Now Available on ECM New Series: András Schiff's Recording of Brahms' Klavierstücke

András Schiff
Johannes Brahms
Klavierstücke

András Schiff, Blüthner piano

Albumblatt, Klavierstücke op.76, Fantasien op.116, Intermezzi op.117, Klavierstücke op.118, Klavierstücke op.119

ECM New Series 2730/31
Out Now

Downloads and CDs available upon request.

Early works and late works, the young Brahms and the mature Brahms: how could the music not sound different? Yet for his new recording of Brahms's piano pieces, András Schiff does not begin with any of the composer's better-known youthful works—from the Scherzo, op. 4, to the Ballades, op. 10, of 1854. Instead, he opens with a musical miniature that remained unknown for many years: little more than a sounding vignette from that period.

Brahms wrote the Albumblatt during a concert tour, inscribing it as a musical dedication in the Album Amicorum of Arnold Wehner, director of the University of Göttingen. Other artists, including Schumann, Mendelssohn and Liszt, had also left their mark there. Brahms later revised the fleeting little piece and incorporated it into his Horn Trio, op. 40. In the context of this recording, this wistful work by the twenty-year-old Johannes Brahms serves as an atmospheric and finely judged introduction to everything that follows. For András Schiff, it is something like “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”.

The "mature" Brahms emerges in the Eight Piano Pieces, op. 76, composed largely in 1878—a collection of Capriccios and Intermezzi. These works reflect Beethoven, Schumann and Chopin far less directly than Brahms's earlier music, and they certainly make no demands for an orchestral style of piano playing. Instead, they are intimate, profound miniatures. The critic Eduard Hanslick aptly described them, with their restrained manner, as "soliloquies," while the French Brahms biographer Claude Rostand called them "a cycle of pianistic reveries tinged with a Nordic world-weariness. 

Between 1866 and 1878, Brahms had largely neglected solo piano music. He returned to the genre only with op. 76 and the Two Rhapsodies, op. 79, before devoting himself once again, in 1892 and 1893, almost exclusively to piano pieces. The Fantasies, op. 116, and the Intermezzi, op. 117, could just as easily have borne that general title. Brahms's friend Theodor Billroth was no admirer of these small-scale works. He considered them "not varied enough, mostly too ponderous," and advised the composer to "remain with the grand style." Posterity, however, reached a very different verdict. These intimate works have come to be regarded as among the finest achievements of late Romantic piano music.

The term Klavierstück ("piano piece") was, incidentally, a catch-all designation in the nineteenth century, encompassing a wide range of lyrical forms: impromptus, ballades, romances, rhapsodies, capriccios, intermezzi and Songs Without Words, with fluid boundaries between the various genres. Brahms himself favoured the designations Capriccio and Intermezzo, using them almost as complementary opposites in terms of tempo, dynamics and musical character. On the one hand are the animated, more passionate Capriccios, full of rhythmic ingenuity and finely shaded dynamics. On the other are the introspective Intermezzi, restrained in expression and avoiding sharp contrasts.

In the recording booklet, András Schiff contributes highly personal notes on the individual works, touching on both their expressive content and aspects of their formal construction. He also observes that "the colours of these autumnal Brahms pieces" remind him, through a kind of elective affinity, of the sequence of colours in Paul Klee's painting Ancient Sound—especially when played on a historical instrument such as "the beautifully maintained 1859 Blüthner, lovingly cared for by Christoph Kern."

With the release of these piano pieces, András Schiff continues his sequence of Brahms recordings for ECM’s New Series. It began with the Clarinet Sonatas, recorded with Jörg Widmann, and has since expanded to include the Piano Concertos with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Violin Sonatas with Yuuko Shiokawa.

Oct 16: ECM New Series Releases Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica - Pages of a Biography

Gidon Kremer
Kremerata Baltica
Pages of a Biography 

Works by Arvo Pärt, Andrius Žlabys and Georgs Pelēcis
Gidon Kremer, violin
Kremerata Baltica

ECM New Series 2803
Release Date: October 16, 2026

Downloads and CDs available upon request

Gidon Kremer and his Kremerata Baltica ensemble continue the longstanding relationship with ECM’s New Series on Pages of a Biography, a programme of works by Georgs Pelēcis, Andrius Žlabys and Arvo Pärt. The three composers heard here are closely connected to Kremer’s work as an interpreter and advocate of Baltic music: Pelēcis and Žlabys have written works specifically for him and Kremerata Baltica, while Pärt’s music has been a constant presence throughout his artistic life.

The album opens with Pärt’s Passacaglia, written in 2007 for Kremer’s 70th birthday. Scored for two violins, vibraphone ad libitum and strings, it explores the relationship between a recurring harmonic pattern and the changing character of the violin line. For Kremer, the piece also establishes a direct connection with Tabula Rasa, Pärt’s 1977 composition which became the first album to be released on the New Series imprint in 1984.

The connection between Pärt and Kremer is both musical and biographical. Tabula Rasa was a decisive recording in the history of ECM’s New Series and in the international reception of Pärt’s music. More than four decades later, Passacaglia places Kremer once again inside a dialogue with the composer’s work, while Darf ich …, composed in 1999 for solo violin, tubular bell and strings, brings the programme to a more intimate conclusion. Kremer describes the latter as “almost a prayer” and as a reminder of the responsibility of the musician to serve something beyond the self.

Between the two Pärt works are pieces by two composers with particularly close connections to Kremer. The title work, Georgs Pelēcis’s Pages of a Biography, was written specifically for Kremer in 2007. Pelēcis and Kremer grew up together in Riga and later shared a room at the Moscow Conservatory. His concerto draws directly on memories of Kremer’s early career, from his prize-winning performances in Latvia and at the Queen Elisabeth Competition to his victories at the Tchaikovsky Competition and his interpretations of the Brahms, Elgar, Sibelius and Beethoven violin concertos. These memories become part of the musical material itself. Pelēcis incorporates quotations from the four concertos into the work, setting them against more dramatic episodes and passages for solo violin that he describes as “intimate pages from a personal diary”.

