Claudio Ortensi / Anna Pasetti DIONYSUS & APOLLO

DIONYSUS & APOLLO

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.

Elicia Silverstein THE DREAMS & FABLES I FASHION

Violinist Elicia Silverstein is rapidly garnering praise on the international stage for her nuanced, bold and insightful performances of repertoire ranging from the 17th to the 21st century. Recently named a 2018 BBC Music Magazine Rising Star, Silverstein is equally at home as performer on historical and modern instruments, as a soloist with orchestra, giving recitals and playing chamber music.  Her inventive and thoughtful approach to concert programming, as well as the sincerity and exuberance she brings to musical communication, distinguishes Silverstein as one of the most important voices of her generation.

Rubicon Classics presents: The Dreams & Fables I Fashion Elicia Silverstein's groundbreaking new album - a musical fantasy in which past, present and future meet and inspire each other...

Manuel Zurria REPEAT!

The restless experimentation and creativity of Manuel Zurria (of Alter Ego fame) has resulted in a brilliant series of collaborative works with legendary composers such as Luc Ferrari, Alvin Lucier, Arvo Pärt, John Cage, Morton Feldman, László Sáry, Louis Andriessen, Aldo Clementi, Zoltan Jeney, Stefano Scodanibbio, Salvatore Sciarrino, Jonathan Harvey and Kevin Volans. A truly stunning mixture of electronic and longform electro-acoustic pieces, repetitive ethnic rhythms, drones and delay, field recordings, flute and the human voice.

Repeat is the diary of an obsession that has been accompanying me for four long years. Alighiero Boetti, one of the fathers of Italian conceptual art, had fit out along a wall of his house in Rome his most introspective work: The Wall. On this wall he showed, continuously modifying their choice and position, objects and works belonging to his own production or to the one of other artists friends, together with objects he found by chance on the street, family pictures and drawings of his children. In other words, his own world. During the realisation of this project I have been reading “Difference and Repetition” by Gilles Deleuze, which gave me the occasion to ponder on the involvements that bring back to the principle of repetition in music of our time. In a certain sense, Deleuze’s writing allowed me to focus on the importance of repetition as a perceptive fact, and as an experience of listening in accumulation. In the same time, I thought of repetition as difference, as a minimal fact, as trance. This element has been determinant in my activity and allowed me to collaborate during the years with musicians who look at repetition as an exciting experience, both physical and mystic. (Manuel Zurria)

Matt Haimovitz ORBIT

Orbit maps my musical journey since the turn of the millenium, a path travelled with my partner in life and music, composer Luna Pearl Woolf. Initially released on Oxingale Records as five thematic albums – Anthem (2003), Goulash! (2005), After Reading Shakespeare (2007), Figment (2009), and Matteo (2011) – Orbit encompasses nearly all of the solo contemporary works on these albums, along with two newly recorded tracks: Philip Glass’ “Orbit” and a new arrangement by Luna of the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter.” All but these two tracks were produced by Luna, and all have now been remastered for SACD HD surround sound. More than twenty composers are represented in the set, fifteen of them still living. Ten works receive their world premiere recording here. 

With the solo cello as our pilot, we steer headlong into the great musical debates of the past half-century: maximalist vs. minimalist; folk-rooted vs. abstract, absolute vs. narrative, tonal vs. atonal. In many ways, we live in a golden age of music, with a perspective rich in history and reference. We can look back at the 20th century’s Tower of Babel. We can embrace its boldness, diversity, complexity, and its return to the natural order of harmony. Leonard Bernstein’s words from his Norton Lectures, The Unanswered Question, ruminating on Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theory of universality, the collective wiring that connects us across borders and between far-reaching lands, resonates more than ever. He writes, “I’m no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.” (Matt Haimovitz)

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)

Carolin Widmann REFLECTIONS

Music for solo violin is still mainly associated with Bach in the eighteenth century and Paganini in the nineteenth. Carolin Widmann, the distinguished German violinist, here provides a varied and vivid survey of such music from the twentieth century, from Ysaÿe in the 1920s to Jörg Widmann (her composer brother) at the turn of the millennium. There is nothing at all in the CD booklet about any of these pieces, though they are unlikely to be at all familiar to most collectors. I describe them below, partly because you need this information for a proper appreciation of the range of what is on offer on this disc, and partly in hope that it might pique your curiosity. 

