ECM Records

Vassilis Tsabropoulos: The Promise (ECM 2081)

| Tyran Grillo

The Promise

Vassilis Tsabropoulos
The Promise

Vassilis Tsabropoulos piano
Recorded January 2008 at Dmitri Mitropoulos Hall, Megaron, Athens
Engineer: Nikos Espialidis
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Vassilis Tsabropoulos’s sixth ECM disc proves that less is indeed more. The Greek pianist-composer offers 11 pieces of original and improvised material, most of it sketched just weeks before the recording session. As solo piano records go, this has none of the fire of a Keith Jarrett or the richness of a Richie Beirach, but what it foregoes in flourish it supplements with emotional fluency.

The album is tented by the first iteration and two equidistant variations of a song called “The Other,” the repetition of which links bed sheets like a child scaling from an orphanage’s high window. Enjoying the feeling of cool, damp grass between his toes, he looks around before taking that first fateful step into new life. Starlit and sweet, his face draws curtains with a single gaze, whispering a ghostly farewell. Between these support beams thrives an effective garden of ruminations, each with its own part to play. “Tale Of A Man” perhaps sees that same child grown into someone who has never forgotten the way his escape has shaped the here, the now, and the ever after. The left and right hands run parallel along opposite riverbanks, never touching across the watery path until they at last reach the ocean into which that river empties.

“Smoke And Mirrors” overlooks that calm, moonlit sea. Hints of dance drop their anchors and hold their vessel true in the afterglow of moonset, which registers as but a glimmer on the water. In “Pearl” Tsabropoulos jumps from that vessel seeking the titular jewel. He finds it not between two shells, but growing of its own desire to be held. And so he plucks it from the sandy floor, cradling it in a calloused palm to the surface, where eyes await to behold its beauty.

One might easily read such evocative associations into the program’s whole, but the music holds its own without them. Despite the fact that much of it follows the same formula, laying melodic improvisations over flowing ostinatos, one also feels spoken to in an honest, reflective way. In this regard, the title track is the heart of Tsabropoulos’s art. Other key moments emerge by way of the crystalline geometry of “Djivaeri” and the intensely cinematic “Promenade.” And Tsabropoulos’s ECM tenure bears traces on “The Insider,” which recalls Ketil Bjørnstad at his solitary best, while “Confession” moves mountains with its G. I. Gurdjieff-like meditation.

These are as much pieces of literature as of music, their language as vivid on the wind as it would be on the page. The recording is distant, seemingly on the verge of floating away, and suits the sounds as the sun suits the moon. At the risk of over-comparing, fans of Eleni Karaindrou’s soundtracks—indeed, The Promise reads like a book of lost dances from an Angelopoulos film—will not want to pass this one by. It’s a melodic oracle. In hearing it for the first time, we know that we’ve heard it before.

Trygve Seim and Frode Haltli: Yeraz (ECM 2044)

| Tyran Grillo

Yeraz

Yeraz

Trygve Seim soprano and tenor saxophones
Frode Haltli accordion
Recorded June 2007 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Saxophonist Trygve Seim and accordionist Frode Haltli, both children of the Norwegian jazz scene and frequent collaborators who have grown into some of that scene’s most genre-defying proponents, pair up for an intimate songbook of frequencies that wraps the duo’s minds around an erudite program of mostly Seim-composed pieces. Exceptions include the haunting and windswept Armenian traditional song, from which the album gets its name, and the seemingly bipartite “MmBall,” penned by Seim’s go-to drummer, Per Oddvar Johansen. Seim and Haltli further explore two melodies—“Bayaty” and “Duduki”—by spiritual guru G. I. Gurdjieff (1866-1949), who, since Keith Jarrett’s 1980 Sacred Hymns, has been a ghostly presence on a handful of ECM projects.

