ECM Records

Valentin Silvestrov: Silent Songs (ECM New Series 1898/99)

| Tyran Grillo

 

Valentin Silvestrov
Silent Songs

Sergey Yakovenko baritone
Ilya Scheps piano
Valentin Silvestrov piano
Recorded 1986 in Moscow
Engineer: Piotr Kondrashin
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Down through shivering fog, the moon now
Makes its way across the night,
Soaking melancholy meadows
In a melancholy light.
–from “Winter Journey” by Alexander Pushkin (trans. A. Z. Foreman)

When producer Manfred Eicher decided to make the Stille Lieder of Valentin Silvestrov available on ECM, he accomplished one of the most unprecedented rescue efforts from Russian label Melodiya’s peerless archive. The title, I have it on good word, is more accurately rendered as “Quiet Songs,” and indeed they are startlingly present in their subtlety and depth of thematic power. Silvestrov’s score demands that the trained baritone sing at the threshold of his capacity, enabling a strained, vulnerable quality to what might normally be a commanding eloquence. Yet in that vulnerability the singer spreads wings that perhaps have remained folded since childhood, arresting the heart via a new level of narrative intimacy. The piano, played to gossamer effect by Ilya Scheps, floats Sergey Yakovenko’s emphatic wonders on a current of ink and time. These melodies look deep into the core of every poem (though the music is so evocative one needn’t even refer to the translations), and find in themselves the means to flourish in a space stilled by anticipation.

These are mournful songs of lost love, unstoppable nostalgia, and (sometimes satiric) exile, and from their nearly two-hour expanse one is hard-pressed to choose favorites. Yet in the interest of exposition I can hardly ignore the heartfelt intensities—in both composition and performance—of Silvestrov’s Pushkin settings, in particular “Winter Journey” and the elegiac “Verses Composed At Night At A Time Of Insomnia.” Like footprints in snow, they are deep and prone to disappearance. By contrast, two Lermentov settings—“When The Cornfield, Yellowing, Stirs” and “Mountain Summits”—stretch Yakovenko to the cycle’s highest registers, overflowing therefrom with honest innocence. In these one senses the same diffuse gaze as Yesenin’s “Autumn Song,” which aside from being one of the most heart-stopping of the set also lifts us above the landscapes through which we otherwise trudge in desperation.

The crowning highlight in this regard, however, is Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” which twists the mind into a simulacrum of its own cognition. Having sung this piece myself, my feelings toward it are admittedly skewed, though I will venture to say that if it doesn’t move you then nothing in these lieder will. “La Belle” is also representative of Scheps’s sensitivity, which renders the keys as might the wind rustle whispers from leaves. It is just present enough to carry along the voice without overpowering it, allowing its contours the grace of self-definition. Similarly, Shevchenko’s “Farewell, O World, O Earth” inspires some of Silvestrov’s most inspired songcraft, which he would revisit in his Requiem for Larissa.

The program ends with Four Songs after Osip Mandelstam (noteworthy is “Schubert On Water”), with the composer at piano. This quartet is significant not only for being a premier recording, but also for being a rare vocal postludium that, perhaps more succinctly than anything in the Silvestrov oeuvre, encapsulates Silvestrov’s post facto aesthetic with dignity and deference.

The writing throughout worms its way into the mind and nests itself where it cannot be reached by waking memory. Rather, it finds slumber in hopes of our own, seeking in the texts a source of fated sound. This is music that stops the heart and starts the mind. An incalculably important recording, at last given the permanence it deserves.

Without a doubt one of the top ten New Series albums of all time.

Aparis: s/t (ECM 1404)

| Tyran Grillo

Aparis

Markus Stockhausen trumpets, fluegelhorn
Simon Stockhausen synthesizers, saxophone
Jo Thönes acoustic and electronic drums
Recorded August 1989 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The time has come that you shall remember who you are.
Forever have you been and shall eternally be.
You have come to feel the joy of creation,
to see its beauty and infinitely love all there is.
For all is thyself.
Each moment you create yourself and a thousand worlds around.
Your being is bliss, perfection, and light.
Rejoice, my friend, rejoice!

