GIYA KANCHELI In l’istesso tempo

“In l’istesso tempo” is an important addition to Giya Kancheli’s ECM discography. His ninth album for the New Series consists of “Time… and again” played, for the first time on disc by its dedicatees, Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer and Ukrainian pianist Oleg Maisenberg, plus premiere recordings of “V & V” with Kremer and Kremeratica Baltica, and the Piano Quartet (subtitled ‘In l’istesso tempo’) performed by the Bridge Ensemble.

The Kremer/Kancheli connection is long-established. The Latvian violinist was one of the first to play the Georgian composer’s music in the West, and he has always seemed temperamentally attuned to Kancheli’s characteristic compositional gestures – the extreme dynamics, the Spartan textures, the emotional volatility, and the use of limited materials to attain a cumulative expressive power. Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin’s early assessment of Kancheli as "an ascetic with the temperament of a maximalist -- a restrained Vesuvius" is still very much to the point, as Kremer well understands.

The last time Kremer and Kancheli combined forces on disc was for the critically-lauded “Lament”, Kancheli’s memorial music for Luigi Nono. “Time…and Again” had a very different geneis. It was originally commissioned for the Schubert bicentennial celebrations at London’s Barbican theatre and intended to be performed as part of Gidon Kremer and Oleg Maisenberg’s Schubert cycle. Kancheli’s first thought was to load the work with “hidden or obvious references to Schubert” a plan he rather quickly abandoned: “It became clear this idea was provoking an inner resistance. Only one solution remained, to rely on my own experiences and work with them instead.” Giya Kancheli now views “Time…And Again” as the culmination of a creative period that began with “Trauerfarbenes Land”, a period in which a continuing preoccupation was the simplifying and clarifying of his harmonic language.

“V and V” was written at the urging of Yehudi Menuhin and first performed at the Menuhin Festival in Gstad Switzerland in 1995. Gidon Kremer has programmed the piece on many occasions – memorably performing it, for instance, alongside Pärt’s “Tabula rasa” at the 1999 London Proms. The present recording of “V & V” was made at Lockenhaus in 2003.

The Piano Quartet was commissioned by the Bridge Quartet, so named because they hoped to bridge Eastern and Western musical cultures, a goal with which Kancheli could sympathize. At the time of the recording the ensemble, formed in Seattle in the 1990s, was comprised of two Russians, David Tonkonogui (cello) and Mikhail Schmidt (violin), with British violist Helen Callus and American pianist Karen Sigers.

Kancheli travelled to Seattle to rehearse the work with the ensemble, a work of which he was to write, “Here you won’t find appeals for a bright future. Most likely you will find threads of sorrow caused by the imperfection of the world, which keeps disregarding the most horrendous examples from human history”. Critics found an austere beauty in the work, nonetheless: “Kancheli appreciates the power of silence,” said Gavin Borchert, in the Seattle Weekly. “The melodic lines, too, keep to small intervals, built mainly out of stepwise motion or obsessive repeated notes. The work preserves one steady pulse throughout; all tempo changes come as a doubling or halving of the pace. These artful restrictions build up an amazing tension, broken by just a few sudden upheavals, and a crushingly violent central passage, and later resolved into moments of melting loveliness.” (ECM Records)