Giya Kancheli
Diplipito

Derek Lee Ragin countertenor
Thomas Demenga cello
Dennis Russell Davies piano
Stuttgarter Kammerorchester
Dennis Russell Davies conductor
Recorded January 2001 at Mozart-Saal, Liederhalle, Stuttgart
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“…I feel that, conceptually, I am still living in the age of the horse and carriage and the first motor cars.”
–Giya Kancheli

Giya Kancheli is a composer of contrasts. Hardly limited to the vast dynamic distances that have marked his work with increasing frequency, these contrasts also flourish in less discernible areas. We find them in mood, in timbre, and perhaps most vividly in the dance of sacred and secular that traces communicative patterns all over the music’s surface. The analogy is no accident, for dance would seem to be capital of the expansive territory etched herein.

The program’s title work, composed in 1997 and named after a drum of Kancheli’s native Georgia, is scored for violoncello, countertenor and orchestra. It begins where all of his works begin: inside. The piano is explored as a cavity in which echoes of Górecki’s Third Symphony comingle with every dancing scene of an Angelopoulos film, seen through a scrim of tears. The inclusion of guitar in the sound mix adds fractures to this glassine surface, while the cello births a countertenor voice from its winged enclosure (these roles reverse as the narrative develops). Though one might expect an ECM regular like David James for this recording, Kancheli has chosen instead a more vulnerable style in Derek Lee Ragin (who also gave the work’s premier). The match is perfect. Half-formed reinstatements of familiar motives shine through Ragin’s vocal branches, even as the strings weave a blanket of stillness over him from the piano’s block chords. At times Thomas Demenga’s song is hardly distinguishable from Ragin’s—not a question of resemblance but of presence. Small clusters of piano arpeggios roll down a hillside of tubular bells, tripping over their own voices. The titular hand drum makes a modest appearance toward the end, bringing with it the sound of villages and forgotten places. Hands brush across its skin in the final whisper, thus stretching to near invisibility one of Kancheli’s subtlest veils of sound. A masterpiece.

Dedicated both to Dennis Russell Davies (who conducts here from the bench) and to his wife (“with whom I have never danced”), Valse Boston for piano and strings (1996) opens with a strike from the keyboard. These outbursts crystallize like philosophies into their core questions. The orchestra breathes in and out through the instrument that enables its expressivity. Each measure is a microcosm held by the cosmos to the eye of a speechless god. Moments of pathos are few and far between, and all the more beautiful for the brevity of their passing. This wondrous music allows us to rethink the parameters of what we consider minimal. The single utterance never lingers yet its taste never dulls. Through this cumulative simplicity we find a monad of audible existence that has passed through us all. It is a silence, a heaviness that links memory to death, and in so doing illuminates the good deeds of our lives.

If we take the composer’s words above at face value, then we might cradle his music as one might a rare antique. There is history in its bruises, and these we can touch only with the intent to heal.

 

Giya Kancheli
Magnum Ignotum

Mstislav Rostropovich cello
Royal Flanders Philharmonic Orchestra
Jansug Kakhidze conductor
Recorded December 1997
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Said Mstislav Rostropovich, to whom the opening work of this album is dedicated, of his longtime friend, “His natural element is the deepest mystical sorrow. Olivier Messiaen revealed for me the limitlessness and endlessness of time, and the same is true for Kancheli.” Chronological uncertainty seems to have been a core philosophy for the master cellist, whose sound grew only deeper toward the end of his life. Simi (1995) proves to be an ideal vehicle for his aging, yet ever robust sound. The title is Georgian for “string,” and indeed vibration is its universe. Pauses are left to the soloist’s discretion, and for this performance Rostropovich drew inspiration from Kancheli’s own halted style of speech. The music swirls in a crystal ball that, when occasionally shaken, snows down on a familiar motivic scene. Its imagery is stark and discomforting. A piano opens its chording like the death throes of an unfathomable organism. Brass-laden swells rupture its skin, immediately cauterized by an instrument of divine fire. Yet Simi is not without its hopeful intimations, as in the brief harmonic twinge at the 14’ mark. And while the cello’s presence dominates throughout, it is anything but the self-centered celebrant, comporting itself rather like one in mourning. That being said, the piece’s subtitle, “Joyless thoughts for violoncello and orchestra,” is something of a misnomer, for the cello also presents its own paradox: in the single performer lies the potential for multiple voices, and in the playing one finds undeniable ardor. In this instance, the cello is like a prism through which the composer’s light passes. The orchestra is no longer mere accompaniment, but an unraveling of the soloist’s heartbeat.

Magnum Ignotum (The Great Anonymous), written in 1994 for wind ensemble, double bass, and tape, has become one of Kancheli’s most widely played pieces. The response to a commission for which the composer was asked to incorporate Georgian folk music, Kancheli includes said music unmitigated, except by the technology of tape by which it is deployed. The opening recitation is of an Anchikhati priest, who seems to float above an almost funereal bassoon. Voices return in a 1930s field recording of three old men from West Georgia improvising in a haunting mezza voce called “ghighini.” Despite following a heavy orchestra piece, the modest scoring of Magnum Ignotum brings its own intensity, not least because every melodic line depends on the strength of the breath behind it. Thus invoked, the human body is unfolded through the vocal phenomenon that is the Rustavi Folk Choir, whose heartening rendition of the Trisagion hymn “Tsmindao Ghmerto” (Holy God) folds its hands to a clang of bells.

