Ketevan Sepashvili / Temo Kharshiladze, Madina / Karbeli GIYA KANCHELI Poetry of Silence

 

POETRY OF SILENCE

 

Khatia Buniatishvili MOTHERLAND

Khatia Buniatishvili has been described by The Independent as “the young Georgian firebrand”. At the age of only 26 years, this Tblisi-born pianist has already achieved an exceptional maturity of interpretation and a distinctive artistic approach that make her playing unmistakable. Khatia’s warm, sometimes sorrowful playing may reflect a close proximity to Georgian folk-music, which, she attests, has greatly influenced her musicality. Critics emphasize that her playing has an aura of elegant solitude and even melancholy, which she does not feel to be a negative attribute. “The piano is the blackest instrument,” she says, a “symbol of musical solitude… I have to be psychologically strong and forget the hall if I want to share it with the audience.” Khatia Buniatishvili speaks five languages and lives in Paris.

The CD is an intimate quest encompassing solo piano works from Bach to Pärt and from Brahms to Kancheli, in which the themes of longing for home, the merriment of a folk dance and the eternal cycle of growth and decay are apparent. Spanning a broad stylistic and historical range, the album celebrates the works that have accompanied Khatia Buniatschvili’s personal path in life, including pieces from her Georgian homeland. Motherland juxtaposes the happy lightness of a ‘Slavonic Dance’ by Dvorak and the melancholy of Grieg’s lyrical ‘Homesickness’, and contrasts the elegant gaiety of Mendelssohn’s ‘Song without Words’ (op. 67/2) with the graceful introspection of Liszt’s ‘Lullaby’. Classics of the Romantic piano repertoire such as Chopin’s Étude in C-sharp minor (op. 25/7) and Brahms ‘Intermezzo’ (op. 117/2) are embedded between Bach’s cantata ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’ and Arvo Pärt’s musical dedication ‘For Alina’. 

Anna Gourari ELUSIVE AFFINITY

In this imaginatively shaped and sensitively played album – her third for ECM -  Russian pianist Anna Gourari explores musical connections and influences extending across the arts.  Three suites of contemporary music are heard here.  Alfred Schnittke’s Five Aphorisms (1990) draw impulses from the poetry of his friend Joseph Brodsky.  Rodion Shchedrin’s Diary - Seven Pieces (2002) dedicated to Gourari and inspired by her playing, reflects the life of a pianist and composer.  Wolfgang Rihm’s sequence of tombeaux, Zwiesprache (1999) pays tribute to musicologists Alfred Schlee and Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, conductor Paul Sacher, and art sociologist Hermann Wiesler. Threaded between the cycles are two Giya Kancheli miniatures drawn from theatre and movie music, as well as Arvo Pärt’s early tintinnabuli-style Variations for the Healing of Arinuschka (1977).  Gourari’s investigation of artistic affinities is framed with Bach’s transcriptions of Venetian composers Antonio Vivaldi and Alessandro Marcello: “Anna Gourari makes these Bach slow movements, too, ours,” Paul Griffiths writes in the liner notes. “And the newer music is cherished and invigorated.”

Alexander Ivashkin / Russian State Symphony Orchestra / Valeri Polyansky GIYA KANCHELI Simi - Mourned by the Wind

Distrustful of virtuosity for its own sake, and aware of his own technical limitations, Giya Kancheli has deliberately avoided using the term "concerto" for his works for cello and orchestra, Simi and Mourned by the Wind. It may be said, however, that these pieces are concerto-like, insofar as sustaining long pitches and controlling the instrument's tone are equally challenging to the performer, and both pieces display serene, chant-like phrases that require a light touch and a steady bow arm. Kancheli's expressions are decidedly somber and meditative -- note the words in the subtitles, "bleak reflections" and "Liturgy in memoriam" -- and it may become obvious why he chooses to score many passages in the cello's and orchestra's lowest range and seldom ventures into the brighter upper octaves, except for occasional eerie harmonics and fleeting "night music" sonorities. The cello's central role in Simi is reversed in Mourned by the Wind, where the orchestra is dominant and the cello reduced to a less active part; yet cellist Alexander Ivashkin is the musician listeners will follow, and his subdued but warm playing is always distinctly separated from the orchestral mass, even at its loudest. The Russian State Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Valery Polyansky, is fully engaged in these brooding performances, and Chandos' sound quality is evenly balanced. (Blair Sanderson)

