Arvo Pärt - Miserere (1991)

It's definitely Pärt weather now, so dropping in on the great Estonian composer today at the turn of the 90s.  Settled in by this time to a fruitful relationship with ECM New Series, the three works featured here were recorded in late 1990 with the Hilliard Ensemble, Western Wind Chamber Choir, Beethovenhalle Orchestra and others.

The 34-minute title piece comes first, with its stark choral liturgy interspersed with orchestral swells and the organ playing of Christopher Bowers-Broadbent.  Miserere remains one of Pärt's most immersive works in its controlled power, and it sounds sublime in this first recording.  A short respite is programmed next in Festina Lente, very much cut from the same cloth as the Cantus in memory of Benjamin Britten.  We return to Old Testament liturgy for the final track, Sarah Was Ninety Years Old, but wordlessly.  An intermittent drumbeat forms the backbone of the piece as the Hilliards in turn add plaintive melodies, the culiminative effect (once Broadbent's organ enters for the finale) being another masterpiece of steady pacing to thoroughly entrance the patient listener.  This might not be Pärt's easiest album to get in to, but it pays some of the greatest rewards.

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pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG:

Tabula Rasa

Kanon Pokajanen

Spiegel Im Spiegel

Other posts featuring music by Pärt:

Trivium

Re: ECM

Christmas in Budapest, 2016

James MacMillan 60th Birthday Concert, 2019

The Fruit Of Silence at Truro Cathedral, 2019

BBC Concert Orchestra, Proms 2021

Alexei Lubimov - Der Bote: Elegies For Piano (2002)

A sublime programme, and one spanning the centuries from baroque to modern, performed by Alexei Lubimov (b. 1944, Moscow).  This recording was made by DRS Radio in Zurich at the end of 2000, and released as an ECM New Series album a year and a half later.

 

Kicking off with a 20-minute stretch that pairs CPE Bach and John Cage, it's clear that this is no ordinary classical solo piano recital.  But you know what, the Fantasie Für Klavier and a nice pacey In A Landscape complement each other just fine, and things just get more interesting from there.  With an overall theme of 'elegies', and an album title of 'the messenger' (taken from the haunting final piece), as a concept piece it plays out well, and just sounds heavenly.  Balancing stock repertoire choices like Liszt, Chopin and Debussy with the kind of more recent composers that have long been Lubimov's interest (Tigran Mansurian, Valentin Silvestrov), he turns in a great set that feels satisfying from beginning to end on every listen.

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pw: sgtg

Momo Kodama - La Vallée Des Cloches (Ravel, Takemitsu & Messiaen) (2013)

Sticking with ECM and classical today for some incredible 20th century piano music, played by Osaka-born pianist Momo Kodama.  Maurice Ravel's Miroirs suite is rendered in all its tricksy, impressionistic wonder with crystal clarity, with Kodama's rendering of Une barque sur l'ocean (one of my favourite piano pieces of all time, which made me buy this album) capturing the delicacy of every lapping wave.  The other substanital work on the album is Olivier Messiaen's birdsong catalogue La Fauvette Des Jardins, evoking a garden-warbler and several other birds on a midsummer's night, and as a bridge between the two French masters Kodoma plays Rain Tree Sketch by Toru Takemitsu, chosen for its interesting similarities to the other composers.

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pw: sgtg

Ravel at SGTG:

Alborada Del Gracioso arranged for marimba duo

Takemitsu at SGTG:

Asterism, Requiem, Green, The Dorian Horizon

November Steps

Messiaen at SGTG:

Quatre Études De Rythme
Des Canyons Aux Étoiles
Turangalîla Symphony / Quatour Pour La Fin Du Temps (EMI recordings cond. by Rattle)
Turangalîla Symphony / L'ascension (Naxos recording cond. by Wit)
Et Exspecto Ressurrectionem (Philips recording cond. by Haitink)
Et Exspecto Resurrectionem (Erato recording cond. by Boulez), etc

Éclairs Sur L’Au-Delà...