Ysaÿe’s Six sonatas for solo violin, Op. 27, were written in 1923. Each one is dedicated to one of his contemporary violinists, No. 2 to Jacques Thibaud, and No. 4 to Fritz Kreisler. If that was a shrewd way to encourage world-class performances, one hopes it worked, for they are fine works and by no means unworthy of their Bachian inheritance. Indeed No. 2 actually opens with some Bach, the famously arresting first phrase of the E minor partita, no less. However, it is the plainchant Dies Irae that informs much of the work, including the noble variations of the Sarabande. Sonata No. 4 is hardly less compelling, and both are very well played indeed. 

If those sonatas are a homage to Bach, then another set of six, the Sei Capricci (1976) of Salvatore Sciarrino, pay homage to the 24 Caprices of his compatriot and forbear Niccolo Paganini. Each capriccio uses almost entirely the least substantial of all string sounds - harmonics. This includes some harmonics that – apparently – do not exist, since they do not lie on any of the nodes along the string that produce the overtones. They are notated and attempted nonetheless, and the sonic result is part of the soundscape. This near exclusive use of harmonics – normally an occasional coloristic effect – means every piece is filled with ethereal, whistling wisps of sound, evoking a world of shadows, as if some revenant from the great days of Ysaÿe and his dedicatees was playing for us, but his spectral status meant he could produce only a disembodied sound. Eerie it might be, but Widmann’s performance again makes us forget the incredible technical demands this music must make on the performer. 

Pierre Boulez’s Anthèmes was commissioned for the 1991 Yehudi Menuhin Violin Competition. The title is a hybrid of the French thèmes (themes) and the English "anthem". The four pages of score (free to download) employ a formidable-looking range of tempi (lent to rapide), expression marks (calme, agité, brusque), dynamics (pppp -fff) and very frequent metrical changes, all punctuated by frequent long trills and glissandi. Widmann manages to observe all this scrupulously, and in so doing, show us that it is a fine piece, by no means as challenging to listen to as it must be to play. Small wonder it is one of those pieces Boulez - as so often - expanded and developed further, as Anthèmes 2 for violin and live electronics. 

Jörg Widmann's solo violin Études I-III are autonomous concert pieces — premiered separately in 1995, 2001 and 2003. The composer wrote of them: “‘Étude' is taken literally here as a compositional exercise … but also as a violinistic study on a certain playing technique: for example, I is some sort of 'sounding out' of the instrument's resonance possibilities, II goes on a journey from a three-part chorale to spirited, unbridled virtuosity, and III is mainly a left-hand étude.' He, perhaps mischievously, does not remark on the element that will strike most listeners to Etude II – one line of the three-part chorale he mentions is for the violinist’s wordless voice. One would like to know what Isabelle Faust — dedicatee and first performer — made of that when she first encountered it, let alone its first audience at the 1995 Cheltenham Festival. The effect is certainly evocative here. Presumably we can take for granted the authenticity of the performance by the composer’s sister and dedicatee and first performer of Étude III, who even contributed the recommended fingering to the score. By the way, Schott’s website has this helpful note for prospective purchasers of the score “Difficulty: Very Difficult”. The only possible criticism of the performer on this CD is that she never makes it sound like that. 

Ysaÿe once wrote that a performer on his instrument "must be a violinist, a thinker, a poet, a human being, he must have known hope, love, passion and despair, he must have run the gamut of the emotions in order to express them all in his playing." I have no idea if Carolin Widmann has experienced all that in her life to date, but surely Ysaÿe would have applauded such virtuosity and expressive range – the playing is often frankly sensational. This recording was first published in 2006 on Telos, and won an award in Germany. It was Widmann’s debut disc, and as a solo violin calling card from a young player it recalls Perlman’s EMI Paganini Caprices from 1972. Its reissue is greatly to be celebrated. (Roy Westbrook)