Aparis was an ephemeral band comprised of trumpeter Markus Stockhausen, his brother Simon (a sound artist and composer), and percussionist Jo Thönes. Although Markus does, of course, bring his characteristic sweep to nearly every stretch he plays, it is Simon whose contributions shine brightest in this atmospheric set of six. In them one may locate a range of influences, spanning the ECM spectrum from Pat Metheny (“Rejoice”) and Terje Rypdal (“Aparis”) to Oregon (“Carnaval”) and a smattering of Jon Hassell here and there for good measure. That being said, the results are fresh and original and bob with a decidedly aquatic sense of temporal space.

The nearly 17-minute title track is by far the most effective. It begins in a cavern of icicles amid looming shadows as Markus’s lone voice oozes from the stone like an afterlife. With the addition of bass and drum lines, steady yet ever ambient, that trumpet jumps through even airier hoops in flanged clothing. A sequencer resolves from the mists, soprano sax in tow. As if to confirm Rypdal’s possible involvement, a synth electric guitar rises toward the end. Next is “Poseidon,” which after an opening state of frenetic group activity launches into a synth-driven ride, a preamble to the expansive territories painted by Markus in the colors of night. “Rejoice” links back to the album’s opening strains, discovering along its winding roads that the journey is already the destination. Distorted recitations over a bed of sonic nails curl themselves into a protective ball and roll into the sun with all the surety of a dreamer awakened, leaving “Peach” to cry with lyrical finality, careening across the horizon with a focused song and impressions of a clear day.

Aparis is not without its missteps (the synth-heaviness of “High Ride,” for example, detracts from its punch), but overall its impressions seeps through you smoothly and at the speed of life. Like the flames on the album’s cover, they bleed from a scar in the air, hanging souls like ethereal laundry. Together, they are a marriage of creationism and evolution in sound.

<< Shankar: M.R.C.S. (ECM 1403)
>> ECM New Series Anthology (ECM 1405 NS)

John Surman: Adventure Playground (ECM 1463)

| Tyran Grillo

John Surman
Adventure Playground

John Surman baritone and soprano saxophones, bass clarinet
Paul Bley piano
Gary Peacock bass
Tony Oxley drums
Recorded September 1991 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

John Surman’s Adventure Playground is an appendix to Paul Bley’s previous quartet efforts, only now we find them in the company of bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Tony Oxley. And while the session does drip with the same brooding viscosity one would come to expect, the added colors of Oxley enhance the music’s inner states with endless novelty. Take, for instance, the anthemic frenzy he builds in his sole compositional contribution, “Just For Now,” by which he holds smelling salts under the nose of the listener’s attention. And again in Surman’s “Quadraphonic Question,” a lumbering yet somehow airy thing to which the rules of interpretation can only bow in appreciation of their own dismantling, his talents are especially brilliant, describing a host of people and places in bursts of expansive inquiries while managing to give those delicate soprano lines all the room they need to weep.

Not to be outdone, Surman rustles up a fine set of tunes from his own wellspring. Between the utterly gorgeous strains of “As If We Knew” and the nocturnal visions of “Twisted Roots” there is plenty to return to for future listening, while the baritone of “Duet For One” wanders up a long and teetering ladder until it can see above the clouds and, with a hand over the eyes, pinpoint a new destination on the horizon.

The unfathomable smoothness of that baritone is also a defining voice in “Figfoot,” the first of three tunes from Bley, who casts his own two cents with Oxley into an off-kilter bass line. Its rhythmic way thus shown, the music seems regard us with slogging humor. This is a dark swing of a piece with a characteristic tarnish, weathered like the patina of a familiar instrument. Bley hones his focus in “Twice Said Once,” yet another veil of intense and careful spontaneity through which the opaque visions of Surman’s bass clarinet leave us primed for the bluesy slice of gorgeousness that is “Seven.”

Peacock’s “Only Yesterday” may be the album’s plaintive opener, but it feels just as much like its conclusion. From a pianistic shower and tender reeds, it channels a flowing rivulet stained by the pigment of an unknown land. Peacock and Oxley dance somewhere upstream, bringing to their frolic an abiding sense of melancholy. In this percolating world of dreams and mythologies one finds an ever-visible thread running through it all. From this filament one can gather neither beginning nor end, but only the points one may grasp and allow it to lead one where it may. As with the album as a whole, it is a fully formed sphere even before the first note is played, waiting only for the light of our ears to reveal its more surprising topographies.