Andrius Žlabys’s Kaleidoscope of Lost Time, written between 2014 and 2020, is dedicated to Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica. Its five movements — Prelude, Scherzacaglia, Dissonance, Quarter=87 and Perpetuum — approach the idea of time from different perspectives. Žlabys describes the work as an attempt to capture “the feeling of time slipping away like sand through fingers”, transforming experiences of beauty and sadness into something that can be revisited through music. The violin writing was conceived with Kremer’s sound in mind from the earliest sketches.

Founded by Kremer in 1997, Kremerata Baltica brought together young musicians from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, giving a permanent form to his commitment to the musical culture of the region. Pages of a Biography continues this work through a programme in which the connections are unusually direct. It furthermore marks the anniversaries of both the ensemble, which turns 30 in 2027, and of Gidon Kremer himself, who’s 80th birthday celebrations in 2027 are inaugurated with this release.

It is thus an album in which Kremer’s artistic biography is not simply the subject of the music but part of its history. The pieces belong to different moments and generations, yet their connections — between composers and performer, between memory and the present — form a continuous thread through Kremer’s long association with the label.

Oct 2: ECM Releases Steve Reich Recordings on ECM - A 3-LP Box Set In Honor of Reich's 90th Birthday

In Honor of Steve Reich's 90th Birthday, ECM Releases Steve Reich: Recordings on ECM

A 3-LP Box Set Including Reich's Albums That Were Released on the Label Between 1978-1982:

Music for 18 Musicians
Octet / Music for a Large Ensemble / Violin Phase
Tehillim

Presented as Facsimile Editions Housed in a High-Quality Cardboard Box with a Booklet Containing Photos from the Archives, Manuscript Pages and Liner Notes by Paul Griffiths

Available October 2, 2026 via ECM

Available for Pre-Order Now via the ECM US Store

Compiling “some of the minimalist composer’s finest works, including the definitive recording of his undisputed masterpiece Music for 18 Musicians” (Pitchfork), Steve Reich: Recordings on ECM comprises the three Steve Reich albums that were released on the label between 1978-1982, presented as facsimile editions housed in a high-quality cardboard box with a booklet containing photos from the archives, manuscript pages and liner notes by Paul Griffiths.

Sourced from the original analogue master tapes and bearing the official AAA label, confirming their all-analogue provenance, these vinyl editions authentically re-introduced the listener to recordings that have since become staples in contemporary music. The works included on these three albums are Music for 18 Musicians, Octet, Music for a Large Ensemble, Violin Phase and Tehillim, tracing the influential early creative period of the composer and his development over the course of fifteen years. The box set arrives on the occasion of Reich’s 90th birthday in October 2026.

“About the famed ECM Recordings, much has already been written. Suffice to say that they confirm that Reich could convey the pulse and spirit of American urban life as brilliantly as Gershwin did 30 years earlier. Even the unity that arises from out of phase quasi-chaos is revelatory. Recorded 1976–1981, the works' emphasis on percussive sounds makes for anything but soothing background listening. It's all fabulous stuff. Although listening to multiple works in one sitting could possibly induce numbness – taken one at a time, they are as exhilarating as they are essential.” – Jason Victor Serinus, Stereophile Magazine

For more information on Steve Reich, please visit stevereich.com.

Now Available on ECM New Series: Samuel Beckett's Stirrings Still - Music by Trevor Bača, Narrated by Paul Griffiths, Performed by JACK Quartet

Samuel Beckett
Stirrings Still 

Text by Samuel Beckett
Music by Trevor Bača

Paul Griffiths, narrator
JACK Quartet: Christopher Otto, violin; Austin Wulliman, violin; John Pickford Richards, viola; Jay Campbell, violoncello

ECM New Series 2801
Release Date: September 4, 2026

Downloads and CDs available upon request.

Stirrings Still was Samuel Beckett’s last message in prose, completed in 1987, and first published the following year. More monologue than story, it comes from a narrator on the edge between life and what lies beyond, which might be a vast wheatfield seen in black-and-white, or might be a swirl of stumbling memories. 

Beckett cherished music, in particular the songs and string quartets of Franz Schubert. His writing is musical, in its meticulous phrasing, its use of repetition, and often its form. Stirrings Still is an example: a composition of interweavings and developments. 

The music, created for this release by composer Trevor Bača, is no accompaniment but rather a parallel stream, heard in alternation with the words, reflecting and contemplating what they have to say. Imagined for the musicianship of JACK Quartet, it is a stream into which the listener is drawn from time to time, not away from the words but more deeply into them, through another medium.

Trevor Bača was born in California in 1975 and grew up in Texas. His concerns as composer include “lost and secret texts, and the powers of musical storytelling.” Samuel Beckett’s protagonist, in the final section of Stirrings Still, hears something from deep within, a sentence with a word he cannot catch, and Bača’s writing for the string quartet conveys some of the intense yearning to grasp it.

Bača studied art, music, literature and languages at the University of Texas, composition and string techniques with Stefano Scodanibbio in Macerata, Italy, and composition with Julio Estrada in Mexico City. He holds a PhD in composition from Harvard University. His music has been played throughout the world, with recent performances in New York, Tokyo, Berlin and Barcelona. Bača's compositions have been anthologized as part of Notations 21, in which graphic and experimental manuscripts of a hundred  international composers are displayed and contrasted, and his scores have also been exhibited as art at the Chelsea Gallery in New York City and the Hutchins Gallery on Long Island. In 2019 he joined the faculty of the Department of Music at Yale University, where he lectures on 20th- and 21st-century music.

JACK Quartet was formed in 2005, its name an acronym of the initials of the founding members. Violist John Pickford Richards and violinist Christopher Otto were there from the beginning, with violinist Austin Wulliman and cellist Jay Campbell joining the quartet in 2016. They have established a reputation for their commitment to challenging contemporary repertoire and experimental chamber music – from Elliott Carter to John Zorn, from John Luther Adams to George E. Lewis – and enjoyed close working relationships with many composers.

Paul Griffiths, born in 1947 in Bridgend, Wales, is a British music critic, novelist and librettist, best known for his prolific writings on modern music. He wrote the libretto for Elliott Carter’s only opera What Next?, recorded for ECM New Series in 2000, as well as the libretti for Tan Dun’s opera Marco Polo, and Hans Abrahamsen’s opera let me tell you.  In 2003, ECM recorded his collaboration with cellist-composer-improviser Frances Marie Uitti, there is still time, subtitled "scenes for speaking voice and cello," which featured Griffiths as narrator of his own text. 

