Music is the key

“Each of my compositions seems to be part of a mosaic which takes on its ultimate form very slowly through the years”, Eleni Karaindrou once said, and the larger picture becomes both clearer and more finely-detailed with each new album.  Concert in Athens is her tenth release on ECM.  It is an exceptional documentation of a performance from 2010, marking a triumphant return to the Athens Concert Hall, the setting for the “Elegy of the Uprooting” shows five years earlier. A new programme offers new insights, particularly when participating friends include guest soloists Jan Garbarek and Kim Kashkashian, both of whom have made major contributions to the realization of Karaindrou’s work in the past – Garbarek with his evocative playing of the themes for The Beekeeper (reprised on the album Music for Films ) and Karaindrou as the key musical protagonist of Ulysses’ Gaze . Over the years both artists have periodically returned to join Eleni for special events. ...

Mezzo-soprano Lena Belkina’s first album garnered high praise: “She sings Desdemona’s ‘Willow Song’ from Rossini’s Otello with lyrical intensity... Nacqui all’affanno e al pianto” from La Cenerentola is sharp-witted and brilliant”, opined Das Opernglas, while WAZ (Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung) wrote: “The coloratura is splendidly placed whether she’s mobilizing Tudor fury (in Anna Bolena), questioning her heart in the Barber of Seville or letting the soul of ‘Tanti affetti’ (La donna del lago) overflow with elegant beauty.” For her second album, “Classic Vienna” , she has recorded the most famous representatives of Viennese Classicism, Mozart (1756–1791), Haydn (1732–1809) and Gluck (1714–1787), with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Andrea Sanguinetti. Her Mozart selections include the aria “Parto, ma tu ben mio” from La clemenza di Tito, “Il padre adorato” from Idomeneo and the concert aria “Ch'io mi scordi di te?”. She sings Glu...

This entry in DG's Echo 20/21 series of contemporary music reissues is outstanding for its musical quality, engineering, and remarkable performances. Offertorium is aptly subtitled "Violin Concerto" to reflect the role of the solo violin, here played with brilliance and understanding by Gidon Kremer, for whom it was written. It's in three continuous sections, each headed by a fascinating Webernesque deconstruction of the theme from Bach's Musical Offering . The extensive violin part is technically demanding, and the vigorous orchestral interjections range from the hauntingly wispy to the aggressively colorful. "The Homage à T.S. Eliot for Octet and Soprano" can be described as "mystical with backbone," perfectly complementing the texts, drawn from Eliot's Four Quartets . The music itself is haunting, rhythmically alive, and forward-moving. Its 33 minutes fly past, thanks to the Kremer-led all-star octet, Gubaidulina's i...

Since the early 1990s, Antonio Vivaldi and Fabio Biondi have become inseparable musical values for many music lovers around the world. In his latest recording for Glossa, the latter offers further proof of the astonishing imaginative powers of Vivaldi as a composer of violin concertos, which are matched by Biondi’s own dynamic and cultured virtuosity as a violinist (and director). With these Farewell Concertos Biondi – leading Europa Galante – turns to works written by a Vivaldi very near the end of his life as he travelled to Vienna in a desperate search for creative opportunities. Where Biondi’s recent Il Diario di Chiara release saw a late Vivaldi surrounded by colleagues and successors at the Pietà in Venice, I concerti dell’addio sees him in a Vienna in mourning for its recentlydeceased emperor and more attuned to the nowfashionable galante style than to that of the Red Priest, however brilliant and ebullient Vivaldi’s compositional spirit continued to be. The...

What happens when you bring the worlds of jazz and Monteverdi together? Is there a musical meeting-point where the two can exist? Claudio Cavina clearly has been believing in this possibility for some time (witness some very “modern” moments in his recent Glossa recordings of the Scherzi musicali and L’incoronazione di Poppea ). Yet this is not La Venexiana playing jazz: Cavina and his musicians do not change a note of the original scores. Instead they bring all their experience and expertise of playing Monteverdi’s madrigals, sacred music (the 1610 Vespers being their current performing focus) and operas to bear on a group of “ ballads” from the 17th century, but in the company of a select quartet of improvising jazz musicians on saxophone, accordion, double bass and drums and all with the warm, soaring story-telling vocal tones of Roberta Mameli shining through as the protagonist. The clue lies in the album’s title, with the musicians tipping their hats and...