<< Ralph Towner: Open Letter (ECM 1462)
>> David Darling: Cello (ECM 1464)

Agnes Buen Garnås/Jan Garbarek: Rosensfole – Medieval Songs from Norway (ECM 1402)

| Tyran Grillo

Agnes Buen Garnås
Jan Garbarek
Rosensfole: Medieval Songs from Norway

Agnes Buen Garnås vocal
Jan Garbarek synthesizers, percussion instruments, soprano and tenor saxophones
Recorded Autumn 1988 at Bel Studio, Oslo
Engineers: Ingar Helgesen and Ulf Holland
Produced by Jan Garbarek and Manfred Eicher

One can hardly overstate the innovativeness of saxophonist Jan Garbarek. Having started as a strong arm of free jazz impressionism, Garbarek quickly turned to the future by mining the past, regaling the world of recorded music with an historical dimension. The crowning achievement of these efforts remains Rosensfole, for which we put the spotlight on folk singer Agnes Buen Garnås in lush settings of synthesizer, percussion, and tenor and soprano saxophones. These two complementary forces touch their cool torches to a tincture of medieval songs from their native Norway, making for an album that could exist nowhere but on ECM, a label ever at the forefront of vivacious interpretations of antiquities with the languages of the here and now.

Such explorations had by then already manifested themselves in Garbarek’s work, but with Garnås his vision was deepened in an entirely new direction. It is also because of her that we have the current program, which reads like a catalog of her work in the field. The scope of her commitment is clearest in “Innferd,” which comes from none other than the singer’s mother. Her bright calls to power blend the word into image and both into air, filling the listener with countless narrative possibilities. (On that note, one needs hardly a translated word within reach in order to appreciate the evocativeness thereof.) The title song carries forth an especially potent vibe, which is heightened by Garbarek’s attentive percussion and synth dulcimer strains. Like many of the tracks thereafter, its spell breaks all too quickly, leaving us still and in dire need of the nourishment that comes in the 16-minute “Margjit Og Targjei Risvollo.” Here the music heaves with the weight of legend, bringing the freshness of its wounds to bear upon the unsuspecting listener with unwavering drama.

In the wake of this epic statement, “Maalfri Mi Fruve” peaks above the mounting waves in an intimate call and response. This stunner sits at the edge of a towering abyss of life (and a love of the same), segueing us into sonic flowers like “Venelite” and “Signe Lita” that morph into drum-heavy expositions of the plains. The latter, along with the droning “Grisilla,” unlocks its secrets one string at a time, floating freely and with the tinge of a lullaby—its sweetness veneered by a hint of mortality—before riding into the sunset on a steed of light and poetry. “Stolt Øli” gives us an even bolder taste of the salty air, furthering that ride through a cloud-shadowed landscape of crumbling stone castles and widening vistas, while “Lillebroer Og Storebroer” diffuses its gallop with electronic voices surrounding a blacksmith’s beat.

Garnås ends this timeless date with “Utferd,” which yodels across the skies with the surety of a shepherd folding into pasture and melts into Garbarek’s plaintive whale song. The latter’s reeds are similarly understated throughout, providing nary a leading line but thickly drawn chords and ephemeral appendages.

Although Rosensfole may not have caught on so noticeably stateside, it proved to be an eye-opener in Norway, where generations of up-and-coming jazz musicians took it as a window into the neglected corners of their craft. One can still hear its influence in the work of Steve Tibbetts and in crossover acts like Vas. A fitting companion to Trio Mediaeval’s Folk Songs, Rosensfole shows a side of Garbarek’s evocative abilities heard only on his solo albums and, more importantly, has in Garnås introduced many to a voice for the ages.

<< Keith Jarrett: Paris Concert (ECM 1401)
>> Shankar: M.R.C.S. (ECM 1403)

Shankar: M.R.C.S. (ECM 1403)

| Tyran Grillo

Shankar
M.R.C.S.