Gidon Kremer / Kremerata Baltica HYMNS AND PRAYERS

A beautifully-recorded album from master violinist Gidon Kremer and his Kremerata, Baltica, spanning a wide range of music, all of it broached with conviction. Hungarian composer and pianist Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer from the Serbian province of Vojvodina has written eight hymns in commemoration of the film director Andrei Tarkovsky, an artist he has called a homo moralis whose remarkable visions cast a small but significant light on the tragic world of the previous century. Georgian composer Giya Kancheli contributes a silent prayer for two of his most important musical associates: the cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich and the violinist Gidon Kremer. The contemplative intensity of the hymns and the ascetic tranquillity of the prayer are offset by César Franck‘s Piano Quintet in F minor like a premonition of Beethoven’s Appassionata, whose second movement, marked Lento, molto sentimento, in turn takes up the mood of the other two works. This programmatic combination underlines an intrinsic principle Paul Klee developed in his theory of harmony in the visual arts: any compositional harmony will gain character through dissonances, with the balance being restored by counterweights. (ECM Records)

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)

Kim Kashkashian / The Hilliard Ensemble / Dennis Russell Davies / Stuttgarter Kammerorchester GIYA KANCHELI Abii Ne Viderem

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 of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. As in said film, every gesture makes a footprint, a remnant of human presence left to sink into the submerged wasteland of a silent future.

Morning Prayers (1990) is immediately distinguished by an angelic boy soprano, whose taped voice is never fully grounded but which hovers throughout. The piano adds another haunting element, seeming to pull at the barbed ends of nostalgia even as it pushes the orchestra down a flight of descendent chords. Occasional violent moments startle us into self-awareness and only serve to underscore the power of the prayers that surround them. The most profoundly effective moment occurs when the piano echoes in a dance-like theme, the orchestral accompaniment slightly off center—a distant memory ravaged by time and circumstance.

The title of the album’s central piece, Abii ne viderem (1992/94), translates to “I turned away so as not to see.” The more one listens to it, the question becomes not what is being turned away from but what is being observed upon turning. Its paced staccato bursts are linked by a profound silence, escalating with every reiteration. This silence eventually opens into a full orchestral statement, italicized again by the piano’s audible pulse. We find ourselves caught in the middle of a larger web of sentiments, until we can no longer see ourselves for who we are but only for who we have been. Personally, I find this piece to be a touch overbearing, if only because the import of its ideas is easily crushed by the heft of its dynamic spread.

The presence of the Hilliard Ensemble rescues Evening Prayers (1991) from the didacticism of its predecessor. It is a more fully unified narrative, linked by a lingering alto flute. A gorgeous “ascension” passage marks a rare contrapuntal moment for Kancheli, while David James’s voice creates magic, ever so subtly offset by a skittering violin. Occasional bursts, some punctuated by snare drum, break the mood and ensure that our attention is held. Inevitably, the piece ends like a ship sailing into a foggy ocean, leaving behind only a blank map to show for our travels.

Don’t let any comparisons to Arvo Pärt lure you astray. Kancheli’s music, while transcendent, cannot be divorced from its rootedness in upheaval. And while this album may be filled with beautiful moments, I cannot help but feel that something gets elided in these grander arrangements. I say this with the gentlest of criticisms, and perhaps only because my first foray into this world was on such a small scale. The sound of Exil stays with me, and sometimes I just cannot hear it in any other context, and for those wishing to hear this composer for the first time I would recommend starting there. That being said, the scale of these pieces makes them no less evocative for all their historical understatements and sensitivity. And perhaps that is Kancheli’s underlying observation: that, in our current climate of convalescent ideologies, all we have to hold on to are those rare flashes of fire in which our communion with something greater has transcended the rising waters of sociopolitical corruption. (ECM Reviews)

Gidon Kremer GIYA KANCHELI Lament

ECM offers some of Giya Kancheli’s most compelling music in Lament (Music of Mourning in Memory of Luigi Nono). This 1994 outpouring for violin, soprano, and orchestra is a requiem, a postlude, a concerto, and homage. It is also more than these, spreading its heavy wings wide across an ever-changing landscape. Kancheli revisits the words of Hans Sahl, whose verses appeared upon the same lips in EXIL, this time through his poem “Stanzas.”

I go slowly hence from the world
Into a domain beyond all distance,

Gidon Kremer’s violin seems to arise from a shadow within a shadow. Soon joined by flute, which acts like a hooded guide through the wilderness, Kremer flirts with his surroundings. The orchestra responds provocatively to these agitations, only to blend back into the woodwork from which its sounds are born. As strings wander toward the horizon, every bowed step seems only to bring them closer to me, as if I were but a projection of a faraway self.

