Roberta Invernizzi DONNE BAROCCHE Women Composers from the Baroque Period

The Donne Barocche, or Baroque Women, featured here are not singers or operatic characters, but composers, and the album, originally released on the Opus 111 label in 2001 and rescued for reissue by Naïve broke new ground when it first appeared. All of the music comes from the last third of the 17th century and the first decade of the 18th. The names of composer/singer Barbara Strozzi and French keyboardist Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre were known to enthusiasts of the history of women's music and were beginning to receive mainstream performances, but the other four composers represented were new to all but scholars, and the big news was a program of music as varied in concept and affect as any by the male composers of the period. The "Sonata duodecima in D minor for violin and continuo" of Isabella Leonarda, an Ursuline nun from Novara, is a wild rush of chromaticism and ornament with affinities to the German fantastic style, and the "Lamento della Vergine" of Antonia Bembo, also a member of a women's religious community, is a fine example of the dramatic pious style that was one of the forerunners of Bach's cantata idiom. Everything benefits from passionate singing by soprano Roberta Invernizzi and from lively accompaniment by Bizzarrie Armoniche, an offshoot of the pioneering Italian group Il Giardino Armonico. There's not a conventional phrase on the disc, from either the composers or the performers. An essential for a Baroque shelf, and even a good place to start with music by women in general. (James Manheim, Rovi)

Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre (1665 - 1729)
Sonata No. 2 in D major for violin and basso continuo
1) Presto [1:25]
2) Adagio [1:26]
3) Presto [1:35]
4) Prersto [2:30]
Barbara Strozzi (c-1619 - 1677)
Serenata for soprano, two violins and basso continuo
5) "Hor che Apollo" [13:15]
Arietta for soprano and basso continuo
6) "Mei pensieri" [4:13]
Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre
Form Suite in D minor
7) "Prelude" [2:18]
Antonia Bembo (1643 - 1715)
Cantata for soprano and basso continuo
8) "Lamento della Vergine" [9:36]
Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre
Allemande from Suite I in re mineur
9) "La Flamande e double" [5:31]
Rosa Giacinta Badalla (1660 - ca. 1715)
Mottetto for soprano and basso continuo
10) "Non plangete" [6:37]
Isabella Leonarda (1620 - 1704)
Sonata duodecima in D minor for violin solo and basso continuo
11) Adagio [1:51]
12) Allegro e presto [1:16]
13) Vivace e largo [4:49]
14) Aria Allegro [1:28]
15) Veloce [1:09]
Bianca Maria Medea (ca. 1665 - ca. 1700)
Mottetto for soprano, two violins and basso continuo
16) "Cari Musici" [9:41]

Roberta Invernizzi, Soprano
Bizzarrie Armoniche:
Riccardo Masahide Minasi, Violin solo
Stefano Barneschi, Violin
Elena Russo, Cello
Giangiacomo Pinardi, Theorbo
Salvatore Carchiolo, Harpsichord

2001 Opus 111 / Naïve
1 CD DDD
OP 30341

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Francesco Tristano BACH CAGE

A young musician and composer causing a stir, not only on the club scene, but also in classical concert venues is probably a world-first. It may also be the first time that purists from the classical and techno camps actually agree on something – That they don’t know quite what to make of this young musician who refuses to stick to the rules. For Francesco Tristano this kind of reaction is nothing new. When he and his trio, Aufgang, begin to play techno from sheets, his puzzled audience shuffle in their seats. Experienced concert audiences and classical music lovers may feel equally baffled when they hear a pianist blend and mix his own composition – just like a DJ – into a piece by Frescobaldi.
The intrepidness with which 29-year-old Francesco Tristano combines eras and styles, occasionally allowing them to collide, may initially create a baffled response. However, Luxembourg-born Francesco Tristano has no aspirations as an agitator. Almost everything he does is an expression of an open-minded attitude which refuses to accept borders and constrictions. Tristano knows all about the interpretational conventions that have shaped generations of classical pianists – But he has chosen to ignore them. He does not seek approval as an artist and when his dynamic performance emotively basks in the intrinsic severity of baroque music – that’s when he’s truly radical.
Tristano’s talent cannot be doubted. His technique is outstanding, his playing is comparative to a virtuoso, his interpretations are bold and unconventional. Yet, he is far from being a sonic iconoclast. Tristano’s wide repertoire spans baroque, classical music, new music, jazz and club music and reflects his experience and playing ability. He refuses to accept the existence of stylistic borders yet his work is always carefully considered and represents a respect for all music.
Francesco Tristano discovered the piano at the age of five. Aged 13, he played his first concert, presenting his own compositions. He later toured both as a soloist and with renowned orchestras, such as the Russian National Orchestra, the French National Orchestra of Lille and the Philharmonie Luxembourg. Tristano founded the chamber ensemble, The New Bach Players, with whom he has also performed as a conductor. This ensemble consciously breaks with conventions, using a Steinway grand piano and old, vibratoless bows on contemporary string instruments.
Tristano is one of the last students at New York’s Juilliard School to complete Bach legend Rosalyn Tureck’s master class. He also studied at the music academies in Brussels, Riga, Paris and Luxembourg as well as the esmuc in Barcelona. In 2004, he won the first prize at the International piano competition for contemporary music in Orléans, France. Tristano has released twelve albums, among them recordings of Bach Goldberg Variations and complete keyboard concertos, Luciano Berio complete piano works, and Girolamo Frescobaldi Toccatas. Not for Piano (2007), presented his own compositions as well as versions of techno classics at the piano. Idiosynkrasia, his third album on the label inFiné, recorded at Carl Craig’s Planet E-communications in Detroit, was released to critical acclaim in 2010. More recently, Tristano has signed with Universal Classics & Jazz. His first project, bachCage, produced by Moritz von Oswald, was released on Deutsche Grammophon in March 2011.

Francesco Tristano (1981 -)
1. Introit
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 - 1750)
Partita for Keyboard no 1 in B flat major, BWV 825
2) Praeludium
3) Allemande
4) Courante
5) Sarabande
6) Menuet I
7) Menuet I - Menuet II, da capo
8) Gigue
John Cage (1912 - 1992)
9) In a Landscape
The Seasons
10) Prelude I
11) Winter
12) Prelude II
13) Spring
14) Prelude III
15) Summer
16) Prelude IV
17) Fall
18) Finale (Prelude I)
Johann Sebastian Bach
19) Duet for Organ in E minor, BWV 802
20) Duet for Organ in F major, BWV 803
21) Duet for Organ in G major, BWV 804
22) Duet for Organ in A minor, BWV 805
John Cage
Etudes australes
23) Etude No. 8 Book 1
Francesco Tristano
24) Interludes
Johann Sebastian Bach
French Suite no 1 in D minor, BWV 812
25) Menuet II

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Nelson Freire LISZT Harmonies du Soir

