Stockholm Syndrome Ensemble VOICES OF ANGELS

VOICES OF ANGELS

Andrei Ioniţă OBLIQUE STRATEGIES

Described in The Times as 'One of the most exciting cellists to have emerged for a decade', former BBC New Generation Artist Andrei Ionita draws together some of the greatest music ever written for solo cello. Ionita gives the world-premiere recording of Australian composer Brett Dean s 11 Oblique Strategies, from which the album takes its name. Dean s work was inspired by the Oblique Strategy cards invented by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt to spark creativity. In J.S. Bach s exquisite Cello Suite No.1 a sense of harmony is created using a single melodic line, with mesmerising results. Kodály's pioneering Sonata (1915) is another giant of the solo cello repertoire, and the album concludes with Black Run (2001) by contemporary Swedish polymath Svante Henryson.

Håkan Hardenberger / Colin Currie THE SCENE OF THE CRIME

The duo with Håkan Hardenberger is my musical safe space for maximum risk-taking. From my earliest point of connection with this most regal of musicians, what entranced me was the fearless audacity of the endeavour. Envelopes pushed, or simply reinvented, boundaries moved and canvasses recast. Rehearsals are intense; not many words spoken, a glance here or there, a certain type of breath taken, whilst the concerts are zones of feverish intensity, many-coloured and highly emotional. Too many now to pick out - San Fransisco, Seoul, Verbier, London, the Hanover concert with three World Premieres - I want to thank him for his encouragement, daring, humour and above all, friendship. (Colin Currie)

Doric String Quartet / Allison Bell BRETT DEAN Epitaphs - String Quartet No. 1 - String Quartet No. 2

It is impossible to talk about the chamber music of the Australian composer Brett Dean without mentioning that he was principal viola of the Berlin Philharmonic. Inevitably he understands string textures from the inside, with compelling results. The excellent Doric Quartet rise to the challenges of these elegiac works. Eclipse (String Quartet No 1), particularly timely, conjures the despair of the boat people rescued from the Indian Ocean by the Norwegian freighter Tampa in 2001, then denied admission to Australia. The three movements flicker between light and dark, turbulence and calm. Five Epitaphs offer moving portraits of five dead friends, including the conductor Richard Hickox. The Quartet No 2, ”And once I played Ophelia” (2013), has a part, too, for soprano (Allison Bell) which began as the seeds of an unwritten Hamlet opera. Tense, tender and original, it’s a tough but rewarding listen. (The Guardian)

Tallinn Chamber Orchestra / Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir / Tõnu Kaljuste GESUALDO

The music of Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa (1566-1613) has exerted a powerful influence on composers down the ages. His highly-charged, mannerist, idiosyncratic vocal music constitutes “a gallery of dramatically-lit portraits of human emotions with a heavy emphasis on the extremes of joy and despair” (to quote former Hilliard Ensemble singer Gordon Jones). Amongst the most experimental and expressive music of its period, it continues to invite reinterpretation and modern responses. 

On this album, recorded in Estonia at Tallinn’s Methodist Church, we hear contemporary composition inspired by Gesualdo, as well as new arrangements of his work. The album opens with a radiant version of Moro Lasso from the Sixth Book of Madrigals (1611) in a transcription for string orchestra by Tõnu Kaljuste. This serves to set the scene for Carlo, a major ‘biographical’ piece based on the life and music of Gesualdo, written by Australian composer Brett Dean in 1997. Dean writes, “With Carlo Gesualdo one should not try to separate his music from his life and times. The texts of his later madrigals, thought to be written by Gesualdo himself, abound with references to love, death, guilt and self-pity. Combine this with the fact that I have always found his vocal works to be one of music’s most fascinating listening experiences and you have the premise for my piece.” Carlo takes up the opening chorale from Moro lasso. Then a vocal collage unfolds, and quotes from the madrigal are also taken up and developed further by the orchestra – until we arrive at the sound-world of 20^th century music. By “moving between two time-zones” musically, Dean conveys a sense of Gesualdo’s troubled psyche. Carlo was originally scored for fifteen solo strings, sampler and pre-recorded tape, but conductor Tõnu Kaljuste suggested presenting it with live singers. Successful experiments with this in 2002 in Stockholm paved the way for the present recording. 