The author of more than twenty books on music as well as novels, a collection of short stories, and numerous liner notes, Paul Griffiths has received many awards and prizes for his work, including an OBE for services to music, literature and composition.

Stirrings Still was recorded in 2023 and 2024 at Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano, and produced by Manfred Eicher, who has long been fascinated by the inherent musicality of Samuel Beckett’s writing.

Oct 9: ECM New Series Releases The Tallis Scholars - Live in Venice

The Tallis Scholars
Live in Venice

Works by Monteverdi, Palestrina, Lotti, Allegri, Komitas, Pärt
Peter Phillips, conductor

ECM New Series 2732/33
Release Date: October 9, 2026
Digital and CD/Blu-ray Set

Downloads and CD/Blu-ray Set available upon request.

The Tallis Scholars, founded by their conductor Peter Phillips in 1973, belong among the world’s preeminent chamber choirs and have championed the sacred vocal music of the Renaissance like no other ensemble. Here they are captured in a remarkable concert recorded on 14 July 2017 in the glorious Basilica di San Marco in Venice. Issued as a 1-CD/1-Blu-ray set, the release offers both an intimate listening experience and the rare opportunity to witness the performance from within the basilica itself, where the acoustics of the historic space become an integral part of the music.

Renaissance polyphony permeates this programme, which was conceived around the 450th anniversary celebrations of Claudio Monteverdi’s birth in 2017. Alongside music by Monteverdi himself are compositions by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Antonio Lotti and Gregorio Allegri, among them Allegri’s celebrated Miserere and Palestrina’s Magnificat – works with which the Tallis Scholars have become closely identified over the years. Yet the programme also reaches beyond the Renaissance, placing this great tradition of sacred polyphony in dialogue with music of a very different historical and cultural origin.

In the concert’s programme note, printed in the CD-accompanying booklet, Peter Phillips speaks of “old favourites and some very new ideas”. The new ideas are represented by Arvo Pärt’s Nunc dimittis on the one hand, (The piece, composed in 2001, also appears on the label in a performance by Vox Clamantis, on the ensemble’s 2025 album And I Heard A Voice.) and on the other by the music by Komitas, whose works the Tallis Scholars performed as a gesture of solidarity with the Armenian community of Venice. Phillips and the ensemble “wish to pay tribute to the centuries-old heritage of the Armenian community in Venice”, creating a connection between the musical traditions of the city and the living cultural memory of its Armenian presence.

The composers represented here illuminate the rich and varied history of sacred vocal music. Monteverdi stands at the threshold between Renaissance polyphony and the emerging Baroque, bringing the contrapuntal inheritance of the sixteenth century into a new expressive language. Palestrina, by contrast, became the defining figure of the Roman Renaissance, his lucid polyphony long regarded as an ideal of liturgical writing. Antonio Lotti, born and active in Venice, continued the Venetian tradition into the eighteenth century and served as maestro di cappella at San Marco, making his presence in this particular setting especially resonant. Gregorio Allegri, a Roman composer and singer associated with the Sistine Chapel, is remembered above all for his Miserere, whose restrained setting of Psalm 51 became one of the most famous sacred works of the Western tradition.

Alongside these European masters stand two works by Komitas (Soghomon Soghomonian), the Armenian priest, composer and pioneering ethnomusicologist whose work preserved and transformed the musical heritage of Armenia. Like Pärt, his compositions bring a modern, deeply personal voice to a programme otherwise rooted in centuries-old Western sacred polyphony. 

The Tallis Scholars are in the midst of an international tour as this album is released, with concerts in Bogotá, Colombia (1 Oct.); Florence, Italy, at the Teatro Niccolini (25 Oct.); and Cambridge, UK, at King’s College Chapel (28 Oct.), followed by performances in South Korea and China in November.

For more information on Steve Reich, please visit stevereich.com.

Sept 4: ECM New Series Releases Samuel Beckett's Stirrings Still - Music by Trevor Bača, Narrated by Paul Griffiths, Performed by JACK Quartet

Samuel Beckett
Stirrings Still 

Text by Samuel Beckett
Music by Trevor Bača

Paul Griffiths, narrator
JACK Quartet: Christopher Otto, violin; Austin Wulliman, violin; John Pickford Richards, viola; Jay Campbell, violoncello

ECM New Series 2801
Release Date: September 4, 2026

Downloads and CDs available upon request.

Stirrings Still was Samuel Beckett’s last message in prose, completed in 1987, and first published the following year. More monologue than story, it comes from a narrator on the edge between life and what lies beyond, which might be a vast wheatfield seen in black-and-white, or might be a swirl of stumbling memories. 

Beckett cherished music, in particular the songs and string quartets of Franz Schubert. His writing is musical, in its meticulous phrasing, its use of repetition, and often its form. Stirrings Still is an example: a composition of interweavings and developments. 

The music, created for this release by composer Trevor Bača, is no accompaniment but rather a parallel stream, heard in alternation with the words, reflecting and contemplating what they have to say. Imagined for the musicianship of JACK Quartet, it is a stream into which the listener is drawn from time to time, not away from the words but more deeply into them, through another medium.

Trevor Bača was born in California in 1975 and grew up in Texas. His concerns as composer include “lost and secret texts, and the powers of musical storytelling.” Samuel Beckett’s protagonist, in the final section of Stirrings Still, hears something from deep within, a sentence with a word he cannot catch, and Bača’s writing for the string quartet conveys some of the intense yearning to grasp it.

Bača studied art, music, literature and languages at the University of Texas, composition and string techniques with Stefano Scodanibbio in Macerata, Italy, and composition with Julio Estrada in Mexico City. He holds a PhD in composition from Harvard University. His music has been played throughout the world, with recent performances in New York, Tokyo, Berlin and Barcelona. Bača's compositions have been anthologized as part of Notations 21, in which graphic and experimental manuscripts of a hundred  international composers are displayed and contrasted, and his scores have also been exhibited as art at the Chelsea Gallery in New York City and the Hutchins Gallery on Long Island. In 2019 he joined the faculty of the Department of Music at Yale University, where he lectures on 20th- and 21st-century music.