2010 saw the centenary of both Schumann’s and Chopin’s birth. In 2011 we pay tribute to their great co-Romantic Franz Liszt. Liszt’s reputation has fluctuated wildly (unlike that of his two contemporaries), and it is only in relatively recent times that his true stature has been fully realised. Though he was possibly the greatest, and certainly the most charismatic of pianists, his compositions embraced many areas of music. But if his symphonic poems, Masses, oratorios and songs are often musically revolutionary, his piano music takes precedence both for its quantity and its quality. This ranges from music once considered unplayable – time was when audiences came to see whether Liszt had more than ten fingers – to works of a dark-hued austerity. One has only to compare “La campanella” (from the Paganini Études) with the “Angelus” (from the third book of the Années de pèlerinage) to become aware of the extent of the composer’s journey. Both pieces evoke bells, but there the similarity ends. True, Liszt’s prodigious gifts and his early flaunting of his Bird of Paradise feathers caused unease and contempt in many quarters. For Clara Schumann he showed “too much of the tinsel and the drum”, while Mendelssohn was enraged by Liszt’s easy familiarity with his music, to which he added sundry ornaments and elaborations of his own. Chopin, too, although he never lived to hear Liszt’s truest masterpieces, saw him as an outsized charlatan (“I still say that he is a clever craftsman without a vestige of talent”).
Today the situation could hardly be more different and, as Nelson Freire’s wide-ranging programme shows, Liszt was a true master of an ever-varying style and achievement. The B minor Ballade gives us Liszt at his most opulent and rhetorical and has been aptly characterised as “concerned less with personal suffering than with great happenings on the epic scale … tragedies of public more than private import”. Most notable after the storming eloquence of the principal theme’s last appearance (a clear inspiration for the very Lisztian cadenza of Grieg’s Piano Concerto) is the Ballade’s serene close, a subtle alteration to the original and bombastic conclusion.
The Nineteen Hungarian Rhapsodies form Liszt’s tribute to the land of his birth with their contrasting lassú (slow) and friss (fast) sections (though he spoke Hungarian only in his music). They have been decried as paste rather than diamonds and are of mixed gypsy rather than genuine Magyar origin, but their freshness and vitality remain uncompromised. For this recording Nelson Freire has avoided the most popular of the Rhapsodies (nos. 2, 6, 12 and 15) and chosen no. 3, one of the least-played.
With the Valse oubliée (the first and most popular of four), Nelson Freire gives us a single excursion into Liszt’s late manner and music of an elusive, bitter-sweet nostalgia expressed with a novel economy. Returning to Liszt’s earlier, more picturesque brilliance, Waldesrauschen, the first of two concert études dating from 1862–63, may lack the ambivalent tonality of the Valse oubliée which was to make of Liszt a prophet of the twentieth century, but its luminous, shimmering texture already points the way to works such as “Ondine” from Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit.
The three Petrarch Sonnets form the expressive centre of the Années de pèlerinage Book 2, Italy. And just as Book 1 records the sights and sounds of Switzerland’s alpine magnificence, so the second and third books show themselves no less susceptible to the art and literature of Italy. Liszt’s vocal settings of Petrarch were composed in 1838, and their transformations into some of the most ardent and luxuriant piano pieces were published between 1847 and 1858. The composer’s chameleon-like ability to change and, indeed, transfigure his own and other people’s work is hauntingly evident in the three ultra-Romantic idealisations of a fourteenth-century poet. Sonnet no.104, the most familiar of the three, remembers unrequited passion.
“Au lac de Wallenstadt” (no. 2 from the first of the Années de pèlerinage, Switzerland) is prefaced by some lines by Byron: “thy contrasted lake / With the wild world I dwell in, is a thing / Which warns me with its stillness to forsake / Earth’s troubled waters for a purer spring”. Marie d’Agoult, Liszt’s mistress of the moment, could hear “a melancholy harmony, imitative of the sigh of waves and the cadence of oars”.
Liszt’s six Consolations, which were completed in 1850, take their title from poems by Sainte-Beuve dedicated to Victor Hugo. Sometimes considered “consolations” for those unable to cope with Liszt’s more difficult pages, they are nonetheless demanding in other, more lyrical and serene ways. The first is wistfully and gently wayward, and its deceptive modulations could easily have developed into an earlier and more customary grandeur. The second is a classic instance in miniature of Liszt’s elaboration rather than development of an essentially simple “vocal” idea. Like the second, the third Consolation is very much for those who delight in Liszt’s most tactful poetry; one of his many unofficial tributes to Chopin, this meditation on the opening of the D flat Nocturne, op. 27 no. 2 is understandably among Liszt’s most popular compositions. The hymnal piety of the fourth is not without fervour, and the urbane charm of the fifth is finely countered by the sixth, music of greater boldness, enlivened by terms such as “vibrato” and “appassionato”.
Finally, “Harmonies du soir” is the eleventh and most opulent of Liszt’s formidably entitled Études d’exécution transcendante. These were composed in three versions, the first a rudimentary flexing of muscles, the second of self-defeating difficulty, and the third a clarifying and refining of its predecessors. “Harmonies du soir”, as its title declares, is a study in impressionism and many of its massive chord sequences are a prophecy of things to come. Messiaen may have made little mention of Liszt, but the influence is unmistakable.
Nelson Freire’s qualities have been admirably summarised by Ivan Davis, the brilliant American virtuoso. For him Freire is “natural (both in pianism and musical honesty), provocative (why didn’t I think of that?) and inevitable (a totality of technique and temperament)”. On a personal note, a friend challenged me some years ago to identify the pianist on a much-loved recording. What I heard was a flawless fusion of gifts: freedom and elasticity, a wholly personal, yet never obtrusive rubato, and a seductive magic which was hard to place but haunting and immaculate. I hazarded some guesses before settling for Nelson Freire. It was indeed Freire, and that recording, taken from a live recital at the Gusman Cultural Center in Miami, remains a priceless collector’s item. (Bryce Morrison)

Franz Liszt (1811 - 1886)
2 Etudes de Concert, S.145
1. No.1 Waldesrauschen [4:00]
Années de pèlerinage: 2ème année: Italie, S.161
2. 5. Sonetto 104 del Petrarca [5:57]
3. Valse oubliée No.1 in F sharp, S.215 [2:45]
4. Ballade No.2 in B minor, S.171 [13:43]
Années de pèlerinage: 1e année: Suisse, S.160
5. 2. Au lac de Wallenstadt [2:45]
6. Hungarian Rhapsody No.3 in B flat, S.244 [4:25]
6 Consolations, S. 172
7. No. 1 in E major (Andante con moto) [1:42]
8. No. 2 in E major (Un poco più mosso) [2:31]
9. No. 3 in D flat major (Lento, placido) [4:22]
10. No. 4 in D flat major (Quasi adagio) [2:59]
11. No. 5 in E major (Andantino) [2:21]
12. No. 6 in E major (Allegretto, sempre cantabile) [2:11]
13. Harmonies du soir [8:37]