Seim Haltli
(Photo credit: Morten Krogvold)

Compared to past recordings, Haltli treads more carefully across the accordion’s polar ice caps, his touch as pliant as ever. With the slightest pitch bend or intervallic quaver, the accordion’s inner heart speaks with utmost profundity, especially in the lower range, which despite a seemingly tenuous hold on notes lays foundations of its own. Seim proves an ideal partner, not only sonically—both are reedmen of sorts—but also in musicality. Nowhere more so than in their interpretation of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song,” for which the instruments blend so well they sound like extensions of one another, regressions and evolutions linking toward plush, resolute skies. In the Gurdjieff pieces, too, the duo feels like a splitting of the same consciousness. Seim’s duduk-like sound reveals tonal mastery, painting a cathedral from the steeple down to Haltli’s throaty bedrock.

As for Seim’s pieces, each is possessed of its own physical property. From the slow-moving liquid of “Airamero” to the cinematic grain of the Tom Waits-inspired “Waits for Waltz,” his writing engenders a joyous but never boisterous sense of play and understated virtuosity. Other Seim notables: the less inhibited brushwork of “Fast Jazz” and the accordion solo “Bhavana,” for which Haltli’s transcendent highs evoke the Russian bayan or, perhaps, the Japanese shō.

Holding the disc together are the freely improvised “Praeludium” and “Postludium,” each a beginning and an end in and of itself, waiting to redraw the circle. Thankfully, the PLAY button allows us to do just that.

Julia Hülsmann Trio: The End of a Summer (ECM 2079)

| Tyran Grillo

The End of a Summer

Julia Hülsmann Trio
The End of a Summer

Julia Hülsmann piano
Marc Muellbauer double-bass
Heinrich Köbberling drums
Recorded March 2008 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The more I get of you
The stranger it feels
And now that your rose is in bloom
A light hits the gloom on the gray
–Seal

From a long shoreline gentrified by Scandinavian jazz outfits, Julia Hülsmann’s all-German piano trio indeed hits the gloom on the gray with this sharp, lyrical ECM debut. The pianist tracks a robust set of ten tunes, most from her pen. Along for the journey are bassist Marc Muellbauer and drummer Heinrich Köbberling, both of whom contribute equally to the trio’s refreshing democracy. To that democracy the opening title track pays express deference, coming into being like Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto before settling into a balanced conversation between inner and outer voices.

The focus of Hülsmann’s writing is matched only by her playing. Whether navigating the upbeat geometries of “Quint” (in which the unity achieved with her rhythm section is a wonder to behold) or floating on the breeze of the Jobim-inspired “Sepia,” she attends to every motivic bend in the road without need of compass. She is just as comfortable turning out stunning fractals of improvisation as she is flitting like a butterfly through nonetheless dense crosswinds (to wit: “Senza” and “Gelb,” respectively). Yet despite her independent spirit, she is most at ease forging on-the-spot connections with her bandmates. Exemplary in this regard is “Not The End Of The World,” which pulses behind a scrim of shadow and draws unity between Muellbauer and Hülsmann’s left hand (foiling the soft-focus sparkle of her right) while Köbberling works gorgeous curlicues at the snare’s rim.

Bassist and drummer also contribute material. Muellbauer’s relatively brief yet smooth nocturnal lines make “Last One Out” a memorable aside. Köbberling’s two offerings, “Konbanwa” and “Where In The World,” both speak in softer poetries, yet with majesty of emotion.

The latter track ends the album with a song for those who cannot sing, a love letter for those who cannot love. Its flow pulls at the heartstrings with a Midas touch, a kiss of the hand that follows wherever you may travel. Speaking of such, one can hardly ignore the trio’s evocative take on Seal’s iconic “Kiss From A Rose,” given new life for all its bareness. Likewise stripped is the engineering, which by the grace of the great Jan Erik Kongshaug mikes the musicians nakedly while also bringing out their inner ability to read the wind.

A must.