JACK Quartet was formed in 2005, its name an acronym of the initials of the founding members. Violist John Pickford Richards and violinist Christopher Otto were there from the beginning, with violinist Austin Wulliman and cellist Jay Campbell joining the quartet in 2016. They have established a reputation for their commitment to challenging contemporary repertoire and experimental chamber music – from Elliott Carter to John Zorn, from John Luther Adams to George E. Lewis – and enjoyed close working relationships with many composers.

Paul Griffiths, born in 1947 in Bridgend, Wales, is a British music critic, novelist and librettist, best known for his prolific writings on modern music. He wrote the libretto for Elliott Carter’s only opera What Next?, recorded for ECM New Series in 2000, as well as the libretti for Tan Dun’s opera Marco Polo, and Hans Abrahamsen’s opera let me tell you.  In 2003, ECM recorded his collaboration with cellist-composer-improviser Frances Marie Uitti, there is still time, subtitled "scenes for speaking voice and cello," which featured Griffiths as narrator of his own text. 

The author of more than twenty books on music as well as novels, a collection of short stories, and numerous liner notes, Paul Griffiths has received many awards and prizes for his work, including an OBE for services to music, literature and composition.

Stirrings Still was recorded in 2023 and 2024 at Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano, and produced by Manfred Eicher, who has long been fascinated by the inherent musicality of Samuel Beckett’s writing.

ECM to Release Steve Reich: Recordings on ECM - A 3-LP Box Set - In Honor of Reich's 90th Birthday

In Honor of Steve Reich's 90th Birthday, ECM Releases Steve Reich: Recordings on ECM

A 3-LP Box Set Including Reich's Albums That Were Released on the Label Between 1978-1982:

Music for 18 Musicians
Octet / Music for a Large Ensemble / Violin Phase
Tehillim

Presented as Facsimile Editions Housed in a High-Quality Cardboard Box with a Booklet Containing Photos from the Archives, Manuscript Pages and Liner Notes by Paul Griffiths

Available October 2, 2026 via ECM

Exclusive Preorder Starting on July 31, 2026 on ECM US Store

Compiling “some of the minimalist composer’s finest works, including the definitive recording of his undisputed masterpiece Music for 18 Musicians” (Pitchfork), Steve Reich: Recordings on ECM comprises the three Steve Reich albums that were released on the label between 1978-1982, presented as facsimile editions housed in a high-quality cardboard box with a booklet containing photos from the archives, manuscript pages and liner notes by Paul Griffiths.

Sourced from the original analogue master tapes and bearing the official AAA label, confirming their all-analogue provenance, these vinyl editions authentically re-introduced the listener to recordings that have since become staples in contemporary music. The works included on these three albums are Music for 18 Musicians, Octet, Music for a Large Ensemble, Violin Phase and Tehillim, tracing the influential early creative period of the composer and his development over the course of fifteen years. The box set arrives on the occasion of Reich’s 90th birthday in October 2026.

“About the famed ECM Recordings, much has already been written. Suffice to say that they confirm that Reich could convey the pulse and spirit of American urban life as brilliantly as Gershwin did 30 years earlier. Even the unity that arises from out of phase quasi-chaos is revelatory. Recorded 1976–1981, the works' emphasis on percussive sounds makes for anything but soothing background listening. It's all fabulous stuff. Although listening to multiple works in one sitting could possibly induce numbness – taken one at a time, they are as exhilarating as they are essential.” – Jason Victor Serinus, Stereophile Magazine

For more information on Steve Reich, please visit stevereich.com.

June 5: ECM New Series releases Heiner Goebbels's Walden featuring Ensemble Modern Orchestra and Peter Eötvös, conducter

Heiner Goebbels
WALDEN

Ensemble Modern Orchestra
Peter Eötvös, conducter
Rob Rutman, speaker

ECM New Series 2878
Release: June 5, 2026

Press downloads and CDs available upon request

“Walden consists of a series of musical sketches inspired by the 1854 novel of the same name by Henry David Thoreau” – thus reads the short description of this project by Heiner Goebbels himself. But those familiar with the oeuvre of the German trans-media conceptualist and composer know that with Goebbels it’s never quite that simple. In his 1998 creation Walden, composed for expanded orchestra with speaker, Goebbels incorporates a wide-flung stream of inspirations and approaches, spanning excerpts from Thoreau’s text “Walden”, soundscape-design in the spirit of audio plays, arsenals of outlandish instruments and sonic layouts as much at home in the avantgarde as they borrow from popular music, all brought to life with Peter Eötvös conducting and Bob Rutman – a main figure in this project – in the role of the narrator.

In his liner note, the composer explains how he initially envisioned this work as a “counterpoint to the urban imagery of Surrogate Cities (1994). Still, my view of Thoreau’s text is far less idyllic, and my relationship to his notion of nature more distant than the original source might suggest. Walden, for me, is a piece about the tension between withdrawal and openness—between individual self-discovery and the constant presence of the outside world. It is not a romantic vision of nature, but rather a reflection on the conditions of our existence today.”

The dichotomy of nature and civilization is subtly dissociated musically throughout nine movements, with the industrial side of things represented in sampled beats, distorted percussion and wailing horns that could perhaps reference city life at night. This work is clearly not meant to be understood as Goebbels’s literal setting of Thoreau’s text, but as an abstract engagement with it and its general topics of solitude, sounds and nature as well as with subsequently published works that likewise examined Thoreau’s text. In other words: “Walden”, but through the looking glass. 

Besides narrating excerpts of Thoreau’s writing, the German visual artist, composer and instrument builder Rutman can also be heard in a more declamatory role, exclaiming with vehemence, sometimes singing in the khoomei technique, then becoming part of the orchestra playing the steel cello and bow chimes, both instruments of his own design. Together with Frankfurt’s Ensemble Modern orchestra under Eötvös’s direction the music is fashioned in multiple layers. They pull and tug at each other in one moment, then merge in ominous unison passages, rich in dissonance and tied together by sections not completely unlike recitatives in operas.

In his extensive examination and analysis of Goebbels’s Walden (an excerpt of it is found in the booklet accompanying the album, the complete text can be found here: www.ecmrecords.com/2878), originally published in 2002, writer Frank Mehring observes how in his composition, “Goebbels points to the mediating function of literary texts, which playfully incorporate the past into new scenarios”. In that vein, his piece unfurls like a web of references, with pockets of meaning and symbolism dangling from individual strings. 

