Music is the key

The Zehetmair Quartett, one of the most exciting and accomplished string quartets of our time, plays a programme of characteristically broad reach, extending from Beethoven to Holliger. This 2-CD set is drawn from two recording sessions, both made at Zürich DRS studio. Beethoven’s F Major quartet, Bruckner’s C minor quartet and Holliger’s 2nd string quartet were recorded in April and May 2010. The Hartmann Nr. 2 was recorded in 2002 by an earlier quartet line-up, and this interpretation is previously unreleased. It was the last of the Zehetmair Quartett recordings to feature cellist and founding member Françoise Groben (1965–2011). “Her energy and creativity were crucial to our development and early successes, such as the Schumann CD. This new production is dedicated to her memory.” The double album begins with Beethoven’s highly-concentrated opus 135 . The last of Beethoven’s five quartets, written in 1826, it occupies a major position in what many feel to be a unifi...

The creative output of Austrian composer (and pianist) Thomas Larcher (born 1963) whom the London Times recently called “a musical talent of unbounded sensitivity and distinction bound for 21st- century glory” has been championed on ECM New Series since 2001. Last fall Larcher’s piano piece “What becomes” attracted wide-spread attention when premiered on Leif Ove Andsnes’ international tour with the project “Pictures, Reframed” in which musical performances were juxtaposed with video images by concept artist Robin Rhode. In the Daily Telegraph Ivan Hewett spoke of “a real 21st- century picture of childhood, rudely energetic and unsentimental”. “Madhares” , the third release dedicated exclusively to Larcher’s works, assembles some of the finest ECM musicians such as Kim Kashkashian, Till Fellner and the Munich Chamber Orchestra conducted by Dennis Russell Davies to present a gripping cross-section of Larcher’s recent orchestral output, enhanced by the third string quart...

On her new album "Prayer" Sol Gabetta takes the listener with her on a meditative musical journey. Accompanied by the Amsterdam Sinfonietta and the Orchestre National de Lyon, she has recorded a selection of Classical music inspired by Jewish melodies. It was Ernest Bloch's (1880-1959) piece "Prayer" that first gave Sol Gabetta the idea for this album: "I often played 'Prayer' as an encore in concert, and could feel that many people in the audience were greatly moved by it. This is music that is both sensual and reflective." In addition to the three-part cycle "From Jewish Life", of which "Prayer" is the first movement, Gabetta's CD recital includes Bloch's "Meditation hebräique", "Nigun", and the famous "Schelomo" for cello and orchestra. The programme is delightfully rounded off by four songs Gabetta has chosen from Dmitri Shostakovich's cycle "From Jewish Folk ...

Four years in the making, the celebrated Beethoven Journey has now reached its crowning season. An intense collaborative project between Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the heart of the journey has been the recording of all five of Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Concerti and his Choral Fantasy, with the final album scheduled for release by Sony Classical on September 16. Over the four years Leif Ove Andsnes has also made Beethoven's concerti the focus of his attention on stage with over 150 performances in 55 cities and 22 countries. With the start of the 2014 / 15 season Andsnes and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra embark on a year of high-profile residencies that will see them perform the complete cycle of concerti in Hamburg, Bonn, Lucerne, Vienna, Paris, New York, Shanghai, Tokyo and London. A third and integral part of the Beethoven Journey is an ambitious education project series entitled Feel the Music that gives children with hearing ...

"Some journeys are unpredictable" wrote Leif Ove Andsnes of the new album. "At the beginning of May 2013, I was all geared up to tour and record Beethoven's Second and Fourth Concertos with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. A couple of days before I was due to depart for the tour, our twins arrived in this world -- twelve weeks earlier than expected. With the insecurity that followed over the next few days, there was no way around it: I had to cancel the recording and stay at home with my family. Now, seven months later, our twins are fine and healthy, and I am so happy that the MCO and I found another period to record the concertos, which we did in the beautiful St. Jude's Church in London in December 2013. Working with this group is always an incredibly gratifying experience, and I continue to be grateful to them for the enormous commitment and passion they bring to our performances together. To live with these two concertos is, for me, emotionally similar to ...