And what I was and am and shall remain
Goes with me hasteless and forbearing
Into a country ’til yet untrod

The wind continues its gentle flight, weaving through orchestral punctuations like a suture through flesh. These satoric bursts never last. Their clarity is brief, their catharsis even briefer. Kremer brings a raw, rustic tone, and with it a certain terrestrial quality to this otherwise stratospheric music. Unfamiliar skies and the mud-stained roads beneath them temper any possible thrill of discovery. And yet, the closer I walk to death, the brighter my surroundings seem to become.

I go slowly hence from time
Into a future beyond the stars,

Kremer’s lilting highs mesh beautifully with Maacha Deubner’s own as both pull the orchestra to a high summit. I leap without hesitation, floating ever so gently back to solid ground. Deubner seems to sing from somewhere not of this world. Her voice becomes a memory, something heard when I let down my mental guard. Kremer gets an equally magical sound from his instrument, leading the orchestra with utter determination.

And what I was and am and ever shall remain
Goes with me hasteless and forbearing,

Deubner sets aloft a high-pitched violin before oboe and orchestra spin their own guiding light out of ether. Familiar material works its way into my mental window: a rare comfort in these tattered vestiges, far enough removed from Kancheli’s motivic staples while also weeping in their shadows. I can only sit on the edge of music like this, never knowing whether to lie back or lean forward. And so I am resigned to the margin, left to wander

As though I’d not, or scarcely, ever been.

(ECM Reviews)

Kim Kashkashian / Dennis Russell Davies GIYA KANCHELI Vom Winde beweint ALFRED SCHNITTKE Konzert für Viola und Orchester

This powerful record brings together two of the most seminal works for viola and orchestra of the twentieth century. Although these pieces are as different as they are similar, together they form a distinct balance of sentiment and execution.

Giya Kancheli: Vom Winde beweint (Mourned by the Wind)
Kancheli’s self-styled “liturgy” is an exercise in patience and surrender. Its opening slam of piano chords is a big bang in and of itself, and sets the stage for the soloist’s epic journey. Wilfred Mellers, in his liner notes, posits the viola’s emergence from such chaos as the “birth of consciousness.” And indeed, one can extrapolate from its startling abruptness the inklings of a life yet lived, fresh and devoid of self-awareness in the greater void of silence. The orchestra skirts the periphery, gradually uniting with the soloist. This contrast mimics the arbitrary stability of human values—at once sacred and mutable—so that moments of resolution always tread a downward slope. Luminous winds, a cosmic harpsichord, and trails of harmonics characterize the first movement. Brief horn blasts introduce the second, throughout which the viola wanders without fortitude into a minefield of piano and timpani, singing without carrying a tune. The harpsichord again works its galactic magic, feeding stardust into the viola’s arterial core. A passage of intense and sustained volume leads into an epic swan song. The third movement is brought forth on the strings of the harpsichord, the viola a mere flit of wings in the surrounding air. An oboe threads the hesitation like the beginning of an incomplete statement. The fourth movement is a violent implosion and balances out the first with its selfish gaze. As with seemingly every Kancheli composition, it ends as quietly as an evening breeze. One hears the rustling of leaves in the distance, only to find that it was a trick of the ears all along. Vom Winde beweint is rich with sharp dynamic peaks that are short-lived and sporadic, the hallmarks of an ode to process over progress.

Alfred Schnittke: Konzert für Viola und Orchester
For this monumental work, Schnittke has chosen to invert the standard concerto form, sandwiching an Allegro Molto between two Largos. The piece opens with a viola solo held aloft by shimmering orchestral waves. Every melodic line is like the root of an ever-growing tree of voices. In the second movement, the viola skips across a landscape of consonances and dissonances at the behest of a passively insistent harpsichord. Schnittke maintains the fascinating sense of rhythm and energy that distinguishes his faster turns, scratching at the surface of a larger unfathomable world. Harpsichord, flute, and viola congregate in a Mozartean danse macabre at the movement’s center. The strangely wooden pizzicato toward the end haunts as the piano jumps impatiently on its lower notes. The last movement gives the viola a demanding solo, which is eventually overtaken by horns and winds. A deep pause marks a change in intent. The harpsichord once again comes to the fore, the final cameo of a strong orchestral cast, before bowing to a beautifully dissonant double stop from the viola.

Schnittke would suffer a stroke just ten days after completing the score for his concerto.* Said the composer: “Like a premonition of what was to come, the music took on the character of a restless chase through life (in the second movement) and that of a slow and sad overview of life on the threshold of death (in the third movement).” Such narrative approaches to one’s own work speak of a pragmatic mind that seeks order in the flow of a creative life. Yet rather than a premonition, I experience the concerto as an affirmation of what one already knows. If Kancheli’s is an unanswered question, Schnittke’s is an unquestioned answer.