2011 Decca
1 CD DDD
478 2728 3 DH

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Mojca Erdmann MOSTLY MOZART

The Muses have been revered as a source of divine inspiration since the time of classical antiquity and are said to encourage artists to give of their exceptional best. From this point of view, the Hamburg soprano Mojca Erdmann seems like a figure from the distant past. Although she is still at the beginning of what promises to be a major international career, she has already inspired a number of contemporary composers, including Aribert Reimann and Wolfgang Rihm. Indeed, Rihm even wrote the main role in his operatic fantasy Dionysos with the young soprano in mind. Her performances in the world premiere at the 2010 Salzburg Festival proved a tremendous personal success.
For her debut with Deutsche Grammophon, however, Mojca Erdmann has chosen a very different type of programme in the form of works by Mozart and his contemporaries: “Mozart has accompanied me all my life. Although my father is a composer and contem­porary music has always played a major role in our lives, for me there is nothing to beat singing Mozart, even though I feel an immense respect for him. You know exactly how it should sound, but it’s insanely difficult to achieve this.”
No one listening to Mojca Erdmann’s singing would suspect for a moment that she finds Mozart difficult. Indeed, her voice is almost ideally suited to the Austrian genius’s music. Her lyric soprano voice is remarkable not only for its beauty but also for its great flexibility and bell-like tone. And she enchants her listeners not just with her voice itself but also with the unconcealed emotionality of her singing: “Mozart goes straight to my heart. That may sound a little dramatic, but that’s how it is. He touches something deep inside me, and some­times the tears come unbidden to my eyes. It’s impossible to say why this should be so, but this magic may well be the secret of his success.”
At the heart of the present album is Pamina’s famous aria, “Ach, ich fühl’s, es ist verschwunden!”, for which Mojca Erdmann has deliberately chosen a slow tempo: “I was keen to express something very inward, very vulnerable. The listener should be able to gaze into this woman’s soul, the soul of a woman who is at her wits’ end and no longer knows where to turn. Her only release seems to be death. What interests me most of all is how exactly he intended his tempo indications to be interpreted. Above all with Pamina I’d love to know whether it would have worked for him if the aria were taken really slowly. Although it says ‘Andante’, it has to be as slow as this for me. If I sang it any quicker, there would no longer be any emotional depth to it.”
The Mozart arias feature alongside works by some of Mozart’s contemporaries and forerunners, works that have been almost completely forgotten but which Mojca Erdmann discovered while preparing for this release. They immediately aroused her interest: “In a letter to his father, Mozart writes very enthusiastically about the music to Ignaz Holzbauer’s opera Günther von Schwarzburg, for example. For me, it was interesting to see what Mozart thought about his fellow composers and how his own music is related to theirs. There are certainly a number of similarities. The aria from Paisiello’s Nina, for instance, starts in exactly the same way as ‘Ruhe sanft’ from Mozart’s Zaide.”
Mojca Erdmann was also surprised by the two arias from Salieri’s Les Danaïdes. Ever since Miloš Forman’s film Amadeus, Salieri has been viewed by the wider public as the man who murdered Mozart. Less well known is the fact that as a composer he was for a time more successful than his younger colleague. Mojca Erdmann, too, is enthralled by the musical quality of Salieri’s works: “Both arias are very short, but in spite of their brevity they are wonderful masterpieces. What Salieri packs into these two minutes is simply incredible.”
The result is an album that avoids the well-worn paths of the standard repertory and introduces listeners to some of the most beautiful arias from the early-Classical and Classical periods. One such composer is Johann Christian Bach, the youngest son of Johann Sebastian and a great influence on the young Mozart’s style. Another is the Viennese composer Ignaz Holzbauer, who wrote over two hundred sinfonias and fifteen operas, most of which have now fallen into neglect. Giovanni Paisiello wrote more than one hundred operas and in his own day was one of the most famous composers in Europe. His works, too, have largely disappeared from the repertory, although they often dwarfed the compositions of his contemporaries with their melodic charm and dramatic intensity.
But the biggest surprise remains Mojca Erdmann’s voice. In her astonishing combination of technical mastery, tonal beauty and consummate expression she affords impressive proof of what Mozart singing can be like today. (Tristan Wagner)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791)
Zaide, K.344
Act 2
1. "Tiger! wetze nur die Klauen" [4:47]
Antonio Salieri (1750 - 1825)
Les Danaïdes
Act 2
Scene 2
2. Par les larmes dont votre fille [2:36]
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791)
Idomeneo, re di Creta, K.366
Act 1
3. "Quando avran fine omai" [4:05]
Act 1
4. "Padre, germani, addio!" [3:57]
Zaide, K.344
Act 1
5. Ruhe sanft, mein holdes Leben [6:34]
Don Giovanni, ossia Il dissoluto punito, K.527
Act 1
6. "Ma se colpa" [0:48]
7. "Batti, batti, o bel Masetto" [3:45]
Giovanni Paisiello (1740 - 1816)
Nina, o sia la Pazza per Amore
8. Il mio ben quando verrà [7:05]
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791)
Le nozze di Figaro, K.492
Act 4
9. "Giunse alfin il momento" [1:21]
10. "Deh vieni, non tardar" [3:18]
Ignaz Jakob Holzbauer (1711 - 1783)
Günther von Schwarzburg
Act 1
Scene 1
11. Es ist geschrieben [3:54]
12. Ihr Rosenstunden [2:45]
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791)
Don Giovanni, ossia Il dissoluto punito, K.527
Act 2
13. "Vedrai, carino" [3:23]
Johann Christian Bach (1735 - 1782)
Amadis de Gaule
14. A qui pourrai-je avoir recours [4:52]
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791)
Die Zauberflöte, K.620
Act 2
15. Ach, ich fühl's, es ist verschwunden (Pamina) [4:27]
Antonio Salieri (1750 - 1825)
Les Danaïdes
Act 5
Scene 1
16. Père babare, arrache-moi [1:35]
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791)
Idomeneo, re di Creta, K.366
Act 2
17. "Se il padre perdei" [6:24]
Ignaz Jakob Holzbauer (1711 - 1783)
Günther von Schwarzburg
Act 2
Scene 4
18. Die Klüfte sausen! [4:44]

Mojca Erdmann

La Cetra Barockorchester Basel

Andrea Marcon

2011 Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Hamburg
1 CD DDD
477 8979 6 GH

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BOULEZ conducts VARÈSE Amériques - Arcana Déserts - Ionisation

