible. His first project in that regard was Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless, a soundtrack he wrote sight unseen. (ECM listeners may remember another Zvyagintsev film, The Return, and its music by Andrey Dergatchev.) In the present program, Galperine tears his mise-en-scène from the pages of life itself. Whether reworking prerecorded material or responding to instruments in the moment, this “augmented reality of acoustic instruments” connects events of importance in his life. Aided by the contributions of Sergei Nakariakov (trumpet), Sébastien Hurtaud (cello), and Maria Vasyukova (voice), he breaks the electro-acoustic mold as he defines it, careful not to step on any shards left by the process to regard the partial reflections they offer.

Much of the work is personal, giving us glimpses into the experiences that have shaped his movements in the world. The most poignant is “This Town Will Burn Before Dawn,” for which Galperine imagined himself combing through the rubble of a destroyed futuristic city. “This simple idea took on a whole new meaning with the invasion of Ukraine,” he says, “the land of my father and of my childhood.” And while hope is found, it is unreachable. A cello stretches its arms but finds no contact in return, only an imagining of light amid ringing bells. Like “Soudain, le vide” later in the album, it is a requiem as much for the living as the dead. The flesh, it seems to whisper, is inseparable from shadow. “Oumuamua, Space Wanderings” is a more ambitious but no less intimate self-examination. Inspired by the oblong asteroid that enchanted the world with possibilities of interstellar contact in 2017, it writes its origin story with a Jon Hassell-esque morphology, nestled in an overlay of bright digital signatures and a seeking spirit.

With other influences ranging from Claude Debussy and Dmitri Shostakovich to György Ligeti and Arvo Pärt, a listening mind is clearly at work. Having such a list at hand prompts me to seek other paths of connection. The bellowing of low horns in “Cold Front” evokes the dawn-kissed expanse of Hans Zimmer, while the trumpet of “After The Storm” exhales like the foggy tropes of Ingram Marshall. To be sure, the high strings and beautiful dreams of “La lettre d’un disparu” make for an easy parallel with Pärt’s Tabula rasa. But they also bring me back to my first encounter with Three Pieces in the Olden Style by Henryk Górecki. If anything, my deep kinship with the Polish composer’s broad oeuvre rings truest for me throughout Theory of Becoming. I feel it in the translucent veil of “Kaddish” and the unrelenting textures of “The Wheel Has Come Full Circle”—not simply in terms of structure but in Galperine’s sense of time. It’s like he stretched out Old Polish Music thin enough to see the sun through without letting it rip, giving us a diffuse lens through which to regard the precariousness of our existence.

Even when the inspirations are of a more imaginative persuasion, they feel no less real. A childlike wonder reigns supreme in “Don’t Tell.” This melange of whistling, percussive clicks, trembling strings, and celesta is a record spinning backward. It cradles a flute like a newborn sibling, ending in a unified song of well-being. Lastly, “Loplop im Wald” refers to the magical bird solely capable of traversing Max Ernst’s mysterious painted forests. Tenser and moonlit, its Morse code trails ever outward into a calling of escape, hoping nature won’t come crashing down on itself before the journey can be completed.

With such a profoundly familiar sense of imagination to regard, we are left with only ourselves as companions, conversing until we implode as sound itself.

Valentin Silvestrov: Maidan (ECM New Series 2359)

| Tyran Grillo

Valentin Silvestrov
Maidan

Kjiv Chamber Choir
Mykola Hobdych conductor
Recorded 2016
St. Michael’s Cathedral, Kjiv
Engineer: Andrij Mokrystkij
Cover photo: private collection
Recording produced by Kjiv Choir Productions
Release date: September 30, 2022

At the core of German existentialist Martin Heidegger’s philosophy was a concept he called “thrownness” (Geworfenheit). Although he meant it to express the uncontrollable immanence of being born into a specific time and place, it has since taken on connotations of suffering and hardship, without which life would never be defined. On Maidan, Valentin Silvestrov’s third all-choral program for ECM New Series, we witness the composer thrown from his private spiritual light into secular shadow.

Sung once again by the Kjiv Chamber Choir under the conduction of Mykola Hobdych, Silvestrov’s writing takes on a political layer he never wished it to have. The title refers to the “Euromaidan,” or the “Revolution of Dignity,” as it is known in Ukraine, signaling the government’s refusal to associate itself with the European Union in 2014 and a precursor to Russia’s invasion on February 24, 2022. Witnessing these events unfold, Silvestrov, then 84, took solace in song. With the alarm bells of St. Michael’s Cathedral sounding a rare alarm in the background, he reclothed the naked body of nationalism with verses from Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861) and liturgical texts.