From trip-hop pastiches and mesmerizing ambient structures to imposing orchestral surges on the far-out edges of contemporary music making, Walden is a testament to the visionary ways of Heiner Goebbels, the composer, mid-career, and stands as one of the most innovative chapters of his body of work to come to light yet. The album is made up of recordings stemming from the work’s premiere performances at the Philharmonie Köln and the Alte Oper Frankfurt, in November 1998.

Jan 16: ECM New Series Releases con slancio from Heinz Holliger and Marie-Lise Schüpbach

ECM New Series Releases

con slancio

Heinz Holliger, oboe, English horn; Marie-Lise Schüpbach, English horn

Music by Heinz Holliger, Toshio Hosokawa, Jürg Wyttenbach, Jacques Wildberger, György Kurtág, Rudolf Kelterborn and Robert Suter

ECM New Series 2807
Release: January 16, 2026
Pre-Save: https://ecm.lnk.to/ConSlancio

Press downloads available upon request.

The release of con slancio, with premier recordings of music written by Swiss composer and nonpareil oboist Heinz Holliger, marks 40 years of collaboration with ECM New Series. Threaded throughout the album are strongly contrasting pieces dedicated to Holliger over the years by fellow composers. A spirit of vigor and enthusiasm animates both new pieces and tributes.

The Holliger compositions, written between 2018 and 2020, are con slancio for oboe solo, Ständchen für Rosemarie for English horn, and several duets for oboe and English horn: Spiegel – LIED, Lied mit Gegenüber (contr’air), Gangis (fang mich), and à deux – Adieu.

“Since I began playing in duo with Marie-Lise Schüpbach, I’ve been fascinated by the way our two instruments expand each other’s range and palette of tone colours,” says Heinz Holliger. “New sound paths have opened up for me.”  He adds that the newest compositions almost completely forego the use of idiosyncratic “extended techniques” of which he has been a pioneer. The freshness of the Holliger/Schüpbach duo sound has been noted in reviews of their earlier release Zwiegesprespäche (2019) where Holliger’s music was interspersed with pieces by his friend and contemporary György Kurtág. “These performances, by Heinz Holliger and Marie-Lise Schüpbach, are simply astonishing in their fluency,” declared UK magazine Gramophone.

In an interview in the CD booklet Holliger suggests that while the oboe cannot ‘vocalize’ in ways that the flute can, the sound of the instrument can – as in Bach’s arias - be a substitute for the male voice that breaks in adolescence. “In my own case, too, since I had sung as a solo soprano before my voice changed.”  In these late works, the oboe is singing more purely than ever.

Of the pieces written for Holliger here, the earliest are Jürg Wyttenbach’s Sonate (1961) and Jacques Wildberger’s Rondeau (1962), and the most recent are György Kurtág’s aphoristic con slancio, largamente and Toshio Hosokawa’s evocative Musubi (Knots), both written to celebrate Holliger’s 80th birthday in 2019.

Hosokawa says that the title of his piece, “was inspired by the Yin and Yang principle, the central concept of the creation of the universe in the East. Polar opposite elements such as man and woman, high and low, light and shadow coexist and complement each other, becoming intertwined without eradicating each other, whilst gradually shaping the harmony of the universe. In this music, the oboe and the English horn, both of which have a distinctive characteristic tone, become entwined and gradually knotted together through arabesque-like appoggiaturas.”

Rudolf Kelterborn’s Duett für Oboe and Englishhorn (2017) was one of the last pieces written by the Basel-born composer, who died in 2021. Holliger: “What impressed about Kelterborn is how much more daring he became in old age.” The piece poses some challenges: “At the opening, the English horn intones a deeply pathos-laden recitative, while the oboe responds with a plaintive lament in its most extreme register.”

The album closes with Robert Suter’s Oh Boe (1999) which calls for Sprechstimme as well as oboe,

juxtaposing vocal and instrumental utterances. “The text is really sharply phrased. It captures me quite well. The oboe attempts to declaim the same words…” 

*

Heinz Holliger was born in Langenthal, Switzerland, in 1939. He pursued studies in composition with Sándor Veress and Pierre Boulez, and in parallel developed the gifts which would see him recognized as one of the world’s most outstanding oboists. Many composers have written works for him, including Frank Martin, Olivier Messiaen, Witold Lutoslawski, Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Elliott Carter, Hans Werner Henze, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Isang Yun. Holliger has also played a key role in the rediscovery of the music of neglected 18th-century masters such as Jan Zelenka.

Recordings with Heinz Holliger’s music on ECM include Scarnadelli-Zyklus (released 1993), Beiseit/Alb-Chehr (1995), Lieder ohne Worte (1997), Schneewittchen (2001), Violinkonzert ‘Hommage à Louis Soutter’ (2009), Romancendres (2009),  Robert Schumann/Heinz Holliger (2011),  Induuchlen  (2011),  Beethoven/Bruckner/Hartmann/Holliger (2013), Aschenmusik (2014), Machaut-Transkiptionen (2015),  Zwiegespräche (2019), and Lunea (2022).

Albums with Holliger as performer include Jan Dismas Zelenka: Trio Sonatas (1999),  Elliott Carter/Isang Yun: Lauds and Lamentations (2003),   Jörg Widmann: Elegie (2011, with Holliger in debut as pianist on Fünf Bruchstücke), Johann Sebastian Bach: Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis – Konzerte und Sinfonien für Oboe (2011), and an album of French music, Éventail, with compositions by Messiaen, Ravel, Debussy, Saint-Saëns, Milhaud and more (2023).  Holliger also conducts Camerata Bern in music of Sandor Veress (1995),  and the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln in music of Bernd Alois Zimmermann on Canto di speranza (2008). 

Heinz Holliger has received many awards and prizes, including the Ernst von Siemens Music Award and the Robert Schumann-Preis für Dichtung und Musik for his lifetime achievement in 2022.

*

Marie-Lise Schüpbach was born in Zurich. She studied oboe with Heinz Holliger in Freiburg im Breisgau, where she graduated with honor. Her orchestral career began at the Cologne Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester. From 1979 to 2017, she held the position of solo English horn at the BR symphony orchestra in Munich. Schüpbach was a member of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra for many years. In 2008, together with colleagues of the BR-Symphony Orchestra, she founded the chamber music festival erstKlassik am Sarnersee.