Kaljuste also encouraged the writing of Erkki-Sven Tüür’s string arrangement of O crux benedicta. The initial motive of this 1603 Gesualdo piece provides the compositional underpinning for Tüür’s L’ombra della croce (2015) for string orchestra. Tüür dedicates the piece to producer Manfred Eicher, “in honour of how he has encompassed both early and contemporary music in the remarkable adventure that is the ECM New Series.”
Psalmody is without a Gesualdo-inspired subtext but it too cross-references older and newer music, within the narrower time-frame of Erkki-Sven Tüür’s own oeuvre. When Tüür wrote Psalmody for the early music ensemble Hortus Musicus in 1993 he was looking back at the music he had composed for his experimental “chamber rock” group ‘In Spe’ in the period 1979-82, so the piece already incorporated a retrospective element.
Tüür revised the work in 2005 and, after hearing a version by Hortus Musicus with the Collegium Musicale choir, revised it again in 2011. Tüür: “I re-orchestrated the entire score – or rather, I recomposed it, brought balance to the form and made additions to the choral element. This is a unique piece for me…The musical idea behind the composition dates back over thirty years. The latest version essentially represents a sort of minimalism derived from rhythmic patterns and intonations characteristic of various traditions of the European Renaissance and Baroque.” (ECM Records)

Swedish Chamber Orchestra / HK Gruber BRETT DEAN Water Music

Water is one of the most fundamental elements of our physical world and of life on earth. It also has enormous symbolic significance in many cultures as the source and transmitter of life. We humans are indeed made up largely of water. Such is the value of water that disputes arise over its availability. Where previous wars have been fought primarily over territory, economic gain and the securing of mined resources such as oil, many predict that water itself will be at the heart of future conflict. Water has also been much on the mind of many of my compatriots in recent times.

The past few years of history-breaking drought in Australia have brought much devastation and despair across the country. It is impossible to ignore the seriousness of the scenarios that may await us, be they through war, or simply through the effects of drought and fire. Even my new home town of Melbourne, a coastal city and traditionally, even notoriously, well serviced by rainfall, has spent much of the past year employing water restrictions, with television adverts and billboards serving as constant community reminders about wise water use. Neighbourly chats about the weather have changed from that of passing curiosity to genuine concern. 

Water is the inspiration for my concertante music for saxophones and chamber orchestra, jointly commissioned by a group of European ensembles to perform with the Rascher Saxophone Quartet. It was the extremely "fluid" playing style and extraordinary tonal blend of this wonderful group that initially turned my thoughts to the sounds and images of liquid as a possible starting point for this three movement work. Hearing recordings of their performances, with their unanimity of sound and virtuosity, led me to a strong desire to treat the quartet as a form of single "super-soloist", hurtling through an orchestral landscape in a series of "rapids" and "waves" of fast, flowing passage work. This then became the genesis of the second movement, Coursing. It is in fact different aspects of water that provide the origin for each of the three movements in turn. 

The first movement, Bubbling, takes as its initial inspiration the sound of water. Emerging initially from the live sounds of bubbling water bowls, it finds an instrumental commentary in the toneless key sounds and pattering staccato passages of the soloists. As the movement progresses, counterparts of a more lyrical-musical nature start to surface, firstly in the orchestral strings, later via a prominent single trumpet and ultimately from the saxophone soloists themselves. One of the most striking aspects of water is its enormous potential of different purposes, be it to clean and purify, to sustain, to carry, to energise. 

This first movement, starting from the mere sound of bubbling water, becomes a journey into these different states and their significance. Coursing, as previously described, is inspired by the image of rushing water, aswell as by the energetic surge of current and power that invariably lies just beneath its surface. Furthermore, on rehearsing this movement, the tenor saxophonist of the Raschers, Bruce Weinberger, wrote to me that he saw, in the suddenly quiet chorale section played by the soloists towards the end of this movement, a form of prayer for the continuation of the earth¹s future water resources, a sentiment that appeals to me strongly, while not necessarily being a conscious intention. 

The final section, Parched Earth, is about the absence of water, of aridity and drought, and the fact that it dominates our lives and thoughts even more when confronted by a dangerous lack of it. This final movement then, with its stark multiphonic chords and extended trills in the solo quartet, slow string glissandi and sampled sounds of metallic eeriness, adds a deliberate question mark to the work as a whole, transforming it from a sonic celebration of one of life¹s most vital forces into a lonely soundscape of dry desert winds and bleak abandonment. (© Brett Dean, February 2004)