When Edgard Varèse arrived in New York in 1915, he paid an homage of sorts to his new home with his first published composition, Amériques, an abstract work that the composer deemed "symbolic of discoveries -- new worlds on earth, in the sky, or in the minds of men." Indeed, listening to the enormous orchestra thrash and convulse its way through it, you get a striking sense of a composer breaking away from his influences -- Stravinsky, Debussy, a touch of Schoenberg -- and leaping into a brave new world where music obeys no prior rules. Perhaps because of this freedom, Varèse's work still has the power to astonish in a way that the music of his modernist contemporaries no longer does. Pierre Boulez has long placed Varèse among the 20th century's most important musical revolutionaries, and this recording of four of the composer's key works is a sonic marvel; the Chicago Symphony's brass and percussion, in particular, show their mettle in splendidly clangorous performances. In addition to Amériques, Boulez conducts Arcana, which despite its title is actually one of Varèse's most approachable pieces -- rising from strident marches and other propulsive figures to a quietly mysterious close. Ionisation, for 13 percussionists, is equal parts intricate rhythmic interplay and brute force. Déserts, which followed the other works by two decades, is performed here in its alternate version without the experimental electronic interludes the composer prepared. What remains, for winds and percussion, is starker and less aggressive than the earlier pieces, but there is no question of Varèse mellowing with age -- especially with Boulez's close attention to sonority and balance. It is as evocative and enigmatic as anything the maverick modernist ever composed. (Scott Paulin)

Edgar Varèse (1885 - 1965)
1. Amériques [25:14]
2. Arcana [19:51]
3. Déserts [17:21]
4. Ionisation [5:58]
Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Pierre Boulez

2001 Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Hamburg
1 CD DDD
471 1372 0 GH

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KAIJA SAARIAHO Graal Théâtre - Château de l'âme - Amers

Kaija Saariaho is not only among the most important Finnish composers of her time, but must be ranked as one of the leading composers of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. Born Kaija Anneli Laakkonen, she began studying visual arts at the University of Art and Design (then known as the University of Industrial Art). She married Markku Veikko Ilmari Saariaho in 1972, but the marriage was short lived, ending the following year. The composer, however, retained her married name.
In 1976, she began composition studies at the Sibelius Academy with Paavo Heininen. She obtained a degree in composition from the academy in 1980, but continued studies there for another year. Afterward, she enrolled at the Musikhochschule in Freiburg, Germany, to study with British composer Brian Ferneyhough and Germany's Klaus Huber. She was awarded a diploma there in 1983. By this time, Saariaho was already turning out some of her earliest works. The most noted efforts from this period include Verblendungen for Orchestra and Tape (1982-1984) and the minimalist piece Vers le blanc (1982). This latter piece was composed with the use of a computer and software developed at the Paris-based I.R.C.A.M. (L'Institut de Recherche et Coordination), where she had begun extensive studies in 1982 in computer techniques as they relate to musical composition. Saariaho had permanently relocated to Paris that same year. In 1984, she married Jean-Baptiste Barrière, also a composer, and their marriage produced two children, Alexandre (born 1989) and Aliisa (born 1995). In the mid-1980s, Saariaho's works began garnering much attention and she received many prestigious awards, such as the Kranichsteiner Prize in 1986, the Prix Italia in 1988, and the following year the Ars Electronica for her works Stilleben (1987-1988) and Io (1986-1987). She also attracted several impressive commissions, including one from the Lincoln Center, which resulted in the chamber work Nymphéa (1987), which was premiered by the Kronos Quartet. By the early 1990s, her music was beginning to appear with greater frequency on the concert stage and with some regularity on record labels. Saariaho had become one of the few composers to write in a modern, though not particularly dissonant, style who has achieved a good measure of popularity. Further commissions came to her, including an important one from the Finnish National Ballet, for which she produced The Earth (1991). Many of her compositions have been written specifically for major artists or groups, as with the violin work she produced for Gidon Kremer, entitled Graal Théâtre (1994), and the song cycle Château de l'âme (1996) for Dawn Upshaw. A 1993 trip to Japan led to a commission from Kunitachi College for which Saariaho composed a work for percussion and electronics, Six Japanese Gardens (1993-1995). The composer spent a year at the Sibelius Academy teaching composition (1997-1998), at a time when her stature could rival that of almost any other composer of the day. This pre-eminence is evidenced by the numerous major performances of her compositions, such as the 1999 Kurt Masur-led New York Philharmonic premiere of her choral work Oltra mar, and the Salzburg Festival premiere of her first opera, L'amour de loin, in August 2000, which featured Upshaw and conductor Kent Nagano. Saariaho also continues to collect prizes, including the German Kaske Prize and the Swedish Rolf Schock Prize, both in 2001. Many of her works have been made available on a variety of labels, including DG, BIS, Finlandia, and Ondine.

Kaija Saariaho (1952 - )
Graal Théâtre
1) I. Delicato [16:56]
2) II. Impetuoso [10:32]
Gidon Kremer (Violin)
Esa-Pekka Salonen
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Château de l'âme
3) La liane [5:57]
4) A la terre [5:14]
5) La liane [3:01]
6) Pour repousser l'espirit [2:08]
7)Les formules [7:53]
Dawn Upshaw (Soprano)
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra
Finnish Radio Chamber Choir members
Amers
8) Part 1: Libero, dolce, misterioso [8:48]
9) Part 2: Sempre molto energico, ma espressivo [10:59]
Anssi Karttunen (Cello)
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Avanti Chamber Orchestra

2001 Sony Music
1 CD DDD
SK 60817

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Daniel Barenboim THE CHOPIN CONCERTOS