Shankar double violin
Zakir Hussain tabla
Vikku Vinayakram ghatam
Jon Christensen drums
Recorded 1987 and 1989 at Studio Bauer, Ludwigsburg and Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineers: Martin Wieland and Jan Erik Kongshaug
Completed and mixed 1989 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Multi-instrumentalist L. Shankar’s fascinating evolution as a musician and composer took yet another intimate turn with M.R.C.S. Dedicated to Shankar’s father, V. Lakshminarayana, it also boasts master percussionists Zakir Hussain (tabla), Vikku Vinayakram (ghatam), and drummer Jon Christensen. The depths of the album’s experiences are forever aquatic, as in the opening “Adagio,” which floats Shankar’s double violin insights on a dark and winding current. Filmic and vivid, its gauche stretches a fine canvas for the pigments that follow. “All I Care” marries the rhythmic edge of “March” (an interlude from Christensen) with Shankar’s cosmic pizzicato and gossamer comet trails, the latter reaching glorious improvisational heights that can only end in fadeout, lest their perpetuity be harmed. The music travels away from us, ever tuneful, into the tabla-infused “Reasons.” Here, Hussain trail-marks a scurrying snare, backing more winged artistry from the leader. The lilting, homespun feeling of “Back Again” unravels from a deceptively simple line a heartfelt wash, as does “Al’s Hallucinations,” in which the melodiousness of Hussain’s tabla enhances the music’s playful melancholy. After the waltz-like and romantic “Sally,” Hussain and Vinayakram carry us on the back of a “White Buffalo” into the sparkle of “Ocean Waves.” For this final breath, Shankar adds a veneer of piano over his reverberant orchestrations, thereby ending this journey where it began: in and of the tide.

Shankar’s sense of melody is endearing and luminous, familiar from the first. Like a great klezmer clarinetist, he weaves a song that is at once mournful and exuberant.

Proof yet again that “fusion” is a misnomer. This is simply wonderful music that need be nothing else.

<< Agnes Buen Garnås/Jan Garbarek: Rosensfole (ECM 1402)
>> Aparis: s/t (ECM 1404)

Eugène Ysaÿe: Sonates pour violon solo – Zehetmair (ECM New Series 1835)

| Tyran Grillo

 

Eugène Ysaÿe
Sonates pour violon solo

Thomas Zehetmair violin
Recorded September 2002 at Propstei St. Gerold, Austria
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Produced by Manfred Eicher

While I continue to wait—in vain, it seems—for a Thomas Zehetmair redux of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin on ECM, we do have, in this touchstone recording of EugèneYsaÿe’s comparable works for the same, easily one of the most enthralling albums to come from the repertoire in a long while. Composed between 1923 and 1924, Ysaÿe’s constructions emerged from a dearth of provocative solo violin literature to which his contributions were more than ornaments and seem as much predecessors as descendents of Bach (as if Bach had anticipatorily extracted from their less contestable passages a more concentrated form of solitude). If Bach’s is a perfect fruit, gilded by two centuries’ of difference, then Ysaÿe’s is both the soil that feeds it and nourishes its seeds, slumbering beneath a layer of frost in the morning sun.

The Grave of the Sonata No. 1 in G minor opens the set with a calligraphic flourish in reverse, funneling fanciful implications into an originary stroke. From these stirrings one already senses the many layers of historicity at work here. In the Fugato we encounter the sinewy balance of robustness and grace that infuses the performance as a whole, which glides off of Zehetmair’s bow like liquid mercury, those double stops seeming to come from a single string divided, opened rather than paralleled. His flexibility works wonders in the Allegretto, contrasting serrated runs with more amorphous shapes, before unwrapping its sweetest virtuosities in the Finale. This tour de force is on par with any of the Paganini caprices and again showcases the powerful subtleties of Zehetmair’s unparalleled (no pun intended) double stops.

The first movement of the Sonata No. 2 in A minor, appropriately titled “Obsession,” is many things to the Preludio of Bach’s Partita No. 3: fragmentation, recapitulation, homage, and parody, to name a few. Like two galaxies shuffled together, these monumental signatures share more than a few loops and hooks, exhaling nebulae on the muted strings of “Malinconia.” This call from distant shores is an afterlife brought into the continental drift of shadows. A lute-like interlude brings us to the ecstatic exposition that “Les furies,” from which Paul Giger draws (at 0:42) an intertextual marker in Chartres (listen for it in “Crossing”).

This distinct sense of exuberant introversion continues in the Sonata No. 3 in D minor (“Ballade”), the nuances of which we were given a taste alongside Heinz Holliger’s Violinkonzert. Thus do we bridge over into the Sonata No. 4 in E minor, which nods again in Paganini’s direction. Its tripartite structure cradles a languid Sarabande, after which the enthralling Finale—during which there hardly seems a moment when at least two strings are not being engaged—closes the most notoriously demanding piece of the set.

The movements pare down one by one, giving us the diptych of the Sonata No. 5 in G major. Equal parts Debussean ritual and imageless reflection, it concludes in a sensuous dance filled with avian throatedness. So, too, do the flying swoops of the single-movement Sonata No. 6 in E major regale us with songs of clouds and earth alike.