Every once in a while Paolo Pandolfo likes to slip away from the world of Baroque-era manuscripts brimming with virtuoso compositions for the viola da gamba in order to create a free-form improvisatory programme surrounded by like-minded musical spirits: and so, away from stylistic rules and regulations, Kind of Satie has come into being for Glossa. Subtitled “new music around Erik Satie”, Pandolfo embarks on a journey around the eccentricity-laden life of that “transcendent idealist”, in the company of his brother Andrea, and with Michelangelo Rinaldi. Andrea Pandolfo, who has worked with Paolo on the Travel notes programme, is a trumpet and flugelhorn player as well as a composer (in world music, contemporary, folk, jazz and early music), whilst the multi-instrumentalist Rinaldi acquits himself admirably on this new recording in playing piano, accordion and toy piano. Paolo Pandolfo is to be heard on both his usual and on an electroacoustic viola da gamba. Satie’s...

Maybe it is the fact that they are women, perhaps it is because of their preference for discretion over visibility, maybe it is in order to give a higher sense of priority to the timeless rather than to immediate success, the case is that both Mara Galassi and Mitzi Meyerson, the only two women in Glossa's artistic lineup, have become skilled in producing minority yet exquisitely-refined and lasting recording projects. Their discs indeed have attained cult status, for they succeed by word of mouth rather than through any more established means of communication. Such will be the case also, we suspect, with Mitzi Meyerson's latest project, called Musique de salon, wherein she introduces us to a charming and delicious recital of pieces by Claude-Bénigne Balbastre. Sounds from a Taskin harpsichord and from a beautifully restored Broadwood fortepiano from 1792 take us back to the fascinating ambience of the pre-revolutionary Parisian salons… although the ...

Lachrymae was my second exposure to the brilliance of violist Kim Kashkashian, after her ECM recording of Paul Hindemith’s viola sonatas. It has long been one of my favorites of hers, as its emotional and tonal complexities are high points of the New Series catalog. The program here is modest—consisting of only three pieces—but heavy. The opening strains of Hindemith’s Trauermusik paint a grave and darkening picture. Composed in a six-hour stretch of creative fervor in the afternoon following the death of King George V in 1936, the piece mourns the fall of the monarchical figurehead by describing a musical effigy in his place. Hindemith gave the premier performance that very evening in a special BBC live broadcast. And indeed, the music has that very quality: a lost message somehow regained and spread across the airwaves in a time of great sorrow. The album’s title work comes from Benjamin Britten and is performed here in its glorious 1975 orchestrated version (for the...

Given the prevalence of war in the Europe of the Renaissance it is no real surprise that warlike themes and echoes of battles should find their ways into secular and civic music compositions – or even into religious ones (such as the many L’Homme armé and La Bataille masses of the time). With Di guerra e di pace , La Pifarescha captures the contrast between the roar and rhythms of battle and the celebrations of courtly and popular festivities as would have been performed by an alta cappella ensemble from the Middle Ages through to the dawn of the Baroque: shawms, slide trumpets and sackbuts, plus other wind instruments buttressed by percussion instruments. The music of well-known composers from the period – Josquin, Isaac, Willaert, Phalèse, Susato and Senfl – is conjured up in virtuosic performances from this Italian ensemble, La Pifarescha, making its first appearance on Glossa (even if its members are regular instrumental contributors to performances and record...

Paolo Pandolfo is one of those rare artists who does not give into the temptation of establishing a regular and frequent rhythm of making new recordings – except, in his case, when he feels that he has something really relevant and new to say. If, in some way, this sets him apart and places him on the fringes of the record market, it does guarantee on the other hand a sense of timelessness and durability for his artistic work. His dazzling virtuosity and a musicality that knows no bounds transforms him into a true reference marker in an early music world that grows more predictable by theday. And now, after nearly two years of silence, Pandolfo gathers round him a group of friends in order to create something which has practically been lost among the performers of “classical” music, victims of a wasting process that has become almost ingrained: improvisation. Turning back to a tradition which in the 16th and 17th centuries counted upon practitioners as f...

