Their last album with works by Robert Schumann, Edvard Grieg and Tõnu Kõrvits saw the Gazzana sisters Natascia and Raffaella “achieve the highest levels of instinctive expression”, according to the French daily paper Le Monde, and one could argue that this holds even more true for their new recording with music by Sergei Prokofiev, Arvo Pärt and Alfred Schnittke.
The duo’s reading of Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 1, op. 80 opens the proceedings with urgency, true to the composer’s intention (Prokofiev famously declared that a particular passage “should sound in such a way that people should jump in their seat…”), but also with lyrical serenity, casting the work’s third movement in a spellbinding light. His Five Melodies op. 35a are interpreted with…
Tag Archive: ECM New Series
“These performances, by Heinz Holliger and Marie-Lise Schüpbach, are simply astonishing in their fluency,” wrote UK magazine Gramophone of Holliger’s album Zwiegespräche, and the description applies with equal pertinence to con slancio, with its inspired and inspiring play of energies.
The title piece, which opens the programme here, was written by the Swiss composer and nonpareil oboist as a tribute to musical partner Schüpbach: “Since I began playing in duo with Marie-Lise, I’ve been fascinated by the way our two instruments expand each other’s range and palette of tone colours. New sound paths have opened up for me.”
The album includes premier recordings of six Holliger compositions written between 2018…
The compositional scene of South Africa remains little-known to listeners outside that country, and it is notable that this collection of South African string quartets does not overlap in the least, not even by composer, with the most famous foreign investigation, the Kronos Quartet’s Pieces of Africa album of 1992.
A Dark Flaring covers music written over a span of more than 70 years, from Priaulx Rainier (1903- 1986) to Robert Fokkens (b. 1975); a poem written by the latter, accompanying his three-movement Glimpses of a half-forgotten future (2012), gives the album its title. They are quite a varied group, ranging from a unique virtuoso Impressionist language in Rainier’s quartet to angry rock inflections in Matthijs van Dijk’s…
Pur ti miro represents one of those rare convergences in classical music when disparate lineages find themselves speaking, almost accidentally at first, a common language. It begins with curiosity, as violist Martin Stegner and double bassist Janne Saksala, both members of the Berlin Philharmonic, step beyond their usual orchestral frame to meet Wu Wei, master of the sheng. His instrument-an ancient Chinese mouth organ whose history predates all the works played here-has been modified with keys for the modern ear, capable of whispering like breath against glass or expanding in a cathedral-like radiance. When Stegner encountered Wei in 2009, as he recounts in the album’s liner note, he felt something akin to recognition, as if this millennia-old voice…
A central fixture in the world of string quartets for the past thirty years, the Zehetmair Quartett’s ECM recordings of Schumann, Hindemith, Bartók and Hartmann have received luminous praise — Gramophone lauded their Schumann as “Record of the Year”, while The Sunday Times described their Hindemith and Bartók performances as “playing of huge finesse in both pieces,” calling them “a real benchmark”.
For this this newest entry to their New Series catalogue, the quartet turns to Johannes Brahms’s first two string quartets, Op. 51 Nos. 1 and 2 — works of mature reflection and dramatic urgency that reveal Brahms’s mastery of form. The composer had after all written over 20 quartets prior two these two, as he confided to…
“Cooperation, interdependence and kindness” are the qualities that Meredith Monk emphasizes in Cellular Songs, “as an antidote to the values that are being propagated right now.” Of the work’s premiere performance the New York Times wrote, “Ms. Monk spun together divergent elements so fluidly that it created an unmistakable sense of hope. It’s much easier to conceive of bridging public divides — or even containing multitudes, as an individual — when you witness a synthesis like the one created in Cellular Songs.”
The second part of an interdisciplinary trilogy begun with On Behalf of Nature, Cellular Songs looks inward, at the fabric of life itself, and draws inspiration from cellular activity including replication and mutation, in the course…
Sun Triptych is the eagerly-awaited second ECM New Series album by British-Bulgarian composer Dobrinka Tabakova. The first, 2014’s String Paths, made an immediate impact, picking up a Grammy Nomination and superlative reviews, The Strad praising its “glowing tonal harmonies and grand, sweeping gestures,” while the Washington Times hailed it as an “exciting, deeply moving, original and triumphant” recording. The new album embraces a still broader expressive range, as is immediately evident from the opening Whispered Lullaby and Suite in Jazz Style, both for viola and piano, the first a yearning song, the second an imaginative chamber meditation on jazz gestures, atmospheres and textures. Spinning a Yarn, for violin and hurdy-gurdy, has a touching…
Estonian vocal ensemble Vox Clamantis and their leader Jaan-Eik Tulve have established themselves among the leading interpreters of Arvo Pärt’s music over a quarter-century of close collaboration with the composer – a relationship that builds on the almost half a century long artistic partnership between Pärt and producer Manfred Eicher. Of the ensemble’s ECM New Series recording The Deer’s Cry, the BBC Music Magazine wrote that “the level of artistry necessary to achieve the kind of living, breathing performance given here by Vox Clamantis is a rarity … This grippingly authentic and superbly sung collection may now be the finest single-disc introduction to Pärt’s music.”
And I heard a voice, recorded in Haapsalu Cathedral, Estonia, and released as Arvo Pärt…
On his newest recording for ECM’s New Series, lute virtuoso Rolf Lislevand turns to the revolutionary Baroque literature for archlute and chitarrone, interpreting 17th century lute composers’ works largely found in their first printed books – their respective libri primi. In striking solo performances, the Norwegian explores the progressive nature of pieces by the Italians Johann Hieronymous Kapsberger, Giovanni Paolo Foscarini and Bernardo Gianoncelli as well as two Recerercadas of Spaniard Diego Ortiz.
Lislevand takes historically informed liberties in his interpretations, improvising frequently, as was custom at the time, and even contributes his own personal study of the challenging Passacaglia form with his “Passacaglia al modo mio”.
Aeris is the ninth ECM New Series album to feature the vibrant and highly expressive music of Erkki-Sven Tüür.
Olari Elts, a long-time champion of Tüür’s compositions, conducts the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra in compelling, intensely-focused performances of Phantasma, De Profundis and Tüür’s tenth symphony ÆRIS, a vast drama of shifting energies and interactions, which is scored for horn quartet and orchestra.
The symphony is in four movements that transition seamlessly.
Tüür: “Each movement expresses a different development between the ensemble of soloists and the orchestra. Sometimes their motifs spread into the orchestra like memes that start…