With a tone deferential yet trailblazing, Zehetmair captures and sets free the genetic codes enraptured by and through these sonatas. I cannot imagine a more ideal performer, or more ideal acoustics than the crisp reverberations of Austria’s Propstei St. Gerold. Every finger seems to rotate on its own axis in the grander solar system of Zehetmair’s playing, at the center of which shines the sun of Ysaÿe’s glorious music. Each planet is of such distinct character that as a family they seem to inhabit their own respective universes, meeting only in the aftermath of a binding cataclysm, which necessitates the retelling of their lost cultures. Picking through this referential hall of mirrors, we see exactly what we hear: a spontaneous recreation.

Valentin Silvestrov: Requiem for Larissa (ECM New Series 1778)

| Tyran Grillo

Valentin Silvestrov
Requiem for Larissa

Yevhen Savchuk choirmaster
The National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine
Volodymyr Sirenko conductor
Valentin Silvestrov conductor
Recorded February 2001 in Kiev, Ukraine
Engineers: Arkady Vichorev and Valery Stupnitsky
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“I do not write new music.
My music is a response to and an echo of what already exists.”

The requiem is a curious object: on the one hand it memorializes someone important to the composer, while on the other most listeners will have never known the dedicatee. In that sense the requiem fulfills a transitory function, and a communicative one at that, bringing a sense of relational knowledge to the abyss. In the case of Valentin Silvestrov’s entry into the Requiem ledger, I feel only the mise-en-abyme of love, and the shape of its web after a cold wind has snapped half of its axial threads. Written between 1997 and 1999, it was intended to be the Ukrainian’s last composition—so affected was he by the death of his wife, musicologist Larissa Bondarenko. As with his above sentiments, the sound-world it introduces to us is a churning sea bordered in humility.

The more one listens to Silvestrov, the more one becomes accustomed to the piano’s (omni)presence in his orchestral imagination. It is both center and periphery of an ever-expanding field in which the wool of darkness is spun into light. And thus it is from the piano that the Requiem’s vocality proceeds, the choir sewn into the larger fabric with divided immediacy, such that emotions merely constitute an audible act shrouding an internal need for stillness. Tenor and alto solos shimmer against a reverberant mesh of harp and strings, each a clear path to struggle. In them Silvestrov admirers will recognize a redux of his Shevchenko setting in Silent Songs, and in the Agnus Dei a choral expansion of his Der Bote, the last piece of her husband’s Larissa ever heard. Though cut from a template, they whisper a self-taught language. Winds pressing in at all sides carry us back into the piano’s embrace, in which we realize that heaven is not a space above but one within. Retreating farther inward, morning glories all, we fold in moonlight with a simple bow, finding some respite in the laborious nature of our surroundings. Effervescence balances at the fulcrum of acceptance, only to be dispersed in the swirling pool of the final section, dissolving behind closed eyes.

I know I would not be alone in expressing thankfulness that Silvestrov has since continued to compose, but in doing so I would be missing the point. Aside from the long-distance comforts my meager consolations may or may not provide, such a gesture is as tear-distorted as the sounds that inspired it. I might also praise this recording for its engineering, performances, and packaging, but when reviewing a requiem these concerns are inconsequential. There is no way that such a project could defeat itself, for its heart has already been punctured by the loss from which it continues to grow. It is its own entity now, atrophied and crawling, searching for rest in a landscape without berth.

Larissa was unknown to me, but whenever I listen to this music in her honor, I feel as if that lack of knowledge becomes filled with something vaster, a nourishing remembrance that sustains everything we are once we have been thrown into the center of the universe to slumber whence we came.

<< Dave Holland Big Band: What Goes Around (ECM 1777)
>> Heiner Goebbels: Eislermaterial (ECM 1779 NS)

Between One Embrace and the Next: Ulysses’ Gaze and the Pace of Discovery

| Tyran Grillo

And, if the soul is about to know itself, it must gaze into the soul.
–Plato, Alcibiades 133b

The film

In a quiet arthouse theater one night in May of 1997, a scene from Theo Angelopoulos’s 1995 masterwork Ulysses’ Gaze reached out and holds me still. In it the protagonist, A (Harvey Keitel), is relating a personal story to a curator from Skopje (Maia Morgenstern, who plays every woman Keitel encounters throughout the film’s nearly three-hour duration). As the latter runs alongside the train that threatens to vanquish their transient encounter, A’s story lures her into the clattering comforts of the car, and into the emptiness of his heart. He tells her of stumbling upon the birthplace of Apollo, of seeing there something so vivid that every Polaroid he attempted to take came out only blank, “as if my glance wasn’t working.” In those empty squares, those black holes made tangible, he sees both the past of which his body and mind were formed and the future into which he blindly walks.  Thus does Angelopoulos engage us, finding in this nameless figure an everyman whose quest for origins beyond his self leads only to a hollowing out of that self.