Arvo Pärt - Tabula Rasa (1984)

The inaugural release on ECM's New Series imprint for classical music, and an album that was instrumental in elevating Arvo Pärt and his tintinnabular style of writing in the public consciousness.  Recording for this incredible-sounding collection took place in late 1983/early '84, apart from WDR's 1977 world premiere live recording of the eventual title track.

Two arrangements of Pärt's Fratres take up most of the first half of the album, the versatile composition first being performed by Gidon Kremer on violin and Keith Jarrett on piano, foreshadowing greater input by Jarrett to ECM's new classical sub-label.  The piece's haunting sequences of chords and interlocking harmonies are also performed by the cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic.  In between is one of Pärt's most famous orchestral pieces, the sublime Cantus In Memory Of Benjamin Britten.  To finish the album, the aforementioned premiere recording of Tabula Rasa is in two parts: just under ten minutes of fiendish string canons and cadenzas, then a wide-open, heavenly expanse of prepared piano and gorgeous orchestration.

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Previously posted at SGTG:

Kanon Pokajanen

Spiegel Im Spiegel

Other posts featuring music by Pärt:

Trivium

Re: ECM

Christmas in Budapest, 2016

James MacMillan 60th Birthday Concert, 2019

The Fruit Of Silence at Truro Cathedral, 2019

BBC Concert Orchestra, Proms 2021

Arvo Pärt - Kanon Pokajanen (1998)

Acapella choral masterpiece by Arvo Pärt, written for the 750th anniversary of Cologne Cathedral.  Kanon Pokajanen takes its text from the eighth-century Orthodox (therefore sung in Church Slavonic) Canon of Repentance, with Pärt letting that liturgical language inform the structure of the music.

 

For this premiere recording in June 1997, the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir were recorded in Niguliste Church, Tallinn, and sound phenomenal throughout, whether all 28 voices are combined or in the solos and responses.  The work's eleven sections climax in the full-on power of the Prayer After The Canon, to top off a sublime listening experience, whether you want to give it full attention or just wash over you in pure sound.

Disc 1 link

Disc 2 link

pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG:

Spiegel Im Spiegel

Other posts featuring music by Pärt:

Trivium

Re: ECM

Christmas in Budapest, 2016

James MacMillan 60th Birthday Concert, 2019

The Fruit Of Silence at Truro Cathedral, 2019

BBC Concert Orchestra, Proms 2021

The Hilliard Ensemble - Transeamus (2014)

Sticking with vocal music today, but slimming down from full choir to a distinguished quartet.  The Hilliards drew their forty-year career to a sublime close with this album, giving it a fitting title alluding to travelling on.  Conceived as a return to their roots, the album is a programme of English motets and carols from the 15th century, with only four composers known for sure, the rest anonymous.  As expected from this esteemed ensemble, all of these fourteen pieces are deftly performed, starkly beautiful and perfectly captured in the ambience of the St. Gerold monastery in the Alps.  Relax and enjoy an hour of pure timeless bliss.

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pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG:

Perotin

The Lamentations Of Jeremiah

Codex Speciálník

Dobrinka Tabakova - String Paths (2013)

Debut album of music by Bulgarian-born, London-based composer Dobrinka Tabakova (b. 1980, Plovdiv).  This superb ECM New Series release focuses on Tabakova's works for strings, written between 2002 and 2008.

First up is Insight, intended to blend the sonorities of a string trio so that they sound like a single instrument - it's a great opener.  Next is a concerto for cello and strings, that emphasises the lead instrument's grounded quality, like "a ship trying to anchor itself".  This is followed by Frozen River Flows, which brings Gubaidulina to mind in its use of accordion, although the inspiration was a Messiaen organ work transcribed for accordion, as well as the titular flow of water underneath ice.

Suite In Old Style, which was being performed at the Lockenhaus Festival where Manfred Eicher discovered Tabakova's music, takes in influences from baroque music and architechture; she described it as "a conversation I wanted to have... with Rameau".  To close, the string septet Such Different Paths gradually introduces the instruments in pairs, passing melodic lines around until the solo violin soars above them.  More music by Tabakova coming up on Monday.