“It’s one of the greatest adventures in music that we play the same pieces again and again – and that, despite their constant repetition, they sound different every time.” For Daniel Barenboim, the essence of classical music lies in the art of interpretation at different points in time. “Repetition and uniqueness – this is the dialectic secret of our art.”
Whether a work tells us about freedom, about death or about love – that for Barenboim is of secondary importance: he has no wish to verify music with words. For him, every piece is primarily nothing else but music, notes from the interplay of which an inner world is born. But this can only be achieved if the performers comprehend the structure of a work, its harmonic, melodic and rhythmic design, its internal relationships, its consciously created contrasts and tensions.
For Barenboim, even Chopin’s piano concertos are initially nothing more. They are notes that create their own specific form, a form that pianist, orchestra and conductor need to fathom. Only as a result of this approach will the work’s musical emotions be unlocked and a freedom be found in the perception of the work that only those artists can permit themselves who do not predetermine the content of a composition but in playing follow the laws inherent in it.
“Let’s take the Second Concerto in F minor,” Barenboim explains. “The end of the first tutti passage is a very important moment, for after the solo instrument has stated the individual themes, these are now embellished by means of various ornaments and decorations. The thematic material isn’t simply repeated in unaltered form – as is the case with the piano concertos of Beethoven, Mozart or Brahms – but is already varied here. With the entry of the orchestra, it’s very important, therefore, to present this thematic material in a very clear and obvious way – in other words, without any major rhythmic liberties . . . When the piano states the second subject, this too is a commentary on what has already taken place in the orchestra. There is no literal repeat of the thematic material and no intensification of the emotional mood. The orchestra has to make a ‘statement’ that can then be commented on and elaborated by the solo instrument.”
For Barenboim, freedom in music invariably means freedom within the bounds of musical form. For the interpreter it is an indication and also a germ cell, out of which ordered sound only then comes into being. To understand Chopin’s Second Piano Concerto simply as a great hymn to love is therefore, in his opinion, to reduce it, even if the then nineteen- year-old composer wrote his F minor Concerto as if in a frenzy for the opera singer Konstancja Gładkowska, his first great love. “Head, heart and belly, that’s our trinity. It’s always a question of reconciling logos, reason and emotion.”
This was also the case when Barenboim recorded Chopin’s piano concertos with the Berlin Staatskapelle under Andris Nelsons at the Ruhr Piano Festival. Barenboim has been the Staats­kapelle’s principal conductor for many years and has turned it into one of the leading orchestras internationally. The musicians have worked together on the fundamental principles of interpreta­tion and defined the parameters of their interpretative freedom. For them, the orchestra in Chopin’s piano concertos is not just a decorative adjunct against the backdrop of which the virtuoso fills out the platform. Quite the opposite, in fact: Barenboim, Nelsons and the Staats­kapelle come together to produce an intensive musical dialogue.
“In Chopin’s concertos, there are many different elements,” says Barenboim. “It’s clear that the tutti passages and large sections of the accompaniment give the orchestra little chance to shine. And so one has to find another way to achieve this. And that’s not so easy because often neither the soloist nor the orchestra nor its conductor has any idea of what a ‘symphonic’ Chopin should sound like since he wrote no symphonies or other orchestral works. There are many interesting details in the orchestral accompaniment, above all in the bassoon parts, which are sometimes invested with an almost exaggerated importance in comparison to the other instruments. All the musicians – soloist, conductor and orchestral players – must pay great attention to the challenge of bringing out these little details.”
In other words, sound or sonority is not just a question of colour for Barenboim but is also a matter of dynamic weight. What feelings are inherent to this sound is left to the audience to decide. A piece of music, Barenboim explains, requires an alert audience. “Only those listeners who follow a concert with interest and understanding have a chance to enter into a world that we musicians create for a mere moment in time. The listeners can reside in that world with their thoughts until the very last note dies away.” (Axel Brüggemann 3/2011)

Frédéric Chopin (1810 - 1849)
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra no. 1 in E minor, op. 11
1) 1. Allegro maestoso [20:43]
2) 2. Romance. Larghetto [9:54]
3) 3. Rondo. Vivace [10:30]
Concerto for piano and orchestra no. 2 in F minor, op. 21
4) 1. Maestoso [14:16]
5) 2. Larghetto [8:59]
6) 3. Allegro vivace [9:05]

Daniel Barenboim
Staatskapelle Berlin
Andris Nelsons

2011 Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Hamburg
1 CD DDD
477 9520 9 GH

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Malena Ernman OPERA DI FIORI

Malena Ernman was recently called ” without a doubt one of the worlds greatest singers” in Swedens leading newspaper Dagens Nyheter.Her musical background is firmly anchored in the Swedish choir tradition. From the age of 6 she was a member of the the Coromanterna Choir in her native Sandviken; a small industrial town some 200km north of Stockholm. And until her exam from the National Opera School she sang the first alto part in the Swedish Radio Choir under the supervision of Tönu Kaljuste, Gustav Sjökvist and Eric Ericsson.
Her swedish breakthrough came straight after finishing Opera school, 1998, in the roles Kaja in Sven David Sandströms Staden and Rosina in il Barbiere di Siviglia at the Royal Swedish opera , where she later also sang the title roles of Carmen and La Cenerentola.
Malena sang some very early and hugely praised roles at the Staatsoper Berlin ; as Cherubino in Le Nozze di Figaro (Barenboim) Rosina in Il Barbiere di Siviglia (Barenboim) and Roberto in Scarlatti’s Griselda (Jacobs). Followed by Zerlina in Don Giovanni (Barenboim).
Her international breakthrough came in 1999 as Nerone in Agrippina (René Jacobs) at La Monnaie in Bruxelles and Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris; a role that has indeed followed her career in various new productions during the last decade. Next time it will be performed in Barcelona 2013 – still under the baton of René Jacobs and with Malena Ernman as the only remaining solist from the original Bruxelles production.
Malena Ernman is a highly renowned concert artist with concerts in Rome, Madrid, Paris, London, Los Angeles, Berlin and Tokyo. Working with conductors like Esa Pekka Salonen, René Jacobs, Daniel Barenboim, Nicolaus Harnoncourt, Philippe Herreweghe, Herbert Blomstedt, Marc Minkowski, Daniel Harding and Sir Simon Rattle.
Her – extremely- wide reportoire include Berios Folk Songs, Seven Deadly Sins by Kurt Weill, Elgars Sea Pictures, Mahlers Kinder Toten Lieder, Bach Cantatas, Mozart’s requiem and C-minor mass and Cabaret songs by Bolcom, Britten and Holländer as well as song cycles by Grieg, Schumann, Brahms, Stenhammar and Nyström.
Malena also sings a wide range of modern contemporary music, often directly written for her by composers like Sven David Sandström, Philippe Boesmans, Anders Hillborg, Fabian Müller and György Ligeti.

Disc 1
1) Casta Diva
2) Habanera
3) Seguidilla
4) Flowers duet (with Anne Sofie von Otter)
5) Oh mattutino albori
6) Deh vieni non tardar, Susannas Rosenaria
7) La ci darem la mano (with Christopher Maltman)
8) Non piu di Fiori
9) Der hölle rache
10) Vois sous L’archet frémissant
11) Barcarolle (with Anne Sofie von Otter)
12) Olympia’s aria
13) Summertime
14) Ack Värmeland
15) Om sommaren sköna

Bonus Disc
1) I det fria

2011 Roxy Recordi

2 Compact Discs DDD

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REBECCA SAUNDERS Stirrings Still