We see a film: Spinning Women by Yannakis and Miltos Manakias. It is perhaps the first film, speculates A’s voiceover. The first gaze. Yet once we are released from its black-and-white confines, the only gaze afforded us is of misty waters, indistinct and close to blanking out. Monochrome pales into color as we witness Yannakis’s last moments, and the single ship upon the sea that is his farewell.

The vessel looms like a face, fills the screen with its expressive pace, and breaks the seal on a filmic letter like no other.


“How many borders must we cross to reach home?”

Yannakis, we learn, left behind three reels of undeveloped film, and it is these A wants like a light bulb hungers for electricity that will one day pop its filament. We contemplate the ship and the three missing reels as A sets out on his personal journey. He hopes a film archivist from Athens may be able to help him, but is instead escorted through crowded streets in which A has not set for 35 years, and which echo with the controversies of his latest film beyond the theater doors it has closed.

A follows the trail into Albania, a land of snow and silence where refugees stare at the mountainous border as if it might speak on their behalf.

A woman who hasn’t seen her sister in 47 years since the civil war asks if A might take her along. His cab driver agrees and drops her off at Korytsa. Only she doesn’t recognize it as the place of her girlhood. She stands in the middle of the street, empty save for the agony of her shattered expectations. Part of us stays with her, knowing that all the comfort in the world will never alleviate the wounds she has endured to get here.

Haunted as much emotionally by the Manakias brothers’ film as we are visually by it, A maps a path of ruin through the Balkan Wars and the First Great War. The turmoil of the region is encoded in every frame of those missing reels. Yet the brothers were interested less in politics and more in people. They recorded “all the ambiguities,” A tells the woman from Skopje, who at first takes no interest in his obsession, which overtakes him to the point where he relives the brothers’ exile by the Bulgarian government as collaborators against the state, feels the confiscation of their archives like an artery ripped from his chest, smells the gunpowder of a mock execution. He wants to find his own first glance, long lost yet always tapping him on the shoulder, and his only way to know where it leads is to take on traumas of which he will never be a part.

His itinerary reads like a litany of destruction. He follows footsteps into a time where his mother can care for him, a substitute in memory for what eludes him in the present. Then again, in this film there is no “present” as such, bearing as it does an eternal trace of that which bore it. A shares a dance with his mother, and in the space of that dance a family is destroyed, dispossessed, and broken before posing for its final group portrait by an illusory photographer who may be the director himself, if not us in his place.

A awakens from that dream, shaken and silent. At the docks of an overcast morning, he bids farewell to Skopje, even as the head of an enormous statue of Lenin is craned onto a barge behind them.

The nameless woman questions his tears. “I’m crying because I can’t love you,” he tells her between sobs, and tears himself away from the only security he may ever know.

“The war’s so close it might as well be far away,” observes an old journalist friend in Belgrade, where the head of its Film Archives has agreed to meet. The man tells A he once had the reels, but after failing to devise the proper chemical formula to develop them, gave them to a colleague in Sarajevo with whom he lost touch during the war. Of course, A insists on going to Sarajevo. He rows a boat into dark waters (an allegory, perhaps, for the toughness of Balkan reality itself) and nearly falls into a double life with a widow in mourning.


“The first thing God created was the journey, then came doubt…and nostalgia.”

Upon arriving in the city, surrounded by bombs and crumbling edifices, he foolishly asks of those fleeing around him, “Is this Sarajevo?” as if his purpose in being there were more important than their demise. It is the deepest moment of denial, and therefore of weakness, in the film, and throws us into the soul of a man whose love for history has blinded him to the visceral impact of its making.

He finds who he is looking for: a film museum curator (the inimitable Erland Josephson) by the name of S. Even as the air explodes with dust and bloodshed, S commends A for his faith in having traveled this far for something believed to be lost.

S, we learn, has been searching for that magic formula for years, and A’s persistence emboldens him to finish his task.