Pandolfo is a musician committed to his instrument and his time. His is an alert mind, at times even tormented, always grappling with the idea of his role as a viola da gamba soloist three centuries after the instrument’s virtual disappearance. In 2003 things fell into place and the realization ofan idea with a vague and uncertain outline became possible… At first conceived as a solo recording project, a few days before the sessions were to begin, and almost by coincidence, the singer Laura Polimeno and Paolo’s brother, the trumpet player Andrea Pandolfo, joined the adventure. The stage was set for two real surprises: on the one hand, a viola da gamba CD comprised entirely of new, modern works, and on the other, the creation of a new and fascinating sonority, produced by combining the viola da gamba with trumpet and voice. The result is profoundly and unusually beautiful. Recorded in Spain (Robledo de Chavela) and Belgium (Namur), this is a truly imp...

The story of Handel’s associations with the harp and also those of harpists with his music stretches out across more than a century, from before the composer’s arrival in London in 1712 until well into the 19th century, when arrangements of his works were continuing still to be published. In an original and novel CD - in which the harpist Mara Galassi performs on two contrasting period instruments, a Welsh triple harp and an Érard pedal harp - there appear both compositions written by Handel for the instrument, such as the Harp Concerto HWV 294 and the Suite in D minor HWV 448, as well as later arrangements by composers such as Edward Jones and Nicolas Charles Bochsa, in new works partially attributed (in a somewhat doubtful manner) to Handel. This is Galassi’s third disc for Glossa (following Il Viaggio di Lucrezia in 1998 and Les Harpes du Ciel in 2003, two CDs which have been quietly acquiring cult status), and on it she shares centre stage with th...

Fabio Biondi signs his fifth release on Glossa with a further opera exploration, here with Europa Galante and providing a vital interpretation of Handel’s late opera Imeneo, given in its serenade style 1742 Dublin version.  If, by this date, the London public was tiring of the Italian opera in which Handel had been excelling for decades, and the composer was now turning both to the oratorio and in the direction of the galant style, he was still able to call upon divos and divas of the quality of La Francesina and Giovanni Battista Andreoni to perform his music. Though not a success in its Lincoln’s Inn Fields staging in London, Imeneo was performed by Handel as his only Italian work during his season in Dublin (which also saw the first performance of Messiah), complete with additional arias to add to those praised in 1740 and a pruning of the libretto (which hadn’t received approval). The revised story turns on Tirinto (Ann Hallenberg in Biondi’s modern-day production, as pe...

There is definitely no lack of heroic roles in the Gluckian repertory apart from the very well-known Orfeo from Orfeo ed Euridice : many memorable parts were assigned by this composer for the alto voice (either male castratos or female contraltos) – and it is precisely this repertory, written for excellent interpreters and yet still rarely performed today, which is celebrated on this CD. As a consequence of a specific historical set of circumstances, Gluck had the good fortune to work with the final alto singers of his generation: not only Gaetano Guadagni, but also Giovanni Carestini, Vittoria Tesi and many others. Until the first part of the 18th century, the contralto register was the one especially favoured for heroic male roles and for those of heroines en travesti . Much of this repertory remains unexplored and of course unrecorded: with this new programme, Glossa tries to help filling a somewhat unexplainable gap. Sonia Prina, one of the leading altos of he...

With Il pianto della Madonna , a collection of spiritual compositions by Claudio Monteverdi, La Compagnia del Madrigale provide a stunning follow-up to their award-winning recording of the Fifth Book of madrigals by Luca Marenzio – both releases from Glossa. The singers of the ensemble have returned to their favoured Piedmontese recording location in Roletto to create a vivid sound picture of the desire in Monteverdi’s own time to bring the “heavenly harmony” of the composer’s secular works into the service of the religious domain (and that despite Post-Tridentine restrictions on such secular “intrusions”). Here, for example, is presented the spiritual version of the celebrated Lamento d’Arianna from the lost opera Arianna – Il pianto della Madonna – and sung in a distinctive polyphonic reworking prepared especially for La Compagnia del Madrigale. Pastoral concerns in Monteverdi’s madrigals, such as in the Fourth and Fifth Books , make way for reflections on the Cruc...