With this album, Rebecca Saunders may well have solved two of the major dilemmas of modern composition. Namely: How to stay emotive without falling back on tradition. And: How to focus on timbre while holding on to a narrative. For decades, composers have been searching for a language capable expressing something new, while trying to arouse the listener in the same way as romantic harmonic schemes. It has sometimes seemed like an impossible task and often, a somewhat brutish approach has consisted of playing everything at ear-deafening volume: It might not have been pretty, but it sure left an impression.
“Stirrings Still”, released as a collaboration with prestigious ensemble Musikfabrik and on well-established German label Wergo, may be a quiet work, with lots of the action happening in between the chinks and cracks of what is actually played. But thanks to its intense morse code, which never sounds as though it could only be decoded by an intellectual elite, it is one of the records which deserve to be debated by anyone with an interest in contemporary composition.
Many have expected an intimate miracle like this from Saunders ever since she appeared on the scene shortly before the turn of the millenium tide. There were scholarships, there were prizes, there were revealing little sentences like: “I’m scraping together tiny moments of colour and gesture before the actual composing process can take place.” It all pointed firmly in the direction of something special waiting to define itself.
Prior to picking up a pen, she would talk to performers in a bid of establishing a trialogue between composer, instrumentalist and instrument, feeling her way forward towards what was possible and what was necessary. It is a time-consuming technique, which has meant that her career could never depend on the sheer volume of her oeuvre, but needed to focus on the impact of the few pieces she could finish. But it was her way of approximating the truth and there was no alternative.
As “Stirrings Still” proves, she has made all the right choices. Four of these five tracks are world premiere recordings and what's more, they actually appear to have been selected for their mutual synergetic potential: All compositions are marked by various polarities, such as regular use of an instrument vs extended technique, silence vs sound, development vs remaining in the moment, solo-performances vs ensemble play and loud vs quiet. Importantly, however, Saunders does not confuse these factors with the score: The music does not deal with anything but itself and the process of listening is the real reward – rather than any kind of externally construed “message”
You can therefore lean back and simply enjoy the sometimes forceful, then again tender exchanges between two contrabasses on “Blue and Gray” as well as the gradual rapprochement between a Piano and a Violin on “Duo”. You can marvel at the fountains of sound gushing forth from a trumpet in “Blaauw” and observe the relationships between changing constellations of interplay on “Vermillion”. Or you can lock yourself into the dreamscape that is the title piece, an eleven-minute fantasy of delicately stertorous drones caught in fibrosic cycles of soft progressions. Paradoxically, these pieces challenge your notion of what an instrument can do, but they also take sound to a state where the source is no longer of any specific interest.
Even though it is a finely constructed, almost fragile music at times, Saunders enjoys the occasional rupture to break up her auto-constructed structures, striking the ear with violent bow attacks or hitting the innards of the Piano to create spectral reverb clusters like a Zen master would use his cane to focus the attention of his scholars. But as serious, serene or whatever-other-adjective-you-might-want-to-apply-to-it as it may be, “Stirring Still” is a record which has left the arduous burden of pushing boundaries at all costs and at the expense of its audience far behind. Maybe that is the very reason why it manages to open up new doors.
In Saunders' work, after all, the old terminologies are rendered useless. She includes the note “This is Melody!” in the score to “Blue and Gray” - but there is none in the traditional sense. She plays with colour references, but they are not to be understood as synaesthetical descriptions. Her music may still be tonal, but the word no longer serves to describe a model in opposition to the Avantgarde. She includes long stretches of non-playing, but silence is no longer a territory to be reconquered.
Instead, it represents the arena where these tonal duels and duets are carried out, a forum of stimulated and intense exchanges. Or, as she puts it: “What we call silence is for me comparable to a dense knot of noise, frequencies, and sounds. From this surface of apparent silence I try to draw out and mould sound and colour."
It seems to be a contradiction that “Stirring Still” could be of universal importance despite its idiosyncratic outlook. Rebecca Saunders, after all, has written an album's worth of material, which represent nothing but her most personal points of view. Maybe that is the solution to the dilemmas of contemporary composition, however: Following your instinct and listening closely may get you further than devising strategies on theoretical battlegrounds. (Tobias Fischer)

Rebecca Saunders (1967 -)

1) Blaauw [9:41]

2) Blue and grey [9:54]

3) Duo [11:05]

4) Vermilion [15:22]

5) Stirrings still [11:00]

musikFabrik

2008 WERGO

1 CD DDD

WER 6694 2

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The Glass Chamber Players SCHOENBERG / GLASS

Philip Glass was born in pre-WWII Baltimore Maryland in 1937. The composer frequently tells the story of how his father Ben Glass, who had an auto-mechanic shop in the 1930s, frequently worked on people’s cars, which led to fixing the car radios, then Ben got rid of the cars in favor of a store that sold and repaired radios. As a sideline to the radio business Ben Glass would sell some records as a small part of the business. It grew to be a big part of the business finally becoming a proper record store.
Much has been made about Philip Glass’ sense as a businessman. Growing up in this American entrepreneurial environment, the young Philip would learn his first lessons in the music business. He would see people hand a five-dollar bill to his father and his father would hand them a record. “There’s nothing wrong with that.” Glass would later say. This was his first exposure to what for many is a complicated relationship of art and commerce in America. For a composer who would eventually take part in changing the course of music history, it’s difficult to disregard the practical business sense which was ingrained in him from day one while working in his father’s record shop.
In another story, Glass would tell of the “return privilege” which was part of the record industry in which retailers were allowed to return a certain percentage of the records if they were damaged. In order to exercise this privilege, Philip and his brother Marty would go down into the basement and break the records that had not sold. This was the first job that Philip Glass ever held in the music industry.
Such an action was a logical answer to a problem: what to do with the records that didn’t sell? Being a very practical guy, as we saw with the evolution of his businesses, Ben Glass had another idea. He would take the records home and listen to them to try to find out why people weren’t buying them. It just so happens that the music which was not selling was classical and 20th century chamber music by composers like Schoenberg, Shostakovich, and Bartok. It was in this way that the Glass home record collection of 78s grew and that a very big part of Philip Glass’ artistic sensibilities were first cultivated. The soundtrack of Philip Glass’ youth had been created.
It is important to the history of music is that Philip Glass spent time as a young person at home with his father listening to chamber music records. Ben Glass was not an educated musician, but he was a music lover in best sense. In the process of listening to these records to “find out what was wrong with them,” he became a sophisticated listener and developed a taste for chamber music. Father Glass would bring Philip in to the room and simply say to the future composer, “Here kid, listen to this.” Years later, after his father’s death, Glass composed his first concert-work as a mature composer, his Violin Concerto No.1 in 1987. He composed it as a piece that he hoped his father would have liked in the tradition of the great concertos by such composers as Mendelssohn, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky concertos.
We see that during Philip Glass’ formation as a composer, chamber music of the kind which is presented on this record, had always been a part of his musical identity. After graduating from the University of Chicago, while working at Bethlehem Steel, and during years of study at Juilliard, and with Nadia Boulanger in France, with Albert Fine in New York, with Darius Milhaud in Aspen, Glass composed chamber music constantly. This was ‘early’ music that Glass categorizes as music of a “generic modernist American sort after Copland/Harris/Schuman.” But it’s important to see that he was composing these chamber pieces from his first essays as a teenager through his mid-twenties until he found his mature voice as a composer. These juvenilia were among the up to 75 pieces while at Juilliard (over about a five year period, as Glass was not initially accepted as a composition student at the school) and another 20 or so pieces while working in the Pittsburgh School system through the Ford Foundation for two years. Examples of pieces of this time are String Quartet, Sonatino Nos. 1 and 2, Arioso Nos. 1 and 2, Serenade for Flute, “Contrasts” for violin, winds, brass and percussion.
Glass’ mature language as a composer was not fully developed until his return from France in the mid-1960s after studying with the pedagogue par excellence Nadia Boulanger (and of course Glass’ other hugely important encounter with Ravi Shankar.) As his musical language settled and matured, the Philip Glass Ensemble, a vehicle for the new music that Glass was composing, was formed essentially a chamber group. The instrumental composition of the Ensemble was partly happenstance and partly a means to a musical end; in very much the same way Schoenberg’s instrumentation was for Pierrot Lunaire. The reasons for this is because the requirements of chamber music are typically more complex the virtuosic than say your ordinary Romantic symphony. Musical language aside, the Philip Glass Ensemble, even when playing its largest pieces such as Music in 12 Parts, is still in essence a chamber group (though it must be said that Glass’ interest and subject matter for his music was for a very long time very far removed from the classical music concert hall.) With the present recording we hear Philip Glass’ mature music in a very different, yet totally appropriate context, alongside Schoenberg’s ultra-Romantic Verklarte Nacht.
There is certain elegance in Glass’ advocating to place Schoenberg on this program considering how doctrinaire Schoenberg’s disciples became about tonal composers. Clearly by the time of composing Verklaerte Nacht, Schoenberg was gearing up to challenge all of the rules of classic tonality and devise new ones. Glass has pursued his own challenges to conventional tonality that usually manifest in very individual polytonality. However, the choice of music for this release was unified not by conceptions and ideas about tonality, but by less controversial criteria: character and quality. This is return of sorts for Glass to the music of his youth (and the recordings of his youth) is significant. Glass has always described himself as a theater composer, yet on this recital, his Symphony No.3 for strings (originally for 19 string players, transcribed for sextet by Michael Riesman) stands as a piece of purely instrumental music and finds itself in perfect company with Schoenberg’s extraordinarily dark and dense Verklaerte Nacht (Transfigured Night), which was inspired by the poem by Richard Dehmel. In Dehmel’s poem, with only a few words, the reader is swooning in a sea of the complex emotions of life, and the poem’s two lovers are united by love and their own courage. Schoenberg’s musical complexity could not be more perfectly analogous to Dehmel’s words.
Not only was the repertoire carefully considered, but the way this record was recorded was as well: it was captured live in two performances at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in Manhattan in December 2009. This ‘live-recording’ sound harkens back to those classic recordings of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s before the advent of serious editing. The end result is almost always thrilling in its ebullience and pathos exactly because of the emotional arc of the performance, unencumbered by the random audible page turn or occasional ambient noise. Indeed on the nights of the recordings, there was an appropriately lugubrious rainstorm outside on the New York City streets.
This type of recording gives is a snapshot of an event that happened in real time and is an actual document of these fine players performance, and brings to full-circle a journey which Philip Glass began back in Baltimore Maryland almost 70 years ago. (Richard Guérin, New York 2010)