Now this is something very special, and it marks an exciting debut for Leif Ove Andsnes on Sony after his long relationship with EMI. The label has struck musical gold with this particular signing and the pairing of Andsnes with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra makes this a thrilling start to what is termed "The Beethoven Journey". (While that might sound like another Beethoven piano concerto cycle to you or me, it is, to Andsnes, “a multi-season project that will make the composer’s music the centerpiece of my life as a performer and recording artist”.) And this is the first time we get to hear Andsnes in Beethoven on disc. He has waited a long time but, on the basis of this CD, was right to do so. He offers a personal but never idiosyncratic view of the First and Third Concertos and it augurs very well for the remainder of the series. Except that it isn’t just another Beethoven cycle-in-the-making, and the achievement is as much down to the Mahler CO’s youthf...

The three string quartets on this album, Mozart's swan songs in the genre, have been recorded many times, but this version ranks near the very top of the collection. Start with the recorded sound, for which Sony chose the unheralded LeFrak Hall at Queens College in New York. It's a superb example of chamber music engineering, with the instruments miked in such a way that the listener hears them coming from slightly different directions, just one would in a live concert at which one was seated 10 or 15 feet away. That in turn highlights the remarkable balance and ensemble of the Emerson Quartet, which is displayed beautifully in these quartets. The "Prussian" designation comes from the original commissioner, King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Berlin, who employed a top cellist at court and wanted quartets that would show off his abilities. Mozart complied with a group of works (only three of the requested six were completed) that use an active cello part to achieve the dens...

Born in Berkeley to a mother of Peruvian/Chinese ancestry and a father of Lithuanian/Jewish descent, Gabriela Lena Frank explores her multicultural heritage most ardently through her compositions. Franks has traveled extensively throughout South American and her pieces reflect and refract her studies of Latin-American folklore, incorporating poetry, mythology and native musical styles into a western classical framework. Winner of a Latin Grammy and nominated for Grammys as both composer and pianist, Ms. Frank holds a Guggenheim Fellowship and a USA Artist Fellowship. This disc includes four works composed over a seven-year period and all feature the piano — one for solo piano; one for flute and piano; another for flute, clarinet and piano; and one for piano quintet, beautifully performed by Ensemble MEME and pianist Molly Morkoski.

Already in Antiquity rhetoricians knew about the wisdom of silence, the necessity of pauses, caesuras and ellipses. They assigned a wide range of meanings to silence as the antithesis of speech. They acknowledged it to be a semantic, or semiotic, space in which speech can be articulated without speaking. Yet it was only in the modern age, with its deep-seated scepticism toward language, that silence was defined as a central place of reflection. Still, nonverbal communication has long been a permanent part of cultural and artistic presentation and expression. In music, on the other hand, pauses, rests, caesuras, fermatas – interruptions of varying quality – are essential. They have belonged to the temporal scaffolding of musical dramaturgy since time immemorial. When Gourzi speaks of a sense of temporal dramaturgy in her pieces, she touches on the art of eloquent brevity. Their melodic gestures are determined by the way she deals with pauses for breath. Often her music exhaustively ...

Dances and Canons is the debut ECM recording of both composer Kate Moore and pianist Saskia Lankhoorn. Moore was born in England in 1979 and lives now in the Netherlands (where she studied with Louis Andriessen, among others). However, it is Australia, where she grew up, which has left the strongest impression on her creative imagination, its teeming natural soundscapes transmuted in her music of swirling pulse patterns and shifting, layered planes of sound. In Dutch pianist Lankhoorn (also born 1979), Moore has a dedicated and resourceful interpreter. “It’s impossible to listen to this music,” writes George Miller in the liner note, “and not wonder about the enormous technical demands it makes of the performer.” Lankhoorn, no stranger to demanding music, made her first broadcast performance on Dutch radio at the age of 16, playing Schoenberg; she met Moore in 2003 when both were at the Royal Conservatorium in The Hague. When Lankhoorn co-founded the new music group Ensemble Klang, ...

The Seventh Symphony falls into Mahler’s second compositional phase and is the last of the three, purely instrumental, symphonies he wrote during those years (from which the Rückert-Lieder and Kindertotenlieder also date). Unlike his first four works in the genre (influenced by the Wunderhorn cycle), the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Symphonies are not programmatic, nor do they draw on folk music or fairy tales, recycle material from his earlier Lieder or involve solo or choral voices – they take us instead into the realm of “pure music”. The two symphonies that frame No. 7 represent two extremes in terms of content: the Sixth is the darkest and most pessimistic of all Mahler’s works, the Eighth a kind of 20th-century “Ode to Joy”. The Seventh, meanwhile, might be said to combine these two extremes within itself, travelling as it does from the darkness of night into the bright light of day (an effect underlined by his use of progressive tonality, from a sombre B minor to a radiant C ma...