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Kate Moore - Dances And Canons, performed by Saskia Lankhoorn (2014)

Piano music by British-Australian composer Kate Moore (b. 1979), who studied under Louis Andriessen and now lives in the Netherlands, performed by her friend and collaborator Saskia Lankhoorn (same age, Dutch born & bred).  There's lots to love here for fans of the piano music of Philip Glass, John Adams (especially the second track Stories For Ocean Shells) et al, but Moore's stamp on her work is definitely an individual one.  For these pieces, she variously took inspriation from woven patterns, nature and tectonic movement, and the writings of Sufi philosopher Hazrat Inayat Khan.

 

Khan's words were the direct inspiration for The Body Is An Ear, from an ancient legend about human ensoulment by angel song, and the two pianos are overlaid exquisitely.  Moore also writes for four pianos, in the longest track Canon, where the gentle reverberations of the piano parts made me think of Jordan De La Sierra.  Sensitive Spot calls for the same piano part to be played in multiple layers, creating gorgeous ripples of sound.  Highly recommended, beautifully evocative music.

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pw: sgtg

The Hilliard Ensemble - Perotin (1989)

As a follow-up to the Tallis album posted just before Christmas (link below), here's another heavenly hour with the Hilliards in one of their best-known releases.  Little is known about the actual person who history records as Magister Perotinus, other than that he was part of the Notre Dame school of polyphony around the late 12th century, and pioneered four-voice writing in organum.

As always, the Hilliard Ensemble are more than up to the task of making this ancient music shine in all its hypnotic, droning and swirling glory, and three pieces by writers lost to time fill out the programme of those attributed to Pérotin.  The liner notes quote no less an authority on droning, swirling music than Steve Reich, who credits this music with part of the inspiration for the underlying 'pulse' of his Music For 18 Musicians.

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Hilliard Ensemble previously posted at SGTG: 
Tallis: Lamentations of Jeremiah
Codex Speciálnik

Thomas Tallis - The Lamentations Of Jeremiah (The Hilliard Ensemble, 1987)

Thought this would make a good follow-up to Current 93 - a nice wintry blast of renaissance polyphony, from the pen of Tallis (1505-1585), and sung in this September 1986 recording by the peerless Hilliard Ensemble.  The austere brilliance of the pure vocal blend reverberating around All Hallows Church, London, is of course perfectly captured by this ECM New Series recording, and the four voices nail each and every nuance of the interlocking lines.  Despite the album title, Tallis' Mass For Four Voices is arguably the highlight here, showing how deftly the composer could move with the times and the changing demands of the crown and the church, making utterly timeless music.

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pw: sgtg

Hilliard Ensemble previously posted at SGTG: Codex Speciálnik

Robyn Schulkowsky/Nils Petter Molvær - Hastening Westward (1995)

Here's something that goes nicely with darker and colder nights.  The starting point for this album was a reworking by American percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky of her 1991 work Hastening Westward At Sundown To Obtain A Better View Of Venus, that evocative title borrowed from Samuel Beckett.

The album contains two suites, with the three-part Pier And Ocean proving a nice overture to lead into the seven-part Hastening Westward.  As told in the liner notes, once Schulkowsky had recorded the three solo percussion sections that appear as tracks 3, 5 and 8, ECM's Manfred Eicher revealed that he just happened to have Nils Petter Molvær around, who could be a perfect partner for Schulkowsky's sound.

The trumpeter was brought in on day two of the sessions, and another in a long line of ECM's instant collaborations quickly took shape.  Molvær did indeed have the innate sensitivity to the overtones of Schulkowsky's drums, bells and bowed gongs that Eicher had anticipated, and the album pays great rewards to repeat listens.  Music for frozen fjords.

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pw: sgtg

Ensemble Belcanto - Come Un'Ombra Di Luna (2001)

As mentioned last month, German mezzosoprano Dietburg Spohr founded this vocal ensemble in 1986, and this was their first ECM New Series release.  Spohr formed Ensemble Belcanto to fill a gap that she saw, that of a group of female voices concentrating on new music.  They'd go on to delve way back into the medieval on a 2013 album of Hildegaard von Bingen's music, but before that came this July 2000 recording of four 1990s works that had been written for the group.