Jacob Young: Sideways (ECM 1997)

| Tyran Grillo

Sideways

Jacob Young
Sideways

Jacob Young guitars
Mathias Eick trumpet
Vidar Johansen bass clarinet, tenor saxophone
Mats Eilertsen double-bass
Jon Christensen drums
Recorded May 2006 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Norwegian guitarist Jacob Young’s sophomore effort follows coolly on the heels of his debut, Evening Falls. The wealth of Scandinavian talent at his side is enviable, to say the least. Trumpeter Mathias Eick, reedman Vidar Johansen, bassist Mats Eilertsen, and drummer Jon Christensen bring their uniquely tessellated feel for rhythm and hues to ten of Young’s originals, of which the title track sets the stage with the bandleader’s unmistakable acoustic. Mallet-caressed cymbals, trumpet, bass clarinet, and upright bass comingle in simpatico resonance, riding a slow and steady frequency from start to finish.

On that note, it’s difficult to say whether or not this music ever finds closure. Rather, each tune suspends itself high above the clouds, catching breath before measuring another dive into the next. In this regard, fans of Manu Katché’s ECM outings—into which the personnel here dovetails slightly—will surely rejoice in Young’s architecturally sound themes, ringing out clearly and distinctly before being recast in light harmonies and natural improvisational turns. Case in point: “Hanna’s Lament,” of which the two horns hover over Eilertsen’s landing pad before Young’s solo on classical guitar threads them all with the skill of a tailor’s needle. The evocative “Near South End” is another representative example, and traces its head through a unifying of bass and guitar. Christensen is the real key to unlocking the inventive nostalgia at play, as also in “St. Ella,” a volcano at the ready.

Eick is the most chameleonic of the bunch, as comfortable highlighting the canvas as he is slashing it with Tomasz Stanko-like leaps of intuition in “Maybe We Can.” Johansen, for his part, treads the line between dream and reality in “Out Of Night,” which at over 10 minutes could be an overbearing tune were it not for the naked clarity of his tenoring. With so much to admire and interpret in its unfolding, it best showcases the album’s finessed engineering.

That Young was fortunate enough to study with Jim Hall and John Abercrombie will be obvious on three tracks for which he goes electric: “Time Rebel,” “Slow Bo-Bo,” and “Wide Asleep.” Each is the side of hidden triangle, rendered to the tune of a watercolor enchantment. At some moments a balladic brew while at others a cosmic layering, the overall shape emerges only with thoughtful listening. Like the multi-tracked guitar-only epilogue, “Gazing At Stars,” it follows the gaze into sunset and to the twilight beyond.

Even with its air of mystery, Sideways comes to us as a completed puzzle, glued and framed so that we might admire its scenery without the task of putting it together. This leaves us free to bask in its light, turning its shadows like the pages of a book personally inscribed.

Terje Rypdal: Vossabrygg (ECM 1984)

| Tyran Grillo

Vossabrygg

Terje Rypdal
Vossabrygg

Terje Rypdal guitar
Palle Mikkelborg trumpet, synthesizer
Bugge Wesseltoft electric piano, synthesizer
Ståle Storløkken Hammond organ, electric piano, synthesizer
Marius Rypdal electronics, samples, turntables
Bjørn Kjellemyr electric and acoustic bass
Jon Christensen drums
Paolo Vinaccia percussion
Recorded live April 12, 2003 at Vossa Jazz Festival, Norway
Engineer: Per Ravnaas, NRK
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher

Terje Rypdal’s Opus 84 is an interdisciplinary suite of epic proportions. The fruit of a 2003 commission by Norway’s Vossa Jazz Festival, this live recording finds the Norwegian guitarist-composer fronting an all-star cast that brings trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg, bassist Bjørn Kjellemyr, drummers Jon Christensen and Paolo Vinaccia, and keyboardists Bugge Wesseltoft and Ståle Storløkken to the fold. Truly special, though, is the ECM debut of Marius Rypdal, who provides digital connective tissue at key points along the way and mines his father’s own discography—particularly Ineo, op. 29 and the 5th Symphony, op. 50—to nu-jazz levels. His veritable hand basket of samples, breakbeats, and atmospheres spreads a picnic that tastes much like Khmer (and, for the obscurists out there, also like Japanese guitarist Sugizo’s 1997 drum ‘n’ bass solo effort, Truth?). His computational acumen is clearest on the three movements he co-writes with Terje: “Hidden Chapter,” “Incognito Traveller,” and “Jungeltelegrafen.” Of these, the first two wield classically cinematic brushes, moving waves of ambience and computerized utterances across swaths of bedrock. Samples range from violin and chorus to a warped phone call pulsing through city streets under cover of night. Gesture for gesture, Mikkelborg matches Rypdal’s every cry, breaking out in the final piece toward full-on escape.

The “brygg” of the album’s title means “Brew,” a forthright reference to Miles Davis’s seminal electric-era Bitches Brew. The introductory, 18-and-a-half-minute “Ghostdancing” mixes a likeminded concoction of heat-distorted drums and organ over a rocking bass line. The thinking is bold, dynamic, and recalls “Rolling Stone,” the once-lost track off Rypdal’s own Odyssey. In this sea of reverberation, Mikkelborg’s vessel stretches the broadest sail.

If Rypdal and friends seem to be digging into the past, it’s only because they are messengers from the future. Be it encoded in the double-headed “Waltz For Broken Hearts / Makes You Wonder” or the halting “That’s More Like It,” his resonant stream is palpable whether his plectrum touches string or not. In this context, Mikkelborg, ever the empathic performer, plays the melodic prince to Rypdal’s atmospheric king. The guitarist holds his authority by no small feat of restraint, as he does further in the post-meridiem groove of “You’re Making It Personal.” Bass and drums haul a heavy cart of night while trumpet cuts shooting star scars over the cityscape. This leaves only “A Quiet Word,” actually a rather dense wave of dreams, to build the afterglow, particle by particle.

This is how it’s done.

Gianluigi Trovesi: Vaghissimo Ritratto (ECM 1983)

| Tyran Grillo

Vaghissimo Ritratto

Gianluigi Trovesi
Vaghissimo Ritratto

Gianluigi Trovesi alto clarinet
Umberto Petrin piano
Fulvio Maras percussion, electronics
Recorded December 2005, Artesuono Recording Studio, Udine
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher

This album’s title, informs Steve Lake in his fascinating liner notes, comes from a madrigal by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, and connotes a beautiful, if hazy, portrait. From that concept, the trio of clarinetist Gianluigi Trovesi, pianist Umberto Petrin, and percussionist Fulvio Maras (who also provides subconscious electronics) unreels a bolt spanning premodern to modern textures, each deconstructed and rewoven along the way to the tune of each musician’s improvisational acumen. Vaghissimo Ritratto is thus a picture gallery that is as much spatial as temporal, painting with good-humored pigments over ECM’s vast canvas.

Trovesi has, of course, already left indelible marks on that same canvas, but perhaps none so distinctive as this. With Maras (heard also on the Trovesi Octet’s Fugace) and Petrin (of Trovesi’s Italian Instabile Orchestra) to assist him, the overall effect is a revelation. A good measure of the album’s “portraits” references Italian cellist and composer Alfredo Piatti. His themes resonate at regular intervals, each a cleansing exhalation before the next intake. In them, not only does Maras hint at a boundless inner world with his light applications, which haunt the edge of perception like dreams jumping off the cliff of waking; he also foils the record’s otherwise acoustic nature. Whether by means of an artful synthesizer or by the touch of hand on drum, he cuts a flash of poetry across every prosodic eye. Through it all, Trovesi stands like a prophet of the here and now. With a lyricism that is an intense as it is entirely his own, Trovesi hones a vibe as only he can elicit from even the simplest melodies.

