Patricia Kopatchinskaja SCHOENBERG Pierrot Lunaire

 

PIERROT LUNAIRE

 

Reto Bieri / Meta4 QUASI MORENDO

Quasi Morendo is Reto Bieri’s third appearance on ECM New Series and follows the 2011 solo clarinet album Contrechant (with music of Berio, Carter, Holliger, Eötvös, Sciarrino and Vajda) and a powerful performance of Galina Ustvolskaya’s Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano with Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Markus Hinterhäuser, issued in 2014. 

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.

Reto Bieri CONTRECHANT

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 are illuminated, calling for “a new kind of virtuosity from the player”, a challenge to which Reto Bieri rises. With the exception of the late Luciano Berio, the clarinettist has worked closely with each of the featured composers to realize optimum performance of these pieces. What a fascinating group of composers it is, too: from Elliott Carter – at 102, America’s Grand Old Man of new music – to Gergely Vajda, former student of Eötvös, who wrote “Lightshadow-trembling” when he was only twenty.

Paul Griffiths, in his liner notes, emphasizes the ‘singing’ quality of the performances: “Song. Some of the titles nudge us in that direction – Lied, Contrechant, Rechant – but what makes the conclusion inescapable is the fluency, the nuanced variety of Reto Bieri’s playing. This is indeed song: song without words … song in which sound alone sings”.

Bieri views the choice of pieces for the present album as an extension of the ideal repertoire suggested by the 1995 ECM solo clarinet recording “dal niente” by Eduard Brunner, with music of Lachenmann, Stockhausen, Stravinsky, Boulez, Scelsi and Yun. (Both solo clarinet discs were recorded at Propstei St Gerold, with Manfred Eicher producing). “Contrechant” is destined to prove no less influential. (ECM Records)

Patricia Kopatchinskaja / Markus Hinterhäuser / Reto Bieri GALINA USTVOLSKAYA

Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) insisted that she wrote no chamber music: instrumentation alone could be no index of her music’s intentions. Her works are infused, she said, with a religious spirit, and the powerful, rhythmic stringency of the music testifies to the relentlessness of her vision. Although Shostakovich had been one of her teachers, Ustvolskaya maintained that her music resembled that of no other composer, living or dead, and put herself outside all stylistic “schools”. She followed only her own austere, unforgiving path. Its sense of concentration is sometimes ferocious; her work, said Viktor Suslin, has the "narrowness of a laser beam capable of piercing metal.” Entering its sound-world calls for a special kind of commitment. With prescience Shostakovich said of her art, “I am convinced that the music of G. I. Ustvolskaya will achieve worldwide renown, to be valued by all who perceive truth in music to be of paramount importance.” Many years had to pass for this prediction to be fulfilled, but Ulstvolskaya’s music is increasingly being taken up by artists. On the present disc, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, pianist Markus Hinterhäuser and clarinettist Reto Bieri rise to its challenges.

The intensity of Ustvolskaya’s music is well-matched with the driven performance style of Patricia Kopatchinskaja who was recently voted “Instrumentalist of the Year” by the Royal Philharmonic Society, its jury of musicians hailing her as “an irresistible force of nature: passionate, challenging and totally original in her approach.” Her aim as an interpretative player, is “to communicate the meaning and inner workings of the music. Curiosity drives me to explore many different musical frontiers." Her repertoire has addressed music from Bach to Cage and beyond. Kopatchinskaja feels that Ustvolskaya’s 1964 Duet is amongst the 20th century’s most powerful compositions: “Here is no place for ‘beauty’. In order to rise to the expressive power of this music the interpretation has to go to the extremes.” The 1952 Sonata, meanwhile, “gains quality and depth with each repeated playing (and listening). In the beginning the violin repeats a hammering phrase, - the stonemason working on a tombstone. This pulse prolongs itself through the whole piece, sometimes interrupted by irregular breaths and sighs – a lonesome soul walking through an endless Russian landscape. The music of Ustvolskaya is like a ritual, taking the listener into a unique and archaic world, where there is no place for comparisons or theoretical analysis.”

The present recording of Ustvolskaya’s music was made at Lugano’s Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera in March 2013, and produced by Manfred Eicher.