The first of these is a four-part suite by Haim Alexander (1915-2012), of settings of poems by Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945), who Alexander had met when both were German-Jewish exiles in Jerusalem.  The complex wordplay of these four excerpts from Lasker-Schüler's final published volume, Mein blaues Klavier, is rendered in wonderful dramatic shapes by Alexander and by Ensemble Belcanto's voices and percussion.

Next up are two short pieces: Konrad Boehmer (1941-2014), who was posted here way back in electroacoustic mode, contributes a great exercise in minature polyphony, set to the text of Un Monde Abandoneé des Facteurs by Michel Robic.  Fabrizio Casti's (b. 1960) mournful, acapella setting of Cesare Pavese's post-apocalyptic desolation gives this album its title.  Closing the album in memorable style is the 18-minute Séraphin-Stimmen by Wolfgang Rihm (b.1952).  Influenced by Artaud, the clave-punctuated wordless piece is a madrigal of sorts, with haunting gaps of virtual silence.  Séraphin-Stimmen was by far my favourite piece here, but the whole album hangs together very well and makes for rewarding repeat-listens.

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László Hortobágyi, György Kurtág Jr & Miklós Lengyelfi - Kurtágonals (2009)

If I could count the number of times I've said to fans of reunion-era Throbbing Gristle / X-TG / Carter-Tutti / late-period Coil that there's an ECM album they should pick up at the first opportunity, as they'd pretty much be fans of it from the word go - that would be precisely... once.

This is the album in question, and it was recorded by three Hungarians who collectively go under the name Hortagonals, although the group name appears only in the liner notes.  Whether that was to avoid confusion with the album title, or that using the contributing artists' names up front is closer to ECM convention, dunno, and it doesn't really matter.  What does matter is the 71 minutes of dark electronic brilliance cooked up here by composer György Kurtág Jr (b. 1955, avant-garde credentials obvious straight away from his name, came up through IRCAM in the 80s), "transglobal" composer László Hortobágyi (b. 1950, and a major scholar of Indian music) and bassist Miklós Lengyelfi (b. 1955, with his roots in folk music).

The centrepiece of Kurtagonals is arguably the 38-minute stretch that takes in its three longest pieces - the self-explanatory Kurtagamelan, which feels like it's only missing a hooded and bearded Jhonn Balance moaning over the top; the more soundtracky Interrogation; and the more explicitly beat-driven drones, pads and micro-details of Lux-Abbysum.  After this, we get a bit of uneasy respite in Dronezone, one of quite a few tracks here that made me imagine Chris and Cosey hunched over laptops (anyone heard his new solo album yet? I've been a bit lazy picking it up), and the possibly weakest but still hugely enjoyable track Kurtaganja.  A couple of nice short tracks wind up this brilliant album, which sadly appears to have been The First and Final Report of Hortagonals - shame there aren't loads more to dig deep into.

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Steve Reich - Tehilim (1982)

Steve Reich's third album in his ECM trilogy, Tehilim (Psalms, sung here in the original Hebrew) for sopranos and ensemble followed up on its predecessor by digging even more explicitly into the composer's cultural and spiritual heritage.  In an interview (scroll to bottom) with Charles Amirkhanian around the time Tehilim was composed, Reich can be heard discussing Judaism becoming more central to his life and his work, and the studies into Torah chanting that he'd been undertaking would find full flower in this, his first vocal work.

The four-part Tehilim on record was, at under half an hour, the shortest LP that ECM had ever released, and I doubt very much they've since released a briefer one.  Huge kudos then to Reich and Eicher for resisting the temptation to pair Tehilim with another work on the album (perhaps there just wasn't one around), as it doesn't need it - it's utterly gorgeous on its own.  The intricate, flowing counterpoints of Part I lead into the heart-bursting wonder of Part II on the album's first side, with the voices perfectly accompanied by mostly just organ, reeds and percussion.