As a unit, the trio sips from various glasses, moving photographically through stages of development. A taste of cabaret comingles with an operatic piquancy, while nostalgia binds the two in harmony. What might feel like the inside of a café at one moment could very well turn into a death scene the next. Such is the album’s theatrical edge, by which the trio adlibs its way through such tracks as “Serenata” with all the comfort of one reading from a score. And in “Mirage,” notable for the arresting, shawm-like quality that issues from Trovesi’s alto clarinet, we feel cargo moving across the sands while tintinnabulations, soft and hymnal, echo from the piano.

Two twentieth-century singer-songwriters, Luigi Tenco and Jacques Brel, are referenced in “Angela” and “Amsterdam,” respectively. In the hands of Trovesi and company, both of which move through changes with the greatest of ease, and with such grandeur as to make one yearn to have been there when first written. Maras and Petrin each contribute a tune in kind, delving through their rapport into jazzier turns.

If these are the vanity muscles, then the album’s blood supply comes from its host of Renaissance composers, including Claudio Monteverdi, Orlando di Lasso, Luca Marenzio, and Josquin Desprez. In the subsection, for instance, marked “Ricercar vaghezza,” the ritornello from Monteverdi’s opera “L’Orfeo” sounds downright futuristic, so pure is its antiquity, and receives the proper Trovesi treatment in the reedman’s “Grappoli orfici” (Orphic clusters), from which he unravels that Monteverdean thread and with it re-stitches the night sky to a toothsome smile of mountains along the horizon. Further delights await in Desprez’s classic “El grillo,” a song all the closer to my heart not only because it shares my last name, but because the spirited rendering it receives here removes that tongue-in-cheek wrapper and cracks open a little transcendence from within it.

By the time we reach our title destination, a vague and freely improvised foray that sparkles as it slumbers, we splinter along with the trio into a motif from Palestrina. Its message, though whispered, is clear enough: The circle is not a cycle, but the ripple of the first stone.

Pierre Favre Ensemble: Fleuve (ECM 1977)

| Tyran Grillo

Fleuve

Pierre Favre Ensemble
Fleuve

Philipp Schaufelberger guitar
Frank Kroll soprano saxophone, bass clarinet
Hélène Breschand harp
Michel Godard tuba, serpent
Wolfgang Zwiauer bass guitar
Bänz Oester double-bass
Pierre Favre percussion, drums
Recorded October 2005, Volkshaus Basel
Engineer: Daniel Dettwiler
Produced by Manfred Eicher

A vital current in the European jazz circuit for decades, Pierre Favre gets full spotlight as composer on Fleuve, which finds the Swiss percussionist in the company of a most unusual ensemble that includes two bassists, tuba, harp, reeds, and guitar. The album certainly lives up to its name, which means “river” in French, and accordingly funnels springs and streams into a larger, contrapuntal current.

Although every musician contributes viable color to the Fleuve palette, the alizarin crimson of harpist Hélène Breschand, forest green of bassist Bänz Oester, sky blue of guitarist Philipp Schaufelberger, and the sunlit soprano saxophone of Frank Kroll (also on bass clarinet) add especially noteworthy streaks to the emerging image. Of that image, track titles such as “Mort d’Eurydice” and “Reflet Sud” give us tantalizing hints, reflecting a mythology as personal as it is timeless.

The music is delicately paced, and spins from that core group (with Favre’s adaptive rhythms completing the pentagon) a narrative of elemental conversion. Whether through the spiraling hide and seek of “Panama” or the angled wingspan of “Albatros,” Favre and his bandmates change up combinations, switching above and below, with seamless intuition. One moment might find a theme pouring from the group in tutti, while the next shifts into a duet of guitar and brushed drums, or harp and bass, that strings every melody with care.

Hints of enchantment abound, as in the bass clarinet ambling along the banks of the “Nile” or the medieval song that ghosts the inner sanctum of “Decors.” As throughout the album, gestures abound with glorious promise and find realization through Favre’s orchestral sensitivity.

An album of sense and originality, this is the pinnacle of Favre’s ECM output.