This is a profoundly emotional album, by turns confrontational and mournfully resplendent. Kashkashian brings her usual heartrending strength to even the subtlest gestures and is never afraid to betray the fragility of her pitch. The orchestras, under the direction of Dennis Russell Davies, are forces to be reckoned with that scintillate in a slightly distanced mix. A benchmark recording in all respects. (Tyran Grillo)

GIYA KANCHELI Exil

Exil is dedicated to Manfred Eicher, the founder of the ECM label, to whom Kancheli paid such glowing tribute in his interview with SJ in last April's Gramophone. And this five-movement, 48-minute song-cycle is in many ways a true ECM piece – wholly contemporary in spirit, yet not excluding any listener with ears to hear and a soul to suffer. 

I suppose I should not be giving a puff for a recording company. Indeed some might counter by saying that music like Kancheli's, which increasingly wears its spirituality on its sleeve, is in danger of creating its own clique of New Age compassion-obsessed fellow-travellers. Certainly there is a danger that a concept such as that of Exil, so resonant in a world of multiple ethnic conflagrations, emotionally blackmails us into uncritical approval. But that would only be so if the music itself were deficient. All I can say is that I am immediately drawn in by the hovering, flute-timbred lines which make up the very discreet taped background to the first movement, a setting of Psalm 23. They are like melancholy calls over bleak mountains, and they return to punctuate and haunt the rest of the cycle. The very first chord which joins in, so familiar yet so elusive, has Kancheli's signature all over it. I love the way his microtonally divergent tape part can never quite be grasped by or reconciled to the 12 semitones (or more usually just plain diatonic triads) of the live instruments. I love the way the soprano and flutes shadow one another, diverge and coalesce. I love the uncanny balance Kancheli manages to strike between profound consolation and, as I hear it, even more profound inconsolability. Exemplary performances and recording make this a valuable addition to the discography of one of the precious voices in the music of our time. (Gramophone)

GIYA KANCHELI Caris Mere

I waxed lyrical, or tried to, about Kancheli’s Morning Prayers and Evening Prayers in April 1995. But I can’t compete with Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich’s booklet-essay for ECM’s companion disc containing the other two Prayers in the cycle. He claims a post-avant-garde historical significance for Kancheli which some may find hyperbolic, and which surely reads more into the music than the composer himself intended. Yet the high-flown imagery is not inappropriate: “In such trackless terrain, history seems to be arrested and sedimented in remembered traces of lost beauty, bygone battles, shattered happiness, and spent suffering... Like the Eskimos whose life experience has led to some three dozen linguistic descriptions of the all-pervasive white of their environment, Kancheli’s mournful expressivity gleans untold variations and nuances from the ‘white’ of his tonal environment.” That’s all well said, and though I can’t share the author’s apparent conviction that Kancheli’s recent work has the expressive power and innovative boldness of his remarkable symphonies from the 1970s, the new disc will certainly appeal to those who have already caught the Kancheli ‘bug’.
Midday Prayers and Night Prayers complete the cycle somewhat cryptically entitled A Life without Christmas. They are meditations on snatches of biblical text, as is the solo viola piece Caris Mere (Georgian for “After the Wind”). Night Prayers was originally composed for string quartet (are the Kronos Quartet, to whom it was dedicated, getting round to a recording?), and to my ears the revised arrangement, superimposing soprano saxophone, doesn’t sound entirely convincing. This may come as a disappointment to those expecting Jan Garbarek to emulate his wonderful collaboration with the Hilliard Ensemble on “Officium” (ECM, 10/94).
In Midday Prayers Kancheli’s familiar polarized extremes of near-hibernation and manic activity are faithfully captured by performers and engineers. So too, unfortunately, is a certain amount of traffic noise, which rather breaks the spell in passages of extreme hush. Kim Kashkashian plays her short solo piece to the manner born.
Not a top priority issue, then, but one which makes a valuable addition to the discography of a distinctive voice in contemporary music.' (Gramophone)

Gidon Kremer / Patricia Kopatchinskaja / Kremerata Baltica GIYA KANCHELI Chiaroscuro

Georgian composer Giya Kancheli’s latest ECM New Series album, issued shortly after his 80^th birthday, features first recordings of two major works: Chiaroscuro for violin and chamber orchestra, and Twilight for two violins and chamber orchestra. Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica have had a long and close association with Giya Kancheli. On Twilight, the coming together of Kremer and Patricia Kopatchinskaja, two of the most powerfully expressive violinists of our era, makes for fascinating listening. The piece is a touching meditation on mortality, written at a time when Giya Kancheli was recovering from illness and seeing in the leaves and branches of poplar trees outside his window a metaphor for change and transformation. 