The CD booklet for con slancio includes an extensive interview with Heinz Holliger by Michael Kunkel, in German and English.

ECM New Series: 2025 Year-End Review

ECM New Series: 2025 Year-End Review

Alexander Knaifel – Chapter Eight | March 14, 2025 (ECM New Series)
Listen on Apple Music or Spotify

Best New Albums Out March 14, 2025 – All Songs Considered, NPR Music

“[Alexander Knaifel] called the work 'a community prayer,' to be realized 'in the most reverberant church acoustics.' This recording from 2009, made in the Jesuitenkirche in Luzern, Switzerland, certainly fills the bill, and credit goes to the ECM label's engineers, in a difficult live situation, for giving the music the desired sense of growing out of the walls.” – James Manheim, All Music

Chapter Eight: Canticum Canticorum is among the most remarkable compositions of composer Alexander Knaifel. A slowly moving piece that acquires a cumulative power with enveloping and radiant atmosphere, it proposes what Knaifel referred to as a “non-concerto situation.” As the work progresses, the cellist is called upon to renounce the soloist’s role of leadership and to surrender to the total sound at the nexus of the choirs, arranged in cross formation inside the church. Here the cellist is Patrick Demenga who, together with his brother Thomas, made the first of ECM’s recordings of Knaifel’s music in 1998 with Lux Aeterna. The premiere performance of Chapter Eight took place in Washington’s National Cathedral in 1995, with Mstislav Rostropovich in the cellist’s role.

Erkki-Sven Tüür, Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, Olari Elts – ÆRIS | May 23, 2025 (ECM New Series)
Listen on Apple Music or Spotify

“highly expressive and colourful music.” – James McCarthy, Gramophone

“Certainly this is challenging music, and just as certainly, it is beautifully recorded by ECM at the Estonian Concert Hall in Tallinn.” – James Manheim, All Music

Best New Albums Out May 23, 2025 – All Songs Considered, NPR Music

Aeris is the ninth ECM New Series album to feature the vibrant and highly expressive music of Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür. Olari Elts, a long-time champion of Tüür’s work, conducts the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra in compelling, intensely-focused performances of Phantasma, De Profundis and Tüür’s tenth symphony “ÆRIS”, which is scored for horn quartet and orchestra.

In Latin, Tüür notes, “æris” means brass while “aeris” means air, “and without this essential element, not a sound would come out of brass instruments. Thus, the title of my tenth symphony focuses mainly on the brass sound that carries the weight of this composition.” Written at the urging of the ensemble German Hornsound in 2022, the symphony is a vast drama of shifting energies and interactions, with the horns effectively “messengers from beyond the horizon, bringing prophecies of imminent irreversible changes.”

Arvo Pärt – Tractus (Limited Edition Heavyweight 2-LP) | May 30, 2025 (ECM New Series)
Listen on Apple Music or Spotify

“An original and intriguing collection of works, this, with beautiful recorded sound, as always, and outstanding performances of passion and precision guided by the presiding genius of Tõnu Kaljuste.” – Ivan Moody, Gramophone

“Tractus, seems to put an arm around you and whisper, 'In troubled times, music can help.'” – Tom Huizenga, NPR Music

Tractus emphasizes Arvo Pärt compositions that blend the timbres of string orchestra and choir. New versions predominate, with focused performances from the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under Tõnu Kaljuste’s direction that invite alert and concentrated listening. From the opening composition Littlemore Tractus, which takes as its starting point consoling reflections from a sermon by John Henry Newman, the idea of change, transfiguration and renewal resonates, setting a tone for a recording whose character is one of summing up, looking inward, and reconciling with the past. Compositions included are Littlemore Tractus, Greater Antiphons, Cantique des degrés, Sequentia, L’abbé Agathon, These Words… and Veni creator. An evocative reworking of Vater unser for choir, strings and piano concludes this album.

The compositions included on Tractus are based upon or inspired by scriptural, liturgical or other Christian texts. “The text is independent of us,” Pärt once said. “It awaits us. Everyone needs his own time to come to it. The encounter occurs when the text is no longer treated as literature or artwork but as reference point or model.”

Signum Quartett – A Dark Flaring | July 18, 2025 (ECM New Series)
Listen on Apple Music or Spotify

"genuinely new experiences for many hearers" – James Manheim, All Music

“On the evidence of this beautifully played and presented programme, string quartet composition is alive and well in Southern Africa.” – Guy Rickards, Gramophone

“The six pieces included on this enthralling album reflect as many different ways of reconciling that most Western European art form – the string quartet – with the heritage of South African culture and history.” – Carlos Maria Solare, The Strad

“I strongly urge you to seek out this release if you are interested in the string quartet and/or the meeting of cultural traditions. It’s been a profoundly refreshing and educative experience.” – Dominic Hartley, Musicweb International

A Dark Flaring marks the Signum Quartett’s return to ECM’s New Series after debuting for the label with striking performances on Erkki-Sven Tüür’s acclaimed chamber music recording Lost Prayers (2020). Here, the quartet has put together a unique programme dedicated to South African composers, born in the 20th century, whose works for string quartet are united by the way they blend respect for the past with an instinct for the future in a wide-flung idiomatic scope. The grid of references unravelled between the six composers here – their dates of birth span from 1903 to 1983 – is as geographically wide as it is idiomatically deep, with large musical bridges connecting inspirations ranging from South African Xhosa and Zulu traditions through the late Renaissance to 19th century Romanticism as well as 20th century impressionists and minimalists. There’s even a nod to popular culture, as Matthijs van Dijk’s (rage) rage against the borrows inspiration for its title from the rock group Rage Against The Machine.

The complicated historical and in the same breath cultural backdrop that goes hand in hand with musical repertory composed over this specific period, in the South African context, is not only impossible to ignore but moreover serves as catalyst, canvas and disrupter – sometimes all at once – for most of the music presented here. The album was recorded at Sendesaal Bremen in March 2022. The CD includes liner notes by South African journalist and music critic Shirley Apthorp.