The album’s bulk is reserved for Maidan 2014, a “cycle of cycles,” which melts the words of the Ukrainian national anthem (penned by Pavlo Chubynsky) into five different molds. Its opening proclamation—“Ukraine’s freedom has not yet perished, nor has her glory…”—takes on more of its intended meaning than ever, crying in the wilderness against the onslaught of a regime surrounding itself in self-fulfilling icons.

In response to such inflations of power, much of what fleshes out the remaining spaces is scriptural in origin. “Give Rest, O Christ, to Thy Servants,” for example, speaks with the voice of the Savior on the cross, who forgave his enemies as he died by their hand. We feel surrounded by the spears of those who would deem him a blasphemer and usurper of authority. Individual singers and choir mirror this dynamic, balancing the alto-led vigil of “The Lord’s Prayer” with the Belarusian folk song-inspired “Lullaby.” These embody the same contradiction of “Lacrimosa,” which awaits a blessed hope in the thorns of a world without it. Like the soloist in “Holy God,” giving praise, honor, and glory to the one on high, they understand that no evil can ultimately overcome the power of faith. Even the wordless “Elegy” makes its deference palpable.

Few composers articulate silence with sound (and vice versa) like Silvestrov, as demonstrated by three collections from 2014 (Four Songs), 2015 (Triptych), and 2016 (Diptych). These settings of Shevchenko range from robust (“The Might Dnieper”) and reproachful (“Come to Your Senses”) to fable-like (“A Cherry Orchard by the House”) and altruistic (“To Little Mariana”), reaching their darkest resignations in “My Testament,” in which the narrator requests, “When I am dead, bury me / In my beloved Ukraine.” Thus, the music suggests that wickedness in high places is truer than we care to admit.

Since Silvestrov now sees the world as Maidan, releasing this music to a wider audience feels appropriate. No longer is it chained to the narrow vision of a particular historical moment but rather the delicate swan song of something dying in all of us lest we fail to have room for hope when the chance arises. “After all,” he says, “the louder the mortars and canons roar, the softer the music becomes.” Therefore, his goal is not to evoke the chaos of war; he is a shield for peace, standing his ground in its storm.

Heiner Goebbels: A House of Call (ECM New Series 2728/29)

| Tyran Grillo

Heiner Goebbels
A House of Call – My Imaginary Notebook

Ensemble Modern Orchestra
Vimbayi Kaziboni conductor
Recorded September 2021
by Bayerischer Rundfunk
Prinzregententheater, München
Engineer: Clemens Deller
Recording engineer: Gerhard Gruber
Mixed and mastered by Clemens Deller, Heiner Goebbels, and Gerhard Gruber
Cover photo: Gérald Minkoff
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: August 26, 2022

With A House of Call, Heiner Goebbels peels back his most significant layer of multimedia music for the stage. This self-styled “imaginary notebook” incorporates archival recordings of prayers, songs, and other speech acts into dialogic relationships with a full orchestra. Much of what we hear is old and anonymous, barely hanging by a thread of preservation and never imaginable in a concert setting. And yet, here it all is, wired together like some elaborate lie detector of our shared past, pinging with increasing frequency to signal every denial of complicity by proxy. Tempting as it might be to view such a project through an archaeological or ethnographic lens, to do so would strengthen the very contradictions it wishes to dilute in its reckonings of time and place. “The music is a direct response to the complexity and roughness of the voices,” says Goebbels in his liner note, pointing also to the radiance thereof against the opacity of present traumas.

Across four thematic assemblages, the Ensemble Modern Orchestra, under the direction of Vimbayi Kaziboni, draws upon an intimate relationship with Goebbels to bring his vision of death to life. Part I, “Stein Schere Papier” (Rock Paper Scissors), cites Pierre Boulez’s orchestral work Répons as foundation, magnifying its call-and-response principle with glimpses of Goebbels’s art rock band Cassiber from the same period (the early 1980s). The initial stirrings of a privileged crowd indicate the biological venues we often fail to maintain. The instrumental colors are fluid, attentive to detail, and indicative of various styles pouring from many portals at once. The story of Sisyphus, as retold in Heiner Müller’s “Immer den gleichen Stein” (Always the same stone), wraps the orchestra in a chameleonic skin. And as the street noise of a Berlin building site from 2017 stirs up a vortex of unread manifestos, faded newspapers, and other detritus, we begin to treat all words as fair game.