Twilight, Kancheli’s first piece composed for two solo violins and strings was written on Gidon Kremer’s initiative for the annual Mozart Week in Salzburg. “In my professional life various superb performers have appeared at different periods,” Giya Kancheli writes in the liner notes.

“I am very happy that for the ECM production of Twilight Gidon Kremer joined forces with Patricia Kopatchinskaja. At the rehearsal I realized from the first bars that Patricia has all the attributes of a distinguished musical personality.” Kopatchinskaja, for her part, much enjoyed the encounter with fellow violinist Kremer: “This was one of my strongest and most moving experiences….I grew up and educated myself with the sounds and visions of Gidon Kremer. He is the musician and thinker who always captures me with all senses and trust, when listening to anything he does.”
The title composition Chiaroscuro borrows its name from the painting technique of the renaissance and baroque whose concern with dramatic contrasts of light and shade corresponds quite directly to the characteristically stark dynamics of the composer’s writing, vigorously conveyed by Kremerata Baltica. The piece was originally written for Julian Rachlin, to be performed by him on both violin and viola.

After its premiere both Yuri Bashmet and Gidon Kremer asked Kancheli for independent versions, and these were subsequently developed and performed. As Kancheli remarks, “Profound personalities always discover in the music something that cannot be expressed in notes and signs … They effectively become co-authors of the works they perform.”
In this sense, Gidon Kremer – as masterful interpreter – has been ‘co-authoring’ Giya Kancheli’s work since 1998 and his riveting performance of Lament – Music In Mourning Of Luigi Nono. Other Kremer/Kancheli collaborations on ECM include Time…and Again and V & V (on the album In L’istesso tempo, recorded in 2000 and 2003), Silent Prayer (on Hymns and Prayers, recorded 2008) and Themes from the Songbook (recorded 2010). Kremerata Baltica, too, has been programming Kancheli’s music from the beginning of its history. Gidon Kremer: “Giya’s music has become an inseparable part of the Kremerata Baltica orchestra’s repertoire: each year, each season we have studied and played one or two of his pieces. Despite our previous acquaintance, each piece reveals something new and special.” (ECM Records)

Gidon Kremer / Kremerata Baltica THE ART OF INSTRUMENTION: HOMAGE TO GLENN GOULD

Nonesuch Records releases The Art of Instrumentation: Homage to Glenn Gould, by violinist Gidon Kremer and his Kremerata Baltica chamber orchestra, on September 25, 2012, which would have been Gould’s 80th birthday. The album comprises 11 pieces and arrangements by contemporary composers that quote from or are inspired by works, mostly by Bach, that Gould famously recorded during his career; two Arnold Schoenberg pieces also are drawn upon in one piece.

Kremer explains: “For the tenth anniversary of the Chamber Music Connects the World festival in Kronberg, Germany in 2010, I took up an idea that happens to have been voiced by a friend of mine, Robert Hurwitz, president of Nonesuch. One day, we were discussing Glenn Gould—whom Bob had known for years and with whom I had spent a long night in the studio, along with András Schiff—when Bob asked me, ‘Wouldn’t you like to arrange some of the works played by Glenn Gould for strings sometime?’

“When artistic director Raimund Trenkler asked me what could be done to make the anniversary celebration special, I knew the answer. The focus was to be on one of the greatest figures of all time—Johann Sebastian Bach—and on our times. A bridge was to be built,” Kremer continues. “The resulting program’s distant gaze extends into the realm of Bach but pays tribute at the same time to one of the greatest personae of modern interpretation, Glenn Gould. A persona, whose handwriting cannot be mistaken for anyone else’s. That is precisely what I have always valued so highly and still do—the unique.”

Kremerata Baltica was founded by Gidon Kremer in 1996 and is composed of a group of young musicians from the three Baltic States. They first performed in the violinist’s hometown of Riga, Latvia, in February 1996 and have since toured throughout the world. Kremer, who is the group’s artistic director, described the Kremerata Baltica, in an interview with the New York Times, as “a musical democracy ... open-minded, self-critical, a continuation of my musical spirit.” (Nonesuch)

Gidon Kremer / Kremerata Baltica GLASS - PÄRT - KANCHELI - UMEBAYASHI New Seasons

Gidon Kremer returns to the Yellow label after more than a decade with the brand new reference recording of Philip Glass’ Second Violin Concerto – “The American Seasons”, his first solo concerto album in many years.The first Glass Violin Concerto, performed by Kremer and released by DG in 1993, has achieved cult status and shipped close to 90k units (in Germany alone over 25k copies) – and has become a staple of DG’s contemporary music catalogue.