THE GLASS CHAMBER PLAYERS
The Glass Chamber Players were created spontaneously with its initial investment by Wendy Sutter, Philip Glass, and Richard Guérin. The group is a collection of virtuosi who have a breadth of classical repertoire and were chosen each for his/her particular talent and passion for music.
Despite Philip Glass’ wide-ranging career of over 50 years, in recent times the composer had not been focusing on chamber music with his last string quartet, no.5, dating from back in 1991. However beginning in 2007 with his solo cello suite, Songs & Poems, composed for cellist and GCP Artistic Director Wendy Sutter, he began composing a series of chamber works including his 2008 Four Movements for Two Pianos, Sonata for Violin and Piano written for GCP member Maria Bachmann (2009), and a large suite for solo violin written for GCP member Tim Fain (2010).

Arnold Schoenberg (1874 - 1951)
1. Verklaerte Nacht [30:19]

Philip Glass (1937 - )
2. String Sextet - Movement I [4:41]
3. String Sextet - Movement II [5:52]
4. String Sextet - Movement III [10:29]
5. String Sextet - Movement IV [3:12]

Tim Fain, violin

Maria Bachmann, violin

Misha Amory, viola

David Harding, viola

Wendy Sutter, cello, Artistic Director

Alexis Pia Gerlach, cello

2010 Orange Mountain Music

1 CD DDD

0069

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Maria Bachmann GLASS HEART

Violinist Maria Bachmann and pianist Jon Klibonoff have assembled a collection of works to surround their premiere performance of Philip Glass’s First Violin Sonata, which leads off their program. Bachmann explains in Lucy Miller Murray’s notes that she chose the other works for various connections they bear to Glass’s sonata. Her remarks and choices seem perceptive and convincing.
Glass’s sonata, in three movements labeled simply “Movement I,” “Movement II,” and “Movement III,” seems to be constructed from the same characteristic, recognizable repetition of melodic and rhythmic cells for which his work has become known. After a sort of gypsy-like introduction, the first movement, if not so highly patterned as the composer’s violin solo from Einstein on the Beach , nevertheless builds intensity through successive ostinati. The slow movement, the longest of the three, though not by much, allows the violinist to deploy expressive devices native to the instrument, such as expressive shifts (Bachmann also makes discreet use of these in the first movement as well). Partly for that reason, and partly on account of the lush harmonies that underlie the recurring figures, especially in the second movement—sometimes there the harmonic patterns span long sections lending the movement a sense of luxurious, almost decadent, richness—the music of the first two movements sounds both violinistic and hauntingly romantic. The third movement begins with four-note patterns recalling such patterns in Einstein on the Beach . But the movement heats up quickly, and frequent double-stops and octaves enhance the violinistic impression created by the other movements (Bachmann and Klibonoff worked with Glass, presumably offering advice, during the sonata’s gestation). As throughout, the piano shares figuration with the violin; Klibonoff serves as an equal partner throughout. Bachmann generally draws a silvery tone from her 1782 Nicolo Gagliano violin, but with the increase in intensity toward the end of the third movement, she presses it almost to the point of hoarseness.
Charles Gounod’s meditation on Bach’s Prelude in C Major, a long-breathed melody supported by a repeated motive, seems like an obvious choice to illustrate one facet of Glass’s compositional technique. Bachmann and Klibonoff play it chastely. In the booklet notes, Bachmann alludes to the melancholy that runs through the first movements of both sonatas, Glass’s and Schubert’s (in A Major). In that first movement, Klibonoff varies his articulation kaleidoscopically; Bachmann correspondingly displays a peacock-like variety of timbres. But their collaboration also incorporates liberal subtle rhythmic nuances that render the movement both idiomatic and consistently interesting. Their Scherzo, charged with electricity, sounds more dynamic than genial. Murray observes in the notes that Schubert had mimicked Beethoven in the expansion of the sonata to four movements and in writing the additional movement as a Scherzo rather than as a minuet. Bachmann and Klibonoff certainly play the movement as a Scherzo, although they’re appropriately lyrical in the trio. They infuse the Andantino with the same melancholy that marked their reading of the first movement, but their finale is as boldly steely, sharply etched, and commanding in its main sections as suggestively lyrical in the episodes (its repeated rhythms also foreshadow similar insistence in Glass’s sonata and work in general). Isabelle Faust played the sonata on a program of Schubert’s works for violin and piano with Alexander Melnikov on Harmonia Mundi 901870, Fanfare 30:4, which I recommended for its “unflinching revelations of a Schubert as a bull in the china shop of a genial Viennese soirée.” From their genial reading of the first movement (although timings don’t tell the whole story, they might have something to contribute here, with Faust at 8: 36 and Bachmann at 9:40), it’s clear that Bachmann and Klibonoff might be more welcome guests—and they take more time to tell their story in all the other movements, as well.
Ravel’s posthumous sonata reflects, according to Bachmann, a tendency Glass shares with that composer to pare expression to the bare essentials. However far-fetched this connection might seem on the page, the duo’s performance makes it clear in practice. Beside this stark but allusive sonata, Ravel’s later one sounds almost chatty by comparison, and some may question whether Glass’s work conjures as much expressivity from such spare materials. In some ways, Bachmann and Klibonoff make a stronger case for this work than for any other on the program, with Bachmann exploring in it virtually every tonal resource of her instrument. Those who prefer Ravel’s later sonata might want to give this one another hearing in Bachmann’s and Klibonoff’s version. In reviewing Leonidas Kavakos and Péter Nagy’s performance on ECM New Series 1824 B0001485-02 in Fanfare 27:4, for example, I suggested that “Kavakos and Nagy refrain from desiccating the sonata either emotionally or tonally,” but while Kavakos plays with a wide expressive and dynamic range, Bachmann seems to create a more haunting atmosphere.
Strongly recommended for recorded sound that transmits the subtlety and dynamic range of the performances, for repertoire astutely chosen to illuminate the program’s central work, and for insightful and convincing readings of Schubert’s and Ravel’s sonatas. (Robert Maxham)