With this production of Francesca Caccini’s La liberazione di Ruggerio dall’isola di Alcina , directed by Elena Sartori, an important stepping-stone in the development of seventeenth-century opera receives a superb new recording from Glossa. For much of her career – Caccini was a composer, a virtuoso singer, a teacher, a poet and a multiinstrumentalist – she worked at the Medici court, and was commissioned by the grand duchess of Tuscany, Maria Maddalena of Austria, to write this commedia in musica for performance in Florence in 1625. Very probably this was the first opera composed by a woman, and its performance in Warsaw in 1628 stands as the first documented Italian opera known to have been staged outside the peninsula. Caccini’s score, evoking not just the music of her father Giulio but that of Jacopo Peri and of the Monteverdi of Venice, is full of musical diversity and originality. The libretto of La liberazione (by Ferdinando Saracinelli, working from Ludovi...

Fabio Bonizzoni returns with a further Glossa release dedicated to the chamber vocal output of Georg Friedrich Handel: here, a second volume of duets (and trios), which features the vocal talents of Roberta Invernizzi, Silvia Frigato, Thomas Bauer and Krystian Adam. Whilst Handel wrote these small-scale vocal works across his career, this new selection focuses on that astonishingly fertile brief stay that the young Saxon made in Italy from 1707-09 (when he also produced many of the cantatas which Bonizzoni has recorded to great critical success for Glossa). These sensual duets and trios are imbued with Handel’s discovery of Italian – especially the Arcadian – culture, which included him hearing and understanding the music of Corelli and Alessandro Scarlatti. How quickly and successfully Handel developed the chamber duet form is discussed in another of Stefano Russomanno’s detailed explorations of Handel’s music in the booklet essay. Much of the music for these...

My first exposure to the music of Giya Kancheli, with which the composer once said, “I feel more as if I were filling a space that has been deserted,” was through Exil , which remains in my opinion the finest ECM New Series release to date. Much in contrast to the tearful beauty of that most significant chamber album, the orchestral arrangements on Abii ne viderem —drawn as they are from the same thematic sources—lend extroverted articulation to essentially “monastic” material. This music may speak the same language, but in a far more distant dialect. The Life without Christmas cycle, from which two pieces bookend the present recording, is central to the Kancheli oeuvre. Not only is it his wellspring, but it also comprises, it would seem, the overarching worldview under which he musically operates. It is the gloom of a life of displacement, the full embodiment of what Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich calls “measured gravity,” which may perhaps be likened to the heavy emptiness o...

Bartók serves as the link between Schumann and Kurtág: when Kurtág says 'My mother tongue is Bartók, and Bartók's mother tongue was Beethoven' he is referring to the historically linked musical traditions of Germany and Austria, which are his special concern. In addition to this general connection, the works of Kurtág and Schumann reveal astonishing and fascinating affinities in terms of both literary and musical references..... --From the CD booklet notes by Hartmut Lück on Kashkashian: '... the best violist in the world.' --New York Daily News 'Her playing is notable for its songfulness, a weightless soaring that conveys a wealth of emotion.' --Philadelphia Inquirer

“Kim Kashkashian’s playing of that most vexing and vulnerable of instruments, the viola, always seems to convey both the pain and the joy, the beauty and the toil, that go into the making of music. As it’s been said, she is a virtuoso who doesn’t play like a virtuoso. You don’t get just the notes, the surface brilliance...you get the subtext, the deep feelings – the composers’, hers, yours.” – Bradley Bambarger, Schwann Opus. Typically impassioned, committed performances distinguish Kim Kashkashian’s New Series recording of music for viola by three great Hungarian composers. Kashkashian’s intense focus, superb craftsmanship and explosive virtuosity are brought to bear on Béla Bartók’s final work, on one of György Kurtág’s early pieces, and on an important new work written especially for her by Peter Eötvös. Interconnections between the composers and the interpreter are many. Something akin to a line of transmission runs from Bartók to Eötvös via Kurtág. Kurtág has f...

Reto Bieri’s New Series debut is a brilliant recital for solo clarinet that looks at new developmental possibilities in the ‘language’ of the instrument in modern music. Bieri quotes with approval Heinz Holliger’s statement “My entire relation to music is such that I always try to go to the limits”. Here the Swiss clarinettist has brought together pieces from the border regions of compositional exploration, as well as the pathways that link them. Under examination here are, for instance, the border region “between silence and the birth of sound and noise, a magical region”, touched upon in the music of Salvatore Sciarrino, Heinz Holliger and Gergely Vajda. Then there is the juncture of speech, sprechgesang and melody (referenced in Holliger and Luciano Berio), as well as the border region linking gesture, dance, ritual and game – as in Holliger, Elliott Carter and Péter Eötvös. In Holliger’s “Contrechant” , the piece that gives Bieri’s album its title, all the regions ...