Now, this extraordinary follow-up Concerto is at the heart of the repertoire of the Kremerata Baltica. Performed for the first time in San José, Costa Rica with Gidon Kremer as soloist in August 2013, it will be toured later in the year - info to follow shortly.

The album is completed by works of Arvo Pärt and Giya Kancheli – two composers both closely associated with Gidon Kremer, and who are both set to celebrate milestone 80th birthdays this year. Gidon has also added the short piece by the well-known Japanese film composer Shigeru Umebayashi as a tribute to his Japanese friends.

Four highly regarded visual artists and film maker have created four different films for each of the American Seasons that are projected to screens during concert performances. (Presto Classical)

GIYA KANCHELI Diplipito

“If you can imagine a flower that makes its way through asphalt, that’s exactly what you find in my compositions. In my works I’m always trying to get the flower through the asphalt.”
Giya Kancheli

The present disc features premiere recordings made – as has been the case with all of Kancheli’s ECM recordings – with the participation of the composer. “Valse Boston”, written in 1996, bears two dedications, one to its conductor and pianist Dennis Russell Davies, the other to the composer’s wife (“with whom I have never danced”). If Kancheli has made a point of avoiding the dancefloor he has created a piece that moves uniquely, if not in ¾ time, and makes sometimes devastating use of the abrupt dynamic contrasts that have become almost a trademark. Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich in the liner notes:

“The metaphor of ‘dancing’ should be interpreted less as a profound than as an ironic comment – but it is also an allusion to the vast distance that separates Kancheli’s music from the apotheosis or demonic fury of the dance. The Boston Waltz is generally associated with the louche, slightly faded realm of urbane entertainment; for Kancheli this is at most a ‘distant echo’ buried beneath the rubble of the ages.” Kancheli has, however, said that he was inspired, in writing this piece, by the visual image of Davies conducting this piece from the piano stool, half standing, gesturing with a free arm or nods of the head while playing; this was also a dance of sorts. Jungheinrich: “Three-quarter time is never used as the vehicle, elixir and essence of dance-like energy. What does occur at the beginning is a slow triplet movement; but instead of introducing spirited movement, the consistently gentle sonorities retain a heavy, clinging, glutinous quality. The first violins seem to want to counter the persistent, grinding slowness of the tempo with their own abandoned song, a mercurial line in the highest register.”

Davies and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra have included “Valse Boston” in their touring programmes on both sides of the Atlantic. The Chicago Tribune wrote, “Don't let the innocuous title fool you: Giya Kancheli's ‘Valse Boston’ is a powder keg of a piece. It is a secular prayer veering between extremes of dynamics, tempo and mood. One moment the piano is goading the strings to produce angry, stabbing dissonances. The next moment, it is quieting the orchestra with tiny fragments of waltz-time, deceptively merry. Nobody conjures troubled landscapes in sound like Kancheli. He has given us a bleak, very Eastern view of modern existence, but the effect is cleansing.”

“Diplipito, written in 1997, is named for the little, high-tuned Georgian drums – in the range of the darbouka or the bongos – that are frequently used to accompany dancing. And the percussive syllables that Kancheli gives to American countertenor Derek Lee Ragin are a kind of concrete poetry inspired by the drum’s rhythm patterns. Giya Kancheli was greatly impressed by Ragin in 1999 when he sang the world première of the composer’s “And farewell goes out sighing”, alongside Gidon Kremer with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra under Kurt Masur and the countertenor was an essential choice for the recording of “Diplipito”, where he is partnered with Thomas Demenga. Ragin makes his New Series debut here while Demenga has been a mainstay of the label since its inauguration.

Jungheinrich: “The vocal part in ‘Diplipito’ finds an equal partner in the solo cello. The orchestra rarely play tutti, there are no winds or brass at all, and the guitar, piano and percussion come in individually, functioning alternately as solo and secondary presences. The terse, tentative figures in the cello contrast with the cluster-like chords typifying the piano line. For long stretches, the sonic space is chromatically measured – often in small, careful interval steps…. The mood of tranquillity, even latent immobility, that dominates the first half of the piece is suspended by the entry of a vigorous ornamental figure on the guitar (which is immediately picked up by the cello), followed by several explosive fortissimo passages. The soft murmur of a bongo rhythm increases the restlessness. This is the preparation for the final phase, the disembodiment of sonic materiality.”  (ECM Records)

Dennis Russell Davies / Radio Symphonieorchester Wien GIYA KANCHELI Trauerfarbenes Land

Giya Kancheli's fifth album for ECM New Series is the first to be devoted exclusively to the Georgian composer's orchestral music, and features two extended pieces of often volcanic power that bear out the judgement of Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin: "Kancheli is an ascetic with the temperament of a maximalist, a smouldering Vesuvius."