Part II, “Grain de la voix,” borrows from the Roland Barthes essay of the same name, in which the French philosopher asserted the power of language to shield oneself against the glare of mortality. Ghosts from the Caucasus region open their lungs, strings trembling beneath the surface as a violin leaps in sporadic response. Thus, the hypocrisy of destroying the questions of culture to answer them is outed. When more modern recordings, like that of Iranian musician Hamidreza Nourbaksh intoning Rumi from 2010, reveal themselves, they take on a volition that blinds the orchestra’s feeble attempts at imitation. The juxtaposition is critically self-aware, a score written in scars. The evocation of Komitas and Armenian soprano Zabelle Panosian hints at the spiritual planes being razed in addition to the physical, as scrutinized in Part III, “Wax and Violence.” The title refers to the wax cylinders weaponized by pseudoscientific ideologues whose voracious appetite for the “exotic” was only the beginning of their consumption. In particular, Hans Lichtenecker’s xenophobic aural documents of the very people German soldiers would later destroy through genocide pull us by the ears. A recording of school children in the Namibian village of Berseba is even more haunting and spawns a big-band catharsis—if falsely so called, for what do we have to be released from by comparison? The effect is even stronger in the laments and incantations of Part IV, “When Words Gone,” wherein Amazon rituals conducted in lost languages blend into lines from one of Samuel Becket’s last texts amid digital whispers.

The danger of all this is reading the wrong kind of sorrow into everyone we hear. We latch on to familiar names like life preservers, forgetting that the nameless have been speaking truth all along. And so, while it would be easy to call this the pinnacle of Goebbels’s work, it might be more appropriate to see it as his valley of the shadow of death. We walk through it, guided by hands unseen, in faith that hope awaits us on the other side. But to get there, we must be willing to face the hostile forces of collective memory, thick with the mud of misunderstanding.

Maacha Deubner: Bessonnitsa

| Tyran Grillo

Soprano Maacha Deubner, whose voice has graced such masterpieces as Giya Kancheli’s Exil, folds her operatic pleats into the tapestry of the KAPmodern-Ensemble in a program of latter-day chamber music. Bessonnitsa is Russian for “insomnia” and points both to an overarching theme and to Valentin Silvestrov’s eponymous piece for soprano and piano. Reminiscent of Francis Poulenc’s songs, it is the album’s crown jewel. Its flowing sense of time and evocation is like a storm turning into ocean and touching the shore with its final breath. One can also trace a line of continuity between this and Edison Denisov’s At the Turning Point for soprano and piano (1979), a set of temporally brief yet spiritually far-reaching evocations of flesh and word in a self-shadowing mode. Deubner navigates them as one might tell the story of their life.

Sofia Gubaidulina’s Brief an die Dichterin Rimma Dalos for soprano and violoncello (1985) begins with the solo voice, floating yet carrying the weight of a monument carved in time. “My soul is a Sphinx,” she sings as if to give that monument a name, setting the immaterial self upon an altar of ruins and unfinished verses. The words come from writer Rimma Dalos, whose texts have also been lovingly set by Hungarian composer György Kurtág. Gubaidulina’s approach, however, is never so compact, as proven by the solo cello commentary that follows.

Most of the pieces here belong to the mind and heart of Elena Firsova, for whom the poetry of Ossip Mandelstam (1891-1938) is a touchstone. Sorrows (Tristia II), op. 145 (2013) carries over the same scoring from Gubaudulina’s contribution and bears a dedication to Deubner. The music is at once a reflection of and counterpoint to the poetry, which looks deep into the night to uncover its many layers of shadow:

Who knows, when the word ‘departure’ is spoken
what kind of separation is at hand.

Such words point not to dialogue but to prayers walking parallel paths. They can see but not hear each other, ever caught in cycles of pain and healing.

In Towards the Starlight for soprano and string quartet (2017), receiving its world premiere recording, we have a different side of Mandelstam. Whereas in Sorrows he praised the uninterrupted life, now we get:

I hate the starlight’s
monotonous spectrum.

Such is the duality of consciousness. In the second movement, “How slow the horses go,” we encounter a more sorrowful glow. The poet sees things he cannot see, speaks of things that have no voice. Cello and soprano engage in subliminal communication as delicate pizzicato and high strains give way to flowers of darkness. In the final movement, lyrical self-deprecation:

To read only children’s books,
To cherish only children’s thoughts.

Yet another facet of Mandelstam catches the light of From the Voronezh Notebooks, op. 121 (2009). This cantata, also for soprano and string quartet, moves into organic textures following a nervous prelude. From the raindrops dripping from leaves in “Greens” and the pouncing delicacy of “A Cat” to the frantic trajectories of “In the Sky” and the final “Madness,” fear is never far behind. Deubner expresses these states of mind with lucid projection.

Peppered among Firsova’s more substantial assemblies are three monologues, of which Starry Flute, op. 56 (1992) is the most intimate. Dedicated to the late Aurèle Nicolet, it captures the brilliant flutist’s penchant for extended techniques, each of which naturally extends the breath. Sustained notes float as if made of vapor (and indeed, that is what our life can only be), so that by the end, we are left in stasis with memories of those enchantments now wilting in the hot sun of reality.

Taking account of these works in the aggregate, I am inclined to treat them as a face seen from different angles of light. It smiles and frowns, sleeps and awakes, screams and whispers, showing us that the continuity between states of mind is where our existence is defined.