Philip Glass
Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano
1) Movement I [7:25]
2) Movement II [8:18]
3) Movement III [6:36]
Johann Sebastian Bach / Charles Gounod
4) Ave Maria Meditation on Prelude No. 1 in C major [3:10]
Franz Schubert
Sonata in A Major for Violin and Piano, Op. 162
5) Allegro moderato [9:40]
6) Scherzo: Presto [4:24]
7) Andantino [4:42]
8) Allegro vivace [5:11]
Maurice Ravel
9) Sonate Opus Posthume [15:15]

Maria Bachmann, Violin
Jon Klibonoff, Piano

2010 Orange Mountain Music, Inc.
1 CD DDD
7006

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HELENA TULVE Lijnen

Helena Tulve, part of a new generation of young Estonian composers, has the honorable distinction of being the only pupil of Erkki Sven-Tüür. Like her mentor, Tulve breaks down her music into bite-sized morsels, so that even her large-scale works feel like congregations of chamber ensembles. In this representative selection of pieces, we get a taste of the latter. Encountering these works for the first time, I heard them as a single story, which is as follows:
In à travers (1998), the ensemble opens with distant calls. A pack of animals wanders, guided by communication alone. These calls come closer as they are taken up by woodwinds. Rather than antagonize one another, they join forces, comingling in search of a new language through which they may repopulate their frozen world. An oboe soloist raises its cry, occasionally overblowing as if to wrench out as much emotion from its solitude as it can: the firstborn of the newly formed colony, flexing its hybrid voice as the pack falls into silence to hear what it has wrought. A viola bravely joins in. Lijnen (2003) continues this conversation, and introduces the lone soprano, who approaches with trepidation. She wanders the landscape like an anthropologist on her first solo field assignment. Her mind desires all the fame this study is sure to bring her, even as her heart yearns to be accepted into the fold, that she might shun the world’s obligations in favor of danger. She scours the terrain with her instruments, her notepads, and her books: all the material culture she has brought from a faraway land. The animals respond with confusion, putting up a dense resistance, not so easily thwarted by her sensitive approach. Her song is half lament and half appeal. Öö (1997) gives us a peek into the anthropologist’s dream. Only in slumber can she approximate this animal language in private. Abysses (2003) awakens her with warning cries. In her half-sleep they seem to come from beyond the forest, but as she grows more aware of the gravity of the situation, she reacts. In the opening haze of cendres (2001), she immediately abandons her tent and hides in the trees, peering out into the valley below. She watches the slow, careful dance that signals the battle to come. There is so much tension in the air that every hair on her body stands on end, and for that instant an invisible thread instinctively connects her to the very subjects of her study. There is a swipe of claws, a bid for distance, but this sets all eyes aflame as reinforcements emerge from thickets and underground hovels, with more yet hidden in reserve. Brief spats of chaos erupt. Eventually, these conflicts subside. The territory has been successfully defended. In the final piece, nec ros, nec pluvia… (2004), the anthropologist weeps because her favorite has been brutally killed. She stumbles down into the valley and weeps over the fallen body. The more she holds it, the more she smells like blood. The rest of the pack surrounds her and kneels to the ground. Once they have licked her clean, they watch her until she has shed her last tear. They no longer fear her, for she no longer fears them.
This is one of the more exciting recordings to grace ECM’s New Series in the past few years. The beginnings and endings of these pieces are open links, flowing into one another in an ongoing chain. This allows us to approach them any way we wish and makes for an utterly unpretentious listening experience. Tulve is not interested in resolution, but in leaving us with more questions than we started with. In this way, the music stays with us, even if we don’t stay with it. Let’s hope partnership with the label continues.

Helena Tulve (1972 - )
1) à travers [9:51]
for ensemble

2) Lijnen [10:24]
for voice and ensemble
poems by Roland Jooris

3) Öö [11:20]
for saxophone quartet

4) abysses [9:57]
for flutes and ensemble

5) cendres [8:26]
for ensemble

6) nec ros, nec pluvia… [9:54]
for string quartet

NYYD Ensemble
Olari Elts
Arianna Savall voice
Stockholm Saxophone Quartet
Sven Westerberg soprano saxophone
Jörgen Pettersson alto saxophone
Leif Karlborg tenor saxophone
Per Hedlund baritone saxophone
Emmanuelle Ophèle-Gaubert flute
Mihkel Peäske flute
Silesian String Quartet
Szymon Krzeszowiec violin
Arkadiusz Kubica violin
Lukasz Syrnicki viola
Piotr Janosik violoncello

Recorded between November 1997 and June 2006
ECM New Series 1955
1 CD DDD

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