Contrechant was widely praised for both the Swiss
clarinettist’s beauty of tone and his uncommon expressiveness with
extended instrumental techniques. Quasi Morendo begins with a new exploration of one of the pieces featured on that first album, Salvatore Sciarrino’s Let Me Die Before I Wake (1982), reentering its “whisper-quiet sound world of harmonics, multiphonics and tremolandos” (as The Guardian
described it) and making new discoveries. “How the sounds come about is
a mystery even to me,” Bieri tells liner writer Roman Brotbeck. “With
special grips, even slight changes in the approach to the sound, it is
possible to create particular multiphonics; through breathing and
blowing (a big difference!) I can influence these sounds in the finest
degree.”
Reto Bieri is then joined by the Finnish string quartet Meta4 for a
profound interpretation of Johannes Brahms’s Quintet op 115 (1891).
Written late in his life, it was inspired by friendship with
clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld. Brahms had planned to retire in 1890, but
after hearing Mühlfeld play music of Weber, Mozart and Ludwig Spohrl,
he rededicated himself to composing to create works that count amongst
the finest of his long career. From the liner notes: “The Clarinet
Quintet is a swan song, a finale; gestures of closure dominate. Even the
beginning has the effect of a coda. The strings intone a sinking
elegiac melody over four bars, preparing the entrance on the clarinet.”
The quintet often sounds freer, and more idyllic, than Brahms’s earlier
chamber music, yet is one of his most meticulously constructed works.
The album closes with French composer Gérard Pesson’s Nebenstück (1998), a ghostly re-arrangement of Brahms’s Ballade, Op. 10 No. 4.