Trio Beyond: Saudades (ECM 1972/73)

| Tyran Grillo

Saudades

Trio Beyond
Saudades

John Scofield guitars
Larry Goldings Hammond organ, electric piano, sampler
Jack DeJohnette drums
Recorded live November 21, 2004 at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
Engineer: Patrick Murray
Edited and mastered at Rainbow Studio by Jan Erik Kongshaug and Manfred Eicher

If you can’t stand the heat, then run—don’t walk—into the kitchen. That seems to be the message of Saudades, the unrelenting album by Trio Beyond. The title connotes a longing or melancholy in Portuguese. Yet the music bursts with conviction left and right, so the only thing one might long for is another two discs’ worth. At the heart of Beyond is Jack DeJohnette. His talents have orbited the sun more times than anyone can count, and here he initiates a project in honor of the great Tony Williams, who stepped off the Miles Davis platform in the late sixties to focus on his Lifetime trio, the guitar/organ/drums format of which is preserved here. Even in the absence of this information, the music clearly serves a time when fusion was not yet a sullied word, when its crosspollinations bore fragrances as fresh as spring. In the album’s official press release, DeJohnette humbly notes Williams’s “visionary concept of time and space,” but we can, of course, give similar credit to DeJohnette, a drummer without whom the landscape of modern American music would be much flatter. Fleshing out this homage are two phenomenal musicians in their own right, each with one eye trained to and the other fro. Keyboardist Larry Goldings is magic at the Hammond organ, often playing the parts of bassist and lead with two remarkably independent hands, while guitarist John Scofield fights fire with fire in his blistering yet welcoming style.

Indeed, once Joe Henderson’s “If” lights the match, there’s no turning away from the ensuing glow. Like this set (recorded live at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in late 2004) as a whole, it engages at both the level of performance and through its call to the fortunate listener by way of carefully chosen tunes. Inspiring and inspired, Goldings parallels Scofield’s flame trail like the DeLorean’s tire tracks in Back to the Future. The organist further offers up his original “As One,” which paves a spacy runway into the full (if brief) melodic shout of Larry Young’s “Allah Be Praised.” The title track, first of two cuts by the trio as a unit, proves a fast-moving vehicle for Scofield, who leads the way with staggering variety of tone and control, all the while getting jiggy with increasingly wild electronic enhancements. “Love In Blues,” also by the trio, is no less lovingly crafted, and finds Scofield holding his intense own over a mosaic of rhythms and voices, and finding intensity on his journey toward calm.

Williams’s spirit is apparent throughout, but gets his most overt props as composer of “Pee Wee” and “Emergency.” The first is a relatively tender chunk of goodness in which Scofield plays downright saxophonically, sustaining and clipping notes in kind. The boisterous second is rich as cream sauce—Scofield bringing the rise and Goldings the fall—and scales the cliffs of a spellbinding improvisational mountain. John McLaughlin’s “Spectrum,” given here a 16-minute treatment, is another thoroughly awesome adventure. The nature of DeJohnette and Scofield’s crosstalk, virtuosic yet free to bask in the groove, is a veritable master class of how musicians should listen to each other.

Our requisite ballad comes in the form of “I Fall In Love Too Easily,” by Broadway legend Jule Styne, in which Goldings treads a smooth and sultry line. It’s a soft reprieve after the sharp focus of Miles Davis’s “Seven Steps To Heaven.” DeJohnette steps up his game in a tune filled with propulsive depth and turn-on-a-dime changes, Scofield and Goldings trading expert handoffs all the while. Of course, Miles goes down all the better with a Coltrane chaser. The latter’s “Big Nick” gives more prime time for Goldings, who slingshots past the moon and back. Yet it’s DeJohnette’s perfect timekeeping that lingers longest on the palette, tasting of vibrant life and love for the moment.