“You have no right to keep it locked away. The gaze…it’s the war, the insanity, the death…”

It is in Sarajevo that we learn the true meaning of the fog, which creeps in like a protective force, a shroud in which one can live without fear, if only for a brief time. In its embrace neighbors can speak without words. In its diffuse glow a youth orchestra made of Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, traveling from city to city during ceasefire, can play its song for all to hear.  But even this screen cannot keep them from harm, for behind its veil children are shot before their parents, thrown to the water from which they took shape. And so, the man who rescued a gaze from certain death now becomes a part of it, but not before leaving the successfully developed reels.

Yet we never see those reels, only their light flitting across A’s weary eyes. Whether or not he finds them is as immaterial as they legend they have grown to be. In those reels lies a dream, “a gaze struggling to emerge from the dark…a kind of birth.” And in birth there is no sight but the glare of strife, no sound but the wail of projection.


“What am I if not a collector of vanished gazes?”

And just what is all this gazing about? Beyond that of the camera, of the eye in reality (and of the soul in non), it is for me the slumber of the centuries, dismembered and left to drift like Lenin’s statue on river’s flow. It is the pathos of pathos, forever unrequited in the blink of a fettered eye.

As a teenager I used to have a recurring dream. In it I was younger still, perhaps 12, and clothed modestly in a tunic and brown leather sandals. I ran through a hilly landscape, dodging brush and fauna to the top of a rocky slope. And there I lay low beneath an olive tree, a quiver of arrows slung across my back, overlooking a landscape of ruins. I like to think that I was also gazing, like A, upon Apollo’s birthplace, of which I can remember nothing but the feeling: an unanswering abyss of rock and overgrowth into which I cast my questioning stones.

The more tangible it is, the more unrecoverable a past becomes, the more easily burned, the more easily dressed in the clothes of the dead.

The music

Among the many sonic cartographies it has innovated, ECM has redefined almost every genre it has touched. This includes the film soundtrack, which, through the work of Angelopoulos’s sonic partner, Eleni Karaindrou, has shown us music that stands alone before reaching toward the images it cradles.

Eleni Karaindrou
Ulysses’ Gaze
(ECM New Series 1570)

Kim Kashkashian viola soloist
Vangelis Christopoulos oboe
Andreas Tsekouras accordion
Sopcratis Anthis trumpet
Vangelis Skouras french horn
Christos Sfetsas cello
Georgia Voulvi voice
Lefteris Chalkiadakis conductor
Recorded December 1994 at Sound Studio, Athens
Engineer: Yannis Smirneos
Produced by Manfred Eicher

This soundtrack introduced me to the Angelopoulos’s cinematic world long before I saw a single frame. It would be two years before I had a chance to see the selfsame film, by which time I had heard the soundtrack and stared at the booklet stills so many times that I felt like I knew every ventricle of Ulysses’ pensively beating heart. Though set against a backdrop of primal discovery, it ends up becoming its own discovery, linking the personal to the political to the universal in one red thread, represented to its fullest by Kashkashian’s gut-wrenching playing. Though mainly driven by the soloist, there are splendid moments of conversation with oboe, as in “Ulysses’ Theme Variation II.” Yet what comes across as an intensely mournful theme can, with just an intensification of speed, turn into an exuberant dance.

Among the more touching moments in both film and soundtrack is “The River.” With its elegiac horn wafting out over the misty waters like a requiem for a fallen past never to be recaptured in the crumbling ruins of an age blinded by innovation, it breathes through our rib cages with voices of passage. The 17-minute spread of “Ulysses’ Gaze – Woman’s Theme, Ulysses’” is the album’s most enchanting encapsulation, the entire narrative telescoped into a single epic mosaic, drawn from the same ink as the tears of its characters. A lilting accordion carries us like a feather on wind into the inner portal of a traditional Byzantine Psalm, from which we emerge with that same thread in our grasp, sinking deeper with every reiteration until the seedlings of our plight become the stuff of myth and melted celluloid.

Ulysses’ Gaze bears dedication to the memory of the great Italian actor Gian Maria Volonté, whose role in the film was cut short by a fatal heart attack and recast to Josephson. In kind, I can only dedicate this review to the memory of Angelopoulos (1935-2012), a director in whose oeuvre everyone seems to find a ghostly double self, whispering at the fringe of conscious imagination.

May his gaze live on.

“I live my life in ever widening circles that rise above things.
I probably won’t come last, but I’ll try. I circle around God.”