Russian pianist and composer Lera Auerbach does not look like your average pianist/composer. She looks a little more like an actress or model, and Americans might note that she looks a bit like British actress Olivia d'Abo, who plays Nicole Wallace, Vincent D'Onofrio's notorious nemesis on the popular detective show Law and Order: Criminal Intent. However, acting is not Auerbach's sideline; it's poetry, and she has five collections of poems to credit, plus publication of more than 100 single items in various Russian poetry journals. Most of us in the West can't make heads or tails of the Russian language, therefore Auerbach's music must speak to us on her behalf. The 37 pieces found on Bis' Lera Auerbach plays her Preludes and Dreams are like pianistic poems; while a few top the three-minute mark, most of these pieces range between 3 minutes and 30 seconds. The movements are subdivided into three sets, 24 Preludes for Piano, Op. 41, Ten...

An ECM debut for György Kurtág jr, in a strikingly unusual context. The son of the great Hungarian composer is himself an influential figure in new music, particularly in the electronic and electro-acoustic domain. “Kurtágonals” is, amongst other things, a celebration of his work in this area, as fellow composer László Hortobágyi  adapts and develops Kurtág jr. themes – some of them more than 30 years old - , setting them in new sound-environments. Hortobágyi views “Kurtágonals” as both a diary of a long friendship and a succinct summary of the musical oeuvre of the contributors. The three musician-composers, also known democratically as Hortogonals, have a vast range of experience between them which reaches beyond ‘new music’ into non-western forms, sound-collage, improvisation, folk music, pop, rock, and ambient music. The participants write, “The principal intention of the Hortogonals project is to re-contextualize these compositions, originally born in a classi...

In his series Vertical Time Study, Hosokawa seeks to "integrate Noh’s vertical structure of time into my own music. It is about how temporal elements, like wedges, disrupt the vertical, horizontal timeline at irregular intervals. These disruptions produce elements of tension … creating visible fissures in the structure of time and visible cracks in space. My aim is to examine the complexity and the depth of these sounds hidden in the moment." In his piece Sen V, Hosokawa tries to combine the "earth’s groaning" - his personal impression of Tibetan Shomyo (Buddhist monk chants) – with the sound of the accordion. The same instrument plays an important role in his 1994 piece In die Tiefe der Zeit, in which it acts as the female counterpart to the solo cello. Both instruments are embraced by the string section representing the universe. The part for accordion in Melodia, which represents Hosokawa’s attempt to portray the "flow of sounds in our souls" , is insp...

Lera Auerbach, just 30, has already achieved success as a pianist, composer (more than 60 opus numbers to date), novelist and poet. Born in the Soviet Union, she trained mainly in the US and in Germany. This, the first commercial CD of her music , benefits from powerful, strongly committed performances, and excellent recording – Auerbach’s style involves vivid, sometimes aggressive exploitation of the piano’s bass register, and such passages come across with wonderful force and clarity.  For the sequence of 24 keys, she adopts the same order as Chopin did for his Preludes (and Pierre Rode in his 24 violin Caprices). But the major and minor keys mean something rather different to Auerbach. Sometimes the key is only tenuously suggested (F sharp major); sometimes we’re half-way through the piece before it’s established (C major). On other occasions the tonal centre may be clear but the mode less so (B major). Or we come across naïve, straight-forward tonal material, ...

For as long as mankind has gazed up into the night sky at the stars and planets following their ordained course, the imagination has been set free. In ancient days, people spoke of “music of the spheres”, ghostly sounds that were long thought to have been created by the planetary bodies brushing past each other. The music they made was ethereal and, quite literally, otherworldly. “I’ve been fascinated for a long time by this idea of ‘spherical music’ and by the philosophers, mathematicians and musicians who expounded their theory of musica universalis over the centuries,” explains Daniel Hope. “It started with Pythagoras and extended to some of those extraordinary German thinkers such as Johannes Kepler who were convinced that music was created when planets move or collide, and that music had a mathematical foundation, a kind of astronomical harmony. I thought it was significant that these were brilliant scientists and mathematicians, not just soothsayers. My aim was ...

The Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa describes his music as calligraphy with notes in space and time, notes that come from the world of silence and also return to it. He understands his composition "In die Tiefe der Zeit" [Into the Depths of Time] as a mythic soundscape. To the traditional Japanese "paths" of discovering the self, Toshio Hosokawa adds another one: the "path of music". John Cage, too, decided early on to take the "path of music", and he thoroughly explored non-Western systems of thought and ways of life.

The German-Austrian-Australian Rosamunde Quartett München was formed in 1991 by four musicians of widely differing backgrounds, and given early encouragement by Sergiu Celibedache and Heinrich Schiff. A major success at the Berliner Festwochen a year later elevated them to 'the elite of the lofty guild of string quartets' to quote one German critic, and since then they have toured the major festivals. The undervalued work of Czech composer Burian has been one of the quartet's enthusiasms from the outset. Here they contrast his 4th String Quartet with Shostakovich's 8th - in the process alluding to the troubled biographies of both men - in a programme that begins with Webern's farewell to Romanticism in the Langsamer Satz. 'One of the finest discs to come from ECM of late by the little-known but distinguished Rosamunde Quartet. The Webern dates from his short-live Romantic period, in style close to late Strauss or Schoenberg of Verklärte Nacht...

Of all the words in music’s vocabulary, one of the commonest is "farewell" Many of the world’s greatest songs are addressed to the departing: the recently dead, lost lovers, missed opportunities. Music speaks of these things as memory speaks, makes us aware both of distance and of remaining closeness. Nothing is lost, music says: it is here. But also: it is here only because it cannot come back. … When it addresses leave-taking specifically, it has terms that include some of the oldest in the Western tradition. A four-note scalewise descent in the minor mode has been an image of lament since the Renaissance, and perhaps it accounts for the atmosphere of sadness that often gathers around minor-key harmony. A final cadence, particularly in slow music, can also sound like a valedicition, because this is the point at which music not only expresses passing but itself recedes. This vanishing and this eternal presence have been the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestro...

The Kultrum collaboration between Argentinian bandoneon master Dino Saluzzi and the Munich-based German-Austrian-Australian Rosamunde Quartet was initiated in 1996. Featuring Saluzzi's chamber music for bandoneon and string quartet, Kultrum is both a "departure" and an extension of Dino's previous ECM recordings (in fact the title echoes that of his first disc for the label), in which - as Swiss critic Peter Rüedi has noted - he acknowledges and then transgresses the boundaries: between composition and improvisation, between so-called serious and popular music, between folk music and jazz and tango. The genesis of the project, however, can be traced back specifically to Saluzzi's solo album Andina of 1988 and a small piece added as a postscript to that session. The sound of the bandoneon on "Memories" seemed to imply a wave of orchestration, and the suggestion that a string quartet could bring this out more fully was left for Saluzzi ...

Mansurian writes extremely well for quartet; the textures and polyphonic working are basically traditional, with little in the way of outré effect. … The Second Quartet consists of three slow movements, putting one in mind of the five Adagios of Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Quartet. This is a work of ravishing if crepuscular beauty, deeply tonal, whose melodic language is partly influenced by a song by the much-loved Armenian national composer Komitas as well as by Armenian sacred music of the middle ages. … The performances by the Rosamunde Quartett of all three works bespeak utter identification with the music and create a very finely tuned chiaroscuro of quiet dynamics. (Calum MacDonald / International Record Review) Both string quartets are beautiful, profoundly moving pieces of great consolatory power and expressive strength, albeit in discreet and introspective. However, for all its apparent simplicity, Mansurian’s music cannot be compared with what is now often re...

With delicate piano themes and atmospheric electronic sounds, Hans-Joachim Roedelius & Arnold Kasar develop a unique chemistry. The fact that they are part of different generations of musicians is one of the reasons for the uniqueness and the magic of their encounter. Roedelius is one of the forefathers of Kosmische and Krautrock. With his bands Cluster and Harmonica, he played a major role in the development of these movements. Roedelius was formed by the political and social uprising of the late sixties and the seventies. Today Roedelius is able to look back on more than a hundred releases and collaborations ranging from his longtime companion Dieter Moebius to acclaimed international artists such as Brian Eno or younger musicians like Tim Story. Arnold Kasar is almost thirty years younger than Roedelius, he is a child of Berlin´s crossover scene of the 1990s. He broke the line between electronic dance music and jazz, he played with Micatone, Nylon and Friedrich...