Rolf Lislevand – Libro primo | August 29, 2025 (ECM New Series)
Listen on Apple Music or Spotify

“Full of rich expressivity and gleaming virtuosity, Libro Primo from Rolf Lislevand is a beautiful listen. It’s also a valuable contribution to our understanding of music from a period that classical music presenters often overlook.” – Jon Sobel, Blogcritics

On his newest recording for ECM’s New Series, lute virtuoso Rolf Lislevand turns to the revolutionary Baroque literature for archlute and chitarrone, interpreting the works of some of the most significant 16th-17th century lute composers. In striking solo performances, the Norwegian lute player explores the progressive nature of pieces by Johann Hieronymous Kapsberger, Giovanni Paolo Foscarini, Bernardo Gianoncelli and Diego Ortiz. Lislevand takes historically informed liberties in his interpretations throughout the programme, 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”. Delving deeper into the musical fabric of the time, he also decided on a different tuning for the archlute than is commonly used today, “giving the music an adventurous timbre, more in line with the nuove musiche.”

The modernity of this music’s melodic and rhythmic sensibility throughout can be surprising, not only substantiating Lislevand’s deeper dive into this repertoire, but also revealing a broad idiomatic reach that can still sound highly contemporary today.

Arvo Pärt, Vox Clamantis; Jaan-Eik Tulve, Conductor – And I heard a voice | September 5, 2025 (ECM New Series)
Listen on Apple Music or Spotify

“The music helps create this supernatural portal between this world and the next and how Arvo Pärt depicts it, is with the utmost wonder and reverence.” Tom Huizenga, – All Songs Considered, NPR Music

“Some of the most outstanding performances I have attended in my life have featured vocal music by Estonian composers performed by Estonian choirs in the acoustic marvel that is Estonian churches – and Vox Clamantis’ new album of works by Arvo Pärt recorded in Haapsalu Cathedral is equally magnificent.” – Amanda Cook, I Care If You Listen

“This superb collection of music for choir composed by Pärt concludes with ‘And I heard a voice’, notable as the only composition by the Estonian composer in which he has set sacred text in his native language, using a translation into Estonian of the Book of Revelation. To the text Pärt has written music that perfectly blends the past with the present, and to which Vox Clamantis bring a gravitas that acknowledges both the compositions and the composer.” – Nick Lea, Jazz Views

And I heard a voice, recorded in Haapsalu Cathedral, Estonia, and released as Arvo Pärt turns 90, shows that the rapport between the choir, Vox Clamantis – conducted by Jaan-Eik Tulve – and composer, rooted in a shared feeling for both ancient plainchant and contemporary music, continues to deepen.

The new album, focusing primarily on recent compositions by Pärt, also reaches back to embrace the Sieben Magnificat-Antiphonen, written in 1988, and based upon the scriptural verses intoned in the Roman Catholic liturgy during evening prayers in the week before Christmas. In the liner notes, Kristina Kõrver indicates how Pärt allows the character of each text to influence his settings of it. Thus, reference to the Laws of Moses in O Adonai are expressed in a “more archaic sound and ascetic expression”, while Jesse (O Sproß aus Isais Wurzel) incorporates dissonance “like a little flower pushing its way through the pavement”, as Pärt once said.e created a fascinating interplay between the pristine European piano tradition and the American poetry of the Beat Generation.

Dobrinka Tabakova – Sun Triptych | September 26, 2025 (ECM New Series)
Listen on Apple Music or Spotify

The Best New Albums Out September 26, 2025 – All Songs Considered, NPR Music

“superb new album” – Craig Byrd, Cultural Attaché

“Her harmonic shifts quite simply melt into each other and leave an imprint on the soul.” – Jean-Yves Duperron, Classical Music Sentinel

Dobrinka Tabakova’s ECM New Series debut, String Paths, made an immediate impact on its release in 2013. Sun Triptych, produced by Manfred Eicher, brings back some of the String Paths ensemble, including close associates violist Maxim Rysanov, violinist Roman Mints, and cellist Kristine Blaumane. Friends and colleagues since conservatory days at the Guildhall School, all now leading soloists in their own right, they have grown up with the expressive language and colors of Tabakova’s music and are among its ideal interpreters.

Dobrinka Tabakova was born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, in 1980 and moved with her family to the UK in 1991; she has lived in London since then. She studied piano and composition at the Royal Academy of Music Junior Department and at the age of 14 won the Jean-Frédéric Perrenoud composition prize at the Vienna International Music Competition. Tabakova graduated from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and King’s College London, and also participated in master classes with composers including Iannis Xenakis, John Adams and Louis Andriessen.

Zehetmair Quartett – Johannes Brahms: String Quartets, Op. 51 | October 17, 2025 (ECM New Series)
Listen on Apple Music or Spotify

“wonderful new recording...outstanding performances.” – Craig Byrd, Cultural Attaché

“[T]he Zehetmair Quartett offer an impassioned and intrepid take on the material, from the throbbing high line of the violins and curved arch of the cello which characterise the opening phrases of the very first movement to the spare romance.” – Christopher Laws, Culturedarm

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 newest entry into their New Series catalogue, the ensemble 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. Recorded with the Zehetmair Quartett’s characteristic intensity and richly expressive depth, the performances capture fresh and deeply felt readings of these cornerstone chamber works.

Meredith Monk – Cellular Songs | October 10, 2025 (ECM New Series)
Listen on Apple Music or Spotify

“[Cellular Songs] is non-narrative stuff — sung in no language, just the experimental vocalise that [Meredith] Monk has perfected over decades. Yet in partnership with her regular percussionist and vocalists (one of whom doubles on violin and piano), Monk shows she’s still capable of fashioning sonic surprise and resolution.” – Seth Colter Walls, The New York Times

“While each of these Cellular Songs carry their own patterns of internal logic, the album conceived as a whole tends to prove resolutely defiant, as Monk is joined variously by Ellen Fisher, Katie Geissinger, Joanna Lynn-Jacobs and Allison Sniffin, each utilising their voice and playing body percussion while Sniffin also adds strains on the violin and piano and John Hollenbeck accentuates their patter through a deft blend of vibraphone, percussion and crotales.” – Christopher Laws, Culturedarm

“Meredith Monk’s music still has the ability to surprise, and with Cellular Songs the composer is still looking to push the boundaries and explore the possibilities available with the human voice.” – Nick Lea, Jazz Views

Cellular Songs is the first Meredith Monk release with ECM since the extensive box-set Meredith Monk: The Recordings in 2022 and the first recording of new music since 2016’s On Behalf of Nature. It is also the second part of an interdisciplinary trilogy of performance works by Meredith Monk that began with On Behalf of Nature, a meditation on the precarious state of our global ecology.