Trio Beyond

Arvo Pärt: Lamentate (ECM New Series 1930)

| Tyran Grillo

Lamentate

Arvo Pärt
Lamentate

The Hilliard Ensemble
Sarah Leonard soprano
David James counter-tenor
Rogers Covey-Crump tenor
Steven Harrold tenor
Gordon Jones baritone
Alexei Lubimov piano
SWR Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra
Andrey Boreyko conductor
Lamentate recorded June 2004 at Stadthalle Sindelfingen
Engineers: Dietmar Wolf and Jürgen Buss
Da Pacem Domine recorded April 2005 at Propstei St. Gerold
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Tempting as it may be, the typing of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt as a spiritual modernist hardly begins to assess the reach, import, and atmospheric integrity of his music. The more closely one listens to it, the more one hears between every heartbeat an alternating current, whereby shadows take solace in their own orientation of elements. Awareness of this dichotomy throws sanctity over the banal, and lends banality to the sacred, so that by the end of any Pärt listening experience one emerges changed yet profoundly the same—the self made clear under a magnifying glass polished by sound.

And so, while Lamentate may be said to represent a new direction for Pärt, whose music has hardly sounded this visceral since his formative dips into the avant-garde, it also feels like a reflection back to the womb, if only because the composer has so carefully woven into its basketry a conscious structural flaw. Said flaw is the essence of being human. It is what turns the visage of existence firmly away from the realm of fantasy toward the mirror of reality. This “lamento for the living” takes its inspiration from the enormous sculpture “Marsyas” by Anish Kapoor, at the time located in Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern, and anchors a piano soloist (here it is Alexei Lubimov at the keyboard) in an orchestral ocean. In the album’s liner notes, Pärt describes his first encounter with the sculpture: “My first impression was that I, as a living being, was standing before my own body and was dead—as in a time-warp perspective, at once in the future and the present.” Lamentate thus concerns itself with time—or, more precisely, with those who deal with time. The work was premiered at the sculptural site in London on February 7 and 8, 2003, and was recorded for ECM in 2004 at Germany’s Stadthalle Sindelfingen, near Stuttgart.

Before throwing us into these prophetic waters, the disc opens with the prayer for peace that is Da pacem Domine. Composed in 2004 on the basis of a ninth-century Gregorian antiphon and recorded here a year later at St. Gerold monastery near the Austrian mountains, it features the Hilliard Ensemble with soprano Sarah Leonard in a moving, timeless performance (the work reappears in updated form on In Principio). Like much of Pärt’s choral writing, its simplicity is its strength, requiring discipline from interpreters to bring out inner complexities. The antiphon is stretched to reveal a stratum unto itself, a melody to be born into and from. Its lines mark the binding of a book of experiences, the pages of which fade in one direction and become crisper in the other. All, however, bear equal wisdom of the divine hand that inscribed them.

With such pulchritude still warming the chest, Lamentate (2002) comes like a hit in the gut. Each of its ten movements is a monument—now fragile, now menacing—to some emotional shell. These surfaces act as palimpsests for the cellular activities that unspool from a brass incantation. A bass drum rumbles as would the hand of a god trapped beneath the earth’s surface pound for escape. In that frustration are flashes of a life confounded by lifelessness, declarations of dependence wrought in beat and bow. Over the piece’s own lifespan, the recording takes on a wavelength that cracks open intersections of space and time and spins from their yolks an entirely new cosmos. In this parallel universe, the winds are seemingly still yet utterly dynamic like nebulae as fetal kicks javelin fresh thought through a needle of questioning. The piano’s solitude provides the only answer it ever needed to breathe, for in the crafting of flesh lurks a question far beyond our articulation, and to which music nevertheless brings us steps closer. As relays of brass, piano, and percussion give way to whispering tides, echoes of earlier compositions (such as Psalom) make themselves known as a lilting oboe swims against the current. And even the nominal resolution treats alignment like a fantasy, leaving us by the end looking above for any sign of what it means to be below.

Marsyas
(Photo credit: Empics)