The long-awaited solo album from Decca’s star cellist sees Weilerstein revealing and revelling in her technique. The American cellist has attracted widespread attention worldwide for her combination of natural virtuosic command and technical precision with impassioned musicianship. The intensity of her playing has regularly been lauded, as has the spontaneity and sensitivity of her interpretations. Committed to expanding the cello repertoire, Alisa is a fervent champion of new music and this release is her first solo album. Calling for left hand pizzicato as well an alternative tuning of the cello’s lower strings, Kodaly’s Sonata was far ahead of the time in which it was written and explored every facet of the cello, revealing what could be done with this instrument. Many of Kodaly’s works are based upon Hungarian folksongs & dances, and this theme inspires the rest of the album, with works from the in-vogue Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov, across the wor...

Grammaire des Rêves (Grammar of Dreams, 1988-89) was born from my curiosity about the relationship between human voice and instruments, a subject which I had put aside for many years. As the title of the piece indicates, another source of interest was the structural life of dreams. Different ideas concerning the research of dreams (for example, how our moving body affects our dreams, changing their directions or interrupting them; in this piece the harp is imagined as a collection of restless limbs, which by their movements direct the musical flow), are drawn to the background during the compositional work, or are transformed into purely musical form. Another interest was to search for a fusion in this rather heterogeneous ensemble. For this reason the musical texture is maybe more simple than in some other of my recent pieces, and the more radical textural changes have been replaced by vibratos, trills, glissandi, dynamic evolutions and other gestures, used here as im...

Tan Dun's Concerto for String Orchestra and Pipa (1999) is a reworking of one of his most popular works, Ghost Opera, written for and recorded by the Kronos Quartet. In this version, the composer's characteristic polystylism -- which here includes Chinese folk song, Copland-esque Big Sky music, quotations from Bach, and vocalizations by the orchestra -- comes across as a jumble, without much of a strong vision holding the disparate elements together. Pipa virtuoso Wu Man, who appeared on the Kronos recording, plays the concerto with energy and delicacy. She's ably accompanied by the Moscow Soloists, led by Yuri Bashmet. The concerto is followed by Takemitsu's Nostalghia (1987) for violin and string orchestra. Its compositional assurance, clarity, subtly nuanced orchestration, and emotional directness make it all the more striking in contrast to the Tan Dun. Here Bashmet is the impassioned soloist, with Roman Balashov conducting with great sensitivity. The three brie...

Jean Françaix (1912-1997) was something of a chronological anomaly. He came of age in the era when neo-Classicism was in vogue and the influence of Les Six was ascendant, and those trends came to inform the musical style that he continued to practice with little fluctuation throughout his long life. His Gargantua, for speaker and string orchestra , dates from 1971, the same year Elliott Carter wrote his Third String Quartet, but it could easily have been written in the 1930s, as could the other works recorded here, L'heure du Berger (1972) and Sérénade B E A (1955). The friendly harmonic language, melodic invention, formal clarity, and pervading tone of whimsicality set them far apart from just about any aspect of the prevailing modernism. The 40-minute Gargantua uses as its basis an absurd fable by Rabelais, and the music offers a pleasant, unobtrusive background to the narration. The text is in French, and no translation is provided so, it's likely to have limited impact ...

"Erkki-Sven Tüür's music," writes Wolfgang Sander, "sounds as if it had strolled through the history of music assimilating theoretical inspiration and practical experience along the way. Then it seems to have wrapped itself up in a cocoon, immune to the outside world, there to develop its own contours, as indicated by the abrupt contrasts. Tüür's music is realistic; it has confidence in its historical references, but it is removed." One could add that Tüür's "removal" from the international new music community was hardly his own choice: his compositional approach was established in an enforced political and geographical isolation. The same, of course, can be said for many of the composers from the former Soviet Union who, between them, have created music of enormous diversity. Tüür is impatient with the Western journalistic habit of bracketing together all post-Soviet composers as if they represented a recognizable "genre...