Cellular Songs turns attention to the very fabric of life itself, and evokes such biological processes as layering, replication, division and mutation. Monk drew inspiration, she has noted, from reading The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by physician and Pulitzer Prizewinning author Siddhartha Mukherjee, struck by the notion that “a cell is like a miraculous prototype of cooperation, offering an alternative culture or template of human behavior to one of competition and destruction.”

Wu Wei, Martin Stegner, Janne Saksala – Pur ti miro | November 21, 2025 (ECM New Series)
Listen on Apple Music

On ECM New Series release, Pur ti miro, sheng player Wu Wei, violist Martin Stegner, and bassist Janne Saksala play Claude Monteverdi’s Si dolce è’l tormento and Pur ti miro from L’incoronazione di Poppea, J. S. Bach’s organ trio sonatas Nos 1 and 4, and Antonio Vivaldi’s D minor Trio Sonata, in a program completed by “Buremarsj frå Beiarn”, a bridal march from Norwegian folk tradition. “Over time our programme kept growing, even though it’s a challenge to arrange works for this unusual combination of sounds,” says Stenger. “We don’t aim to interpret early music in a strictly historically correct way. All of us come from different musical and cultural backgrounds and it is precisely this diversity that consciously flows into our interpretations.”

Dec 4: Meredith Monk's Cellular Songs Album Listening Party at National Sawdust - Out Now on ECM New Series

Meredith Monk: Cellular Songs

Album Listening Party at National Sawdust
Thursday, December 4, 2025 at 7:30pm
80 North 6th Street | Brooklyn, NY
Tickets & Information 

Out Now on ECM New Series
Listen: https://ecm.lnk.to/CellularSongs

Read The New York Times Review

Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble 

Meredith Monk, Ellen Fisher, Katie Geissinger, Joanna Lynn-Jacobs, Allison Sniffin, voices; John Hollenbeck, vibraphone, percussion, crotales; Allison Sniffin, piano, violin 

ECM New Series 2751

“As artists, we're all contending with what to do at a time like this. I wanted to make a piece that can be experienced as an alternative possibility of human behavior, where the values are cooperation, interdependence, and kindness, as an antidote to the values that are being propagated right now." – Meredith Monk

Cellular Songs is the first Meredith Monk release with ECM since the extensive box-set Meredith Monk: The Recordings in 2022 and the first recording of new music since 2016’s On Behalf of Nature. It is also the second part of an interdisciplinary trilogy of performance works by Meredith Monk that began with On Behalf of Nature, a meditation on the precarious state of our global ecology. Cellular Songs turns attention to the very fabric of life itself, and evokes such biological processes as layering, replication, division and mutation. Monk drew inspiration, she has noted, from reading The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by physician and Pulitzer Prizewinning author Siddhartha Mukherjee, struck by the notion that “a cell is like a miraculous prototype of cooperation, offering an alternative culture or template of human behavior to one of competition and destruction.”

On Thursday, December 4, 2025 at 7:30pm, National Sawdust in Brooklyn, NY will host an album listening party, celebrating this new release. Listeners are invited to sit back and immerse themselves in the world of Cellular Songs, alongside Monk and fellow contributors to the album, in National Sawdust's state-of-the-art sonic environment. CDs will also be available for purchase.

Cellular Songs features the women of the acclaimed Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble (Monk, Ellen Fisher, Katie Geissinger, Joanna Lynn-Jacobs and Allison Sniffin), and some of Monk’s most adventurous and daring writing for voice. The work, at once playful and contemplative, conjures cycles of birth and death throughout. “Some of the pieces have much more dissonance and chromatic harmonies, and the forms are almost like three-dimensional sculptures,” Monk notes. “Earlier, my music had much more to do with layering. Now you can almost see or hear the piece rotating as if it were a sculpture in space, though it's a musical form."

With voices and body percussion among the primary resources, Monk underlines her aim to “boil down what I am doing to its essence”. Songs are wordless, with the exception of “Happy Woman”, which also incorporates piano, violin and vibraphone by Allison Sniffin and John Hollenbeck.

Cellular Songs was premiered at the BAM Harvey Theater, Brooklyn, New York in March 2018. The Financial Times hailed the work as a “deeply affecting meditation on the nature of the biological cell as a metaphor for human society” and “an antidote to the troubled times we live in.”

In the album’s liner notes, writer Bonnie Marranca takes up this theme: “Art takes many forms to address global crises as a way of comprehending reality. Monk’s work has chosen a path different than the response that is a direct statement of conditions, following instead her Buddhist grounding in art as spiritual practice (…) Her work honors the human need for the feelings of love and joy and beauty. In the integrity of its regard, Cellular Songs is of this world but also beyond this world, like all poetic works of the imagination.”

Meredith Monk has been an ECM recording artist since 1981. In 2022, Meredith Monk: The Recordings, a box set of her New Series albums from Dolmen Music to On Behalf of Nature was issued in celebration of her 80th birthday, in an edition incorporating texts, photos, scores and more. In 2023 the full scope of Monk’s interdisciplinary work was the subject of major exhibitions at Munich’s Haus der Kunst and Oude Kerk Amsterdam. 

Cellular Songs was recorded at New York’s Power Station in 2022 and 2024. 

In 2024-2025 Meredith Monk celebrated her 60th Performance Season with a host of events centered in New York City, including the North American premiere of Indra’s Net, the third part of the trilogy of works exploring our relationship with the natural world. This fall she will receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Music at the Venice Biennale.

CD booklet includes performance photography by notes by Julieta Cervantes and liner notes by Bonnie Marranca, whose previous publications include the book Conversations with Meredith Monk (New York 2014, revised 2020).

Further information: www.meredithmonk.org

Nov 21: ECM New Series Releases Pur ti miro - Wu Wei, Martin Stegner, Janne Saksala