The marimba and strings-underlaid Part III is the shortest part, apparently written by the movement-shunning Reich via the gentle persuasion of conductor Peter Eötvös, before the original percussion picks up again for Part IV's setting of the last Psalm ("praise him on the..." etc), bursting into a final joyous gallop for the final 'hallelujahs'.  Essential, life-affirming Reich.

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Meredith Monk - Book Of Days (1990)

It was in 1984 that Meredith Monk first conceived of the imagery that would lead to the film Book Of Days - a monochrome scene of a young girl in a medieval Jewish village.  The nonlinear narrative would end up focusing on the girl's strange visions of 20th century life, that she would attempt to explain to her grandfather (see image above), before finding a kindred spirit in a 'madwoman' portrayed by Monk.  Certainly sounds fascinating - anyone out there ever had a chance to watch it?

The soundtrack would feature mostly brief vocal pieces that Monk had been concurrently working on, most of them acapella, occasionally with subtle drone instrumentation from a keyboard, organ, dulcimer, hurdy gurdy or cello.  On completion of the film project, Monk decided to re-record the music from the film, plus some pieces that she hadn't been able to include, and restructure the running order.  The result was this, her fourth album for ECM; intended by Monk and Manfred Eicher to be 'a film for the ears'.

Book Of Days the album remains an oft-cited high point in Meredith Monk's discography, and for good reason.  The preponderance of short acapella pieces really lets her vocal, compositional and vocal arrangement talents shine, and their structure here flows beautifully as an album completely apart from its soundtrack origins.  This is vocal music that sounds truly timeless, notwithstanding the occasional use of a digital keyboard (which actually fits just fine on Churchyard Entertainment and Madwoman's Vision in a Badalamenti-sinister kind of way).  The occasional acoustic instrumentation mentioned earlier perfectly fleshes out the austere vocals too.  A highly recommended jewel of a record.

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Previously posted at SGTG: Dolmen Music | Turtle Dreams 

Meredith Monk - Turtle Dreams (1983)

Meredith Monk's second release for ECM again selected pieces from theatrical and film works to produce a great album experience.  The sonic palate is more varied than on Dolmen Music, so even though this album is ten minutes shorter than its predecessor, you actually get a broader snapshot of Monk's sound-world of the period.

The first half of Turtle Dreams is taken up by its title track.  In its original conception, the four performers shown on the album cover above provided the focal points of sound and movement, while the backdrop was intermittently superimposed with images of a turtle crawling across cityscape footage.  A made-for-video reduction has survived, and remains one of the most wonderfully weird YouTube experiences I've ever had.  Musically, Glass/Reich-esque organs provide a sedate backing to Monk's voice, just on the edge of comprehensibility, before the rest of voices join in and the singing switches to the much more primal vocalese that Monk excelled at.

The four pieces on the album's second half are ran together in a varied and fascinating patchwork.  View 1 is first and longest, and starts with rippling piano arpeggios before settling down.  This isn't just a straightforward voice-and-piano ballad like on the first side of Dolmen Music though - the voice parts are more treated, mostly with echo, and little bits overdubbed.  Sped-up overdubs of the opening piano riff are also dropped in at times, along with a low growl of didgeridoo in the background.  After a loud synth fanfare closes this amazing piece, we're next offered two minutes of mechanical, industrial sound in Engine Steps, then Ester's Song, a minute of keyboard and voice.  The closing track on the album, View 2, was also taken from the original Turtle Dreams production, and winds this album up in style as Monk's amazing voice coos and soars over a flutey synth backing.

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Meredith Monk - Dolmen Music (1981)

Been enjoying this album a lot on these past few autumnal weekends - gorgeous, unique music, much of it just piano and (one hell of a!) voice, and just enough magnificent weirdness, from a singular musician and composer.  Meredith Monk (b. 1942 in NYC) stands alongside Yoko Ono for me as one of the most fearless and boundary-pushing explorers of the potential of the human voice in music, and Monk's singular craft as a composer and performer continues to this day.