<< Alexandr Mosolov: Sonatas for piano Nos. 2 and 5, etc. (ECM 1569 NS)
>> Thomas Demenga: J. S. Bach/B. A. Zimmermann (ECM 1571 NS)

Bobo Stenson Trio: Serenity (ECM 1740/41)

| Tyran Grillo

 

Bobo Stenson Trio
Serenity

Bobo Stenson piano
Anders Jormin double-bass
Jon Christensen drums
Recorded April 1999, HageGården Music Center, Brunskog, Sweden
Engineer: Åke Linton
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Serenity is the Bobo Stenson Trio’s night and day. With bassist Anders Jormin and drummer Jon Christensen, pianist Stenson has not only carved a niche for himself but has also redefined the tools with which he carves. With this date the Trio takes itself to yet another level, fashioning anew the very material to which those tools are laid. Something in the opening harmonics of “T.” tells us so. Blossoming against percussive footfalls, Jormin dances a tango of shadow and light into cool slumber, the dreams of which are mapped by the cardinal points of the next four tracks (“West Print,” “North Print,” “East Print,” “South Print”), each a magnetic improvisation which draws its directionality not only from the earth but also from the gravity of our emotions. The surest of these attractions brings us into the exigencies of the “Polska of Despair (II).” This chromatic twist never winds into the legs it needs to stand but only dissolves even as it hoists itself up on crumbling melodic crutches. In “Golden Rain” Jormin’s bass emotes as if a tree might sing, dropping fruit to the tune of Christensen’s cymbals as Stenson’s keys take in their surroundings like chlorophyll to sunlight. The nod to Wayne Shorter (“Swee Pea”) that follows sounds more like the rain that precedes it in title, falling as it does with the rhythm of a weeping cloud. And by the time Jormin redraws those paths with a recognizable surety, we accept it not as a resolution but as an amendment to its scattered beginnings in the piano’s fertile soil. “Simple & Sweet” begins with a protracted intro from Jormin, which after two and a half minutes of brilliance guides Stenson into view against an organic flow from Christensen. This is followed by Hanns Eisler’s “Die Pflaumenbaum,” one of the most reflective turns in the album’s passage. Christensen is brilliant on cymbals along the way, with nary a drum in earshot. “El Mayor” (Silvio Rodriguez) smoothes us out into the comforts of another rainy afternoon, threading itself through every droplet with a grace of a prayer and the immediacy of its answering. Jormin stands out yet again, playing almost pianistically, while Stenson proves that in the sometimes mountainous terrain of the ballad he is our most reliable Sherpa. The haunting group improvisation “Fader V (Father World)” is deep to the last drop, beginning inside the piano (as if in the heart) and drawing from it an array of ribbons around the maypole of memory. Yet the pace is contemplative, filled with bittersweet joy. Jormin’s bass rings true like the voice of the past, at once domineering and loving. “More Cymbals” might as well be Christensen’s middle name, though its results forefront only whispering rolls along with Jormin’s pained arco trails. “Die Nachtigall” (Hanns Eisler) is another foray into smoother territories. It brushes its way through space and time like a street sweeper in the mind, quarantining all the refuse of a varicolored life into the sewers—only we follow it through those corroded pipes, past families of rats and dim reflections and out into the ocean where they are reborn along the waves. The rubato smattering of sticks and strings that is “Rimbaud Gedicht” brings us at last to the most awesome track on the record: “Polska of Despair (I)” embodies the perfect combination of propulsive drumming, buoyant bass work (Jormin even pays brief homage to Andersen’s “305 W 18 St” in his solo), and soaring pianism that every trio aspires to. Finally, “Tonus” is classic Stenson. Around a bass line for the ages he weaves vivacious improvisational lines into a braid from which we may wish never to detangle ourselves.

The topography of Serenity is as varied as that of life, speaking to and from the heart of what this outfit is capable of. This record is first and foremost about clarity, second about a distant storm whose image is its soundtrack. In balancing these two forces—circumstance and memory—Stenson and company forge a shining star whose light illuminates everything that we are. It’s easy to let the spell of its lyricism wash over you like a song, but we are reminded that the Trio speaks as much as it sings, bringing life to a vocabulary that can only be uttered at the keyboard, fingerboard, and drum, each traipsing at the edge where words fail.

<< Ensemble Belcanto: Come un’ombra di luna (ECM 1739 NS)
>> Crispell/Peacock/Motian: Amaryllis (ECM 1742)