This release features song excerpts from various long-form theater pieces, the first four coming from Meredith Monk's theater piece Acts From Under and Above, and these are the most jarring on the record. "Scared Song" features English lyrics, minimal accompaniment, and Monk singing harsh, abrasive "scared" sounds. Very unsettling -- and perhaps that is the intention. "Do You Be," a selection from her opera Vessel, features Monk solo on piano and voice with a shrill, piercing wail. Very satisfying. Additional selections from Vessel appear on Monk's 1992 recording Facing North. With one exception, the remaining tracks come from a Monk/Ping Chong science fiction epic opera called The Games, and these more diverse, more exploratory pieces really make the collection work as a recording. A casual listener unfamiliar with the theater pieces may well be put off by the abrasiveness of the first four tracks, which may unfortunately be enough to...

In her album Impermanence, Meredith Monk succeeds in creating pieces that fit her theme well and much of this music does indeed seem ephemeral, fleeting. These works are not casually or routinely constructed, though; their apparent simplicity masks a psychological and musical sophistication that's evident in the way their carefully placed details contribute to their surprising impact. The prevailing mood of the album is melancholy, but not passive sadness; even the songs that deal most explicitly with loss, such as Last Song (which opens the album) and Liminal, are punctuated with astonishing, defiant gestural outbursts that make it clear that Monk has no intention of going gentle into that good night. One of the strengths of the album is the variety of its pieces; Monk is never repeating herself or just recycling ideas . Pieces such as Particular Dance, for voices and mixed ensemble, are lively and full of unpredictable humor, and Maybe 1, for eight pianos, is a quirk...

Little is known about the early life of Giaches de Wert, except that he was born in 1535 somewhere in the region of Antwerp or Ghent (perhaps in the small village of Weert between the two cities). From his youth, however, his world was more Italian than Flemish: as a child he was taken to Italy to be one of the Marchesa of Padulla’s choristers. In his mid-teens he moved to serve an offshoot of the Gonzaga family at Novellara, but soon made connections with the nearby ducal courts of Mantua – where the devout Duke Guglielmo Gonzaga had a particularly keen interest in church music – and Ferrara, long famed for its musical prestige thanks to the patronage of the Este family, where he was influenced by the madrigalist Cipriano de Rore. After a short spell in Milan, he returned to Mantua in 1565 as maestro di cappella in Duke Guglielmo’s recently completed chapel of Santa Barbara. There he was to remain for the rest of his life, th...

With this, Meredith Monk's latest record and one of her most substantial pieces, a number of questions have to be raised and satisfactorily answered. Atlas is a self-declared opera, yet is an opera virtually without words. It has a narrative, yet the narrative would be imperceptible to the CD listener unless it was relayed in an accompanying note which, by definition, is separate to the musical entity called Atlas. Judging by the booklet-note by Max Loppert and the accompanying photographs of the 1991 Houston premiere, these problems would not attend an actual staging of this work where the music has a clear and narrative-based context throughout. So, how are we to approach this work in its CD form? A parallel which comes to mind is listening to a conventional opera sung in a tongue which one doesn't understand, and for which one has neither libretto nor synopsis. Or, perhaps even more aptly, a ballet where one is similarly strapped for a story-line and unable...

Pianist Valery Afanassiev – renowned for strikingly individual and deeply introspective interpretations of the music of Franz Schubert – has now paired two often extrovert works by the composer: the set of six “Moments musicaux” and the “Sonata D 850”. Recorded in September 2010 at the Auditorio Radiotelevisione Svizzera, Lugano, this is ECM’s second solo Schubert release by the Moscow-born pianist, having previously issued a live recording of Afanassiev performing Schubert’s final “Sonata D 960” at the 1985 Lockenhaus Festival that has become a much-discussed favourite among connoisseurs. Composed from 1823 to 1827, the year before the composer’s death at age 31, the “Moments musicaux” brim with song and dance, as well as Schubert’s characteristic mood swings from major to minor, from light to dark, often within a single piece. With its glittering surface, the brief “No. 3 in f minor” was one of Schubert’s more popular piano pieces for decades; but the ballroom-worth...