Dolmen Music marked the beginning of her ongoing relationship with ECM, and presented five examples of her work from the 70s.  After the beautiful opener Gotham Lullaby, which was composed for a 1975 theatre piece by frequent early collaborator Ping Chong, the next three pieces were taken from Monk's 'solo opera' Education Of The Girlchild (1972-3).  Performed as the stages of a woman's life in reverse, the selections here are by turns joyously euphoric (Travelling), comical (The Tale) and melancholic (Biography).

The second half of the album is taken up by its title track, a six-section choral suite from 1979.  After a ghostly cello introduction, Monk's lone voice is soon joined by the male voices, giving the impression of a sombre ritual from some long-lost culture.  The full vocal ensemble broadens this out, its full flight interspersed with smaller pairings and solos, and the return of the cello.  Eventually that instrument gets a dramatic, rattling solo, before the voices gradually gather again for the stunning finale.  A brilliant work of breathtaking dynamics, topping off an essential album.  More Meredith Monk to come in due course.

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Kim Kashkashian, Sarah Rothenberg, Houston Chamber Choir - Rothko Chapel (2015)

This album came up in the comments a short while back, so as promised, here it is.  Asked to curate a programme of music for a 40th anniversary concert at Rothko Chapel in 2011, Sarah Rothenberg, pianist and leader of the Da Camera organisation for chamber music in Houston, TX, chose to frame Morton Feldman's unique Rothko-inspired work with pieces by John Cage and Erik Satie.

The connection, Rothenberg explains in her lengthy liner note to this collection of 2012-13 recordings of the pieces in the programme, was that the three composers 'form a triumvirate of original creators who were each closely tied to the visual art of their time'.  And besides that, on this ECM New Series CD the programme just sounds great as a flowing, 70-minute immersion in some unique, inspired music.

Feldman's Rothko Chapel, written in tribute to the painter's great work just after his death, is the obvious opener to this collection.  Its sombre, eerie choral drift, piano backdrop and viola lead remain the perfect musical expression of Rothko's diffuse hints of colour on black backgrounds that graced the inner walls of the Houston chapel.

The remainder of the programme alternates between Rothenberg on solo piano playing inspired choices from Satie's Gnossiennes and Ogives, and the Houston Chamber Choir performing works by John Cage.  I hadn't heard any choral work by Cage prior to this disc, and the pieces here, Four², ear for EAR and Five, sit really well with the main Feldman work.  The programme closes with one of Cage's finest piano pieces, In A Landscape.

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Górecki, Satie, Milhaud, Bryars - O Domina Nostra (rec. 1992, rel. 1993)

Christopher Bowers-Broadbent's Trivium seemed to go down well the other week, so here's the organist's second ECM New Series release, again focusing on just three well-chosen composers.  The most striking difference with this album is that he's also joined for two pieces by Sarah Leonard, an English soprano with a particular interest in contemporary classical music, to great effect.

First up is the Górecki work that gives the album its name.  O Domina Nostra (1982-1985/90) takes inspiration from the iconography in a Polish monastery, and making stunning use of the deep organ drones set against the developing soprano part.  The organist is then featured solo in a vocal-less version of Erik Satie's Messe des Pauvres (1895) and a couple of Darius Milhaud Preludes from 1942, before Sarah Leonard returns for the stunning finale - Gavin Bryars' The Black River (1991), with its text from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.  Compared to the Trivium album, this collection is much more about subtlety and gradual shifts in atmosphere, making it a fascinating feast for the ears.

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Thomas Demenga / Heinz Reber - Cellorganics (rec. 1980, rel. 1981)

Staying in the ECM organ zone for today, and adding a cello.  That cello is the first sound you hear on this recording from October 1980, tentatively staking out its naturally-reverbed territory (in Pauluskirche, Bern) before the organ gradually fills the rest of the space.  From then on, these two Swiss composer-musicians create a perfectly-balanced dialogue, sometimes quiet and reflective, but able to work up to a full-on maelstrom when necessary.  A great combination of two unusually-paired instruments, that needless to say for ECM, sounds absolutely stunning.

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