The writing of Trauerfarbenes Land was the direct outcome of the highly successful initial collaboration between Kancheli, Dennis Russell Davies, and the orchestra Davies then conducted, the Orchester der Beethovenhalle Bonn, a recording documented on "Liturgy: vom Winde beweint" (ECM New Series 1471). At the end of that session the Bonn orchestra commissioned a new work from Kancheli, and Trauerfarbenes Land was subsequently given its first performance in Bonn in December 1994. Davies, one of the most ardent champions of Kancheli's music, now presents the premiere recording of the work with the Vienna Radio Symphony, the orchestra for which he has been chief conductor since 1996.

"A combination of sensuality and artistic precision, vitalism and rigour pervades every fibre of Kancheli's work," writes Wolfgang Sandner in the CD booklet notes. And if the composer's choice of titles invites extra-musical associations – critics have found it hard to resist the temptation to interpret his work geopolitically – the music itself "like Beethoven's is 'more an expression of feeling than painting'...These are self-contained works of art, not agitprop." They are, moreover, often named after the event. Kancheli found the title Trauerfarbenes Land ("Country the colour of mourning"), for instance, in a newspaper article about Georgia while he was putting the finishing touches to his score.

Epic in scope – maximal music indeed, to use Shchedrin's term – Trauerfarbenes Land emphasises Kancheli's penchant for extreme dynamic contrasts as it "unfolds like an austere musical procession", building in intensity until "single colours and contours can no longer be recognised." The words of the Los Angeles Weekly in praise of Kancheli's Caris Mere album are applicable here, too: "This is thrilling music, mysterious and distant at one moment, erupting with an astonishing blaze of sound the next. If you treasure the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, the late quartets of Shostakovich, or the great works of Ligeti, this is your music as well."

...à la Duduki is named for the reed instrument of the Caucasus whose piercing, wailing tone is basic to the Georgian folk tradition, but the inspiration for the piece is traceable to a trumpet player, Karlen Avetisian, who contributed his "duduki-esque" trumpet sound to a piece Kancheli wrote for radio in the mid-1960s. Avetisian wasn't a professional musician, he played mostly at weddings, but Kancheli liked his sound, and enticed him to the studio. The old man made several passes at the written notes but the essence of his sound seemed to disappear when confronted with a score. Finally he asked if he could try to improvise, and the music came alive. The trumpeter's playing had an emotional persuasiveness that Kancheli never forgot. When asked to write a piece for the orchestra of Mannheim's National Theatre, he went back and listened again to his tapes from 30 years earlier and rescored that trumpet solo for five brass players, reintegrating it in his new composition. The intermingling of brass and strings in this composition also brings out quite clearly Kancheli's affection for jazz; there are, intentionally, some parallels here with Gil Evans's orchestral arrangements for Miles Davis, always a touchstone for the Georgian composer. But there is much more to be heard. Wolfgang Sandner: "The dialoguing of brass quintet and full orchestra in ...à la Duduki is playfully reminiscent of the Baroque tradition. [Elsewhere] melisma follows melisma, recalling beautiful oriental script. No note is attacked directly, as it would have been in Trauerfarbenes Land: appogiaturas, sighing motifs and ornaments continually obscure the direction of the melodic flow."

Kronos Quartet NIGHT PRAYERS

To a Cold War generation reared to believe that only official arts could flourish in the harsh cultural climate of the Soviet Union, the discovery of a vast and fantastically varied world of music came as not just one surprise, but many. Even during the dark Brezhnev years, the part-Tatar, part Russian Sofia Gubaidulina was improvising with a group of unapproved folk musicians and developing a musical language for her even more strenuously unauthorized Russian Orthodox faith. In Georgia, Giya Kancheli was producing music of quiet theatricality, and explosive reverence. In Azerbaijan, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh was charging down two simultaneously un-Soviet paths: Viennese modernism in the spirit of Arnold Schoenberg, and mugham, the classical folk music of her homeland. In the 1990s, after the Soviet empire collapsed, the Kronos Quartet was quick to capitalize on the newly popular rubric of Eastern European mysticism, which included, somewhat awkwardly, composers who had little more in common than a spirit of non-materialistic transcendence. Night Prayers is not so much a collection of religious music as a mood album, a document of a time when composers found refuge from their historical era in an elaborately constructed sense of timelessness. (Justin Davidson)