This is music concerned with its own ephemeral path, always skirting the edge of fleshly existence and the limitations upon which its life hinges. It is a candle flame holding on to its last flickers; it is also the puff of air that pulls it into smoke. An essential release from cover to disc.

 

Giya Kancheli
Lament

Gidon Kremer violin
Maacha Deubner soprano
Tbilisi Symphony Orchestra
Jansug Kakhidze conductor
Recorded March 1998, Centre for Music and Culture, Tbilisi
Engineer: Mikhail Kilosanidze
Produced by Manfred Eicher

ECM offers some of Giya Kancheli’s most compelling music in Lament (Music of Mourning in Memory of Luigi Nono). This 1994 outpouring for violin, soprano, and orchestra is a requiem, a postlude, a concerto, and homage. It is also more than these, spreading its heavy wings wide across an ever-changing landscape. Kancheli revisits the words of Hans Sahl, whose verses appeared upon the same lips in EXIL, this time through his poem “Stanzas.”

I go slowly hence from the world
Into a domain beyond all distance,

Gidon Kremer’s violin seems to arise from a shadow within a shadow. Soon joined by flute, which acts like a hooded guide through the wilderness, Kremer flirts with his surroundings. The orchestra responds provocatively to these agitations, only to blend back into the woodwork from which its sounds are born. As strings wander toward the horizon, every bowed step seems only to bring them closer to me, as if I were but a projection of a faraway self.

And what I was and am and shall remain
Goes with me hasteless and forbearing
Into a country ’til yet untrod

The wind continues its gentle flight, weaving through orchestral punctuations like a suture through flesh. These satoric bursts never last. Their clarity is brief, their catharsis even briefer. Kremer brings a raw, rustic tone, and with it a certain terrestrial quality to this otherwise stratospheric music. Unfamiliar skies and the mud-stained roads beneath them temper any possible thrill of discovery. And yet, the closer I walk to death, the brighter my surroundings seem to become.

I go slowly hence from time
Into a future beyond the stars,

Kremer’s lilting highs mesh beautifully with Maacha Deubner’s own as both pull the orchestra to a high summit. I leap without hesitation, floating ever so gently back to solid ground. Deubner seems to sing from somewhere not of this world. Her voice becomes a memory, something heard when I let down my mental guard. Kremer gets an equally magical sound from his instrument, leading the orchestra with utter determination.

And what I was and am and ever shall remain
Goes with me hasteless and forbearing,

Deubner sets aloft a high-pitched violin before oboe and orchestra spin their own guiding light out of ether. Familiar material works its way into my mental window: a rare comfort in these tattered vestiges, far enough removed from Kancheli’s motivic staples while also weeping in their shadows. I can only sit on the edge of music like this, never knowing whether to lie back or lean forward. And so I am resigned to the margin, left to wander

As though I’d not, or scarcely, ever been.

 

Giya Kancheli
Trauerfarbenes Land

Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra
Dennis Russell Davies conductor
Recorded March/August 1997, ORF Studio, Vienna
Engineer: Joseph Schütz
Produced by Manfred Eicher

As much as I adore the likes of Arvo Pärt and John Tavener, it mystifies me to see their names being repeatedly opened like comparative umbrellas under which other contemporary composers are ushered from the critical storm. Enter Giya Kancheli, who has carved such a lasting gouge in the recorded landscape that one could hardly mistake it for that of anyone else. Though he may share the same light as his contemporaries, the Soviet Georgia-born composer gives off an entirely unique reflection, and would seem to hold no illusions regarding the messages of his music. The massive orchestral works on this disc are like two mirrors held in front of one another, projecting endless sorrow into a trembling corridor.

From the opening measures of…à la Duduki (1995), we are graced by a sound that is at once anthemic and solemn. The intermittent brass proclamation invokes nothing more than itself. Although the music harbors a potential for regularity, it prefers to express its wordless sentiments with widely varying degrees of fluidity. Ultimately, gentle hearts still these moments of profound drama. The occasional piano introduces a human color to the palette, which otherwise seems to paint an atmospheric veneer far beyond our touch. The music falls as it rises: that is, in anticipatory silence.

1994’s Trauerfarbenes Land (“Land that Wears Mourning”) introduces another resounding breach of sound, only this time accentuated by a more pointed percussion section. For the next 37 minutes, we are subjected to a slow vacillation between agitation and peace, self-hatred and prayer. The power of this music is the power to unsettle, guiding us away from our comfort zones into a land that, like its title, is indeed cloaked in grief. Yet what appears on the surface a poignant meditation on the harms of the material and the abstract ends up the product of a beating heart and nothing more. Every moment of delicacy pulls those gravid statements closer and every bellowing cry brings that crawling darkness into blinding light. There is no tragedy to be found here, but only the nooks in which we hide our fears.

As with any Kancheli recording, one will find familiar footholds, and will thus feel supremely grounded in these musical surroundings. At the same time, there is an underlying (in)difference, an umbral presence creeping in from all sides. Kancheli shows a liking for more pronounced contrast in these larger settings, forging in that intersection a rather terse melodic territory that is constantly folding in upon itself like a cell dividing in reverse. It is also his unity. Like “left” and “right,” though divided into “evil” and “good,” respectively, we are reminded here that they both belong to the same body, and therefore can never be separated.

ECM set a new standard of classical recording with this album, capturing the music’s quietest whispers and resounding roars with equal presence and clarity.

Alternate cover (?)