Lisa Batiashvili ECHOES OF TIME

The sound of Shostakovich belongs to Lisa Batiashvili’s earliest memories. During her childhood, she often heard her father’s string quartet rehearse Shostakovich’s music, and at home and in concert his was the sound world which shaped her sense of cultural context. Lisa Batiashvili and her family left their Georgian homeland when she was eleven years old, but the music of Shostakovich travelled with them. Mark Lubotsky, her teacher in Hamburg, was a student of David Oistrakh, for whom Shostakovich wrote his violin concertos, and to the young Lisa Batiashvili, this felt like a direct line to the source. “When my teacher started telling stories about the First Violin Concerto, I completely fell in love with this piece. David Oistrakh had shared very emotional and precise information about every movement. Somehow the piece became symbolic of the time in the Soviet Union, which I had also experienced myself during the first ten years of my life. Musicians during Soviet times were also looking for the freedom that Shostakovich sought through his music. Music was an escape and a symbol of freedom at a time when it was so difficult to function in an incredibly brutal system. When I travelled to Moscow with my parents, we met many people, and I had a strong feeling that this music was a mirror of what they were going through.” So her debut recording for Deutsche Grammophon has Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto at its core. Under the title Echoes of Time, Lisa Batiashvili has assembled a collection of works which all cast light on Soviet Russia.

Her native Georgia is represented through Giya Kancheli’s haunting V & V, a small taste of a sound world which is markedly different from, yet somehow connected to, that of its massive northern neighbour. “Georgian people are actually not at all related to Russians”, explains Lisa Batiashvili. “In terms of climate, Georgia is a southern country, and the people are more like southern Italians or Greeks by nature – very alive, incredibly emotional and spontaneous. You have the mountains and the sea and great weather for eight months of the year. Russia is vast and lonely and full of isolated places, whereas Georgia is compact and everything is kind of burning. Of course, I cannot avoid sounding Georgian when I play. I spent my childhood there, and when you are in Georgia, you feel something very intense. It’s in my genes and in my veins, even if I’ve spent more than 20 years now in Europe.”

In 1994, Lisa Batiashvili and her family moved to Munich, where she stayed for 15 years. Since then she and her oboist husband have moved to France with their children, but the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra still feels like family. “It’s very special to record with them, because during my time in Munich I got to know three quarters of the orchestra personally”, she says. “I have friends in the orchestra and also colleagues with whom I play chamber orchestra. Recording with them was one of the most wonderful personal experiences – quite apart from the fact that this is one of the most fantastic orchestras in the world, with a tradition like few others.”

Through her spectacular win in the Sibelius Competition at the age of 16 and subsequent visits to Finland, Lisa Batiashvili also feels a cultural affinity with conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. “When we began the first rehearsal of the Shostakovich, it already felt as if we had played together millions of times. With Esa-Pekka, everything seems so easy and natural. Everything falls immediately into place. He has amazing intuition.” And this recording also brought the long-awaited chance to work with pianist Hélène Grimaud, for Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel and Rachmaninov’s Vocalise. “We’ve been planning for years to play together. She loves this kind of repertoire. I admire her a lot, not only for her musicianship, but also as a person who is an incredibly serious musician.” While Pärt and Kancheli, like Shostakovich, both felt the weight of Soviet oppression, Rachmaninov’s music expresses a nostalgic yearning for his homeland that Lisa Batiashvili feels fits well with the other works on the recording. It balances the sweetness of Shostakovich’s Lyrical Waltz, written for the piano and arranged for violin and orchestra by her father, with echoes of another age, she says.

Germany, Finland, Georgia, Moscow, France – in the course of our conversation, Lisa Batiashvili has mentioned a surprising number of places which are almost, but not quite, home. “It has happened quite often over the past fifteen years that I was not really sure where I belonged”, she agrees. “Germany felt so different from my own country when I first arrived there. But when I went back to Georgia I found I didn’t understand anymore who I was or where I belonged. And at the same time I didn’t really integrate fully with the German way of life, I felt like a guest everywhere. On the other hand, for musicians it is a huge advantage to be able to make their home wherever they go. I have a French husband now, our children were born in Germany, and I no longer feel uncomfortable about this way of life. When you bring music to the whole world, it is important to have an easy connection to all kinds of people. And then, in the end, you are not really a stranger anywhere anymore.”

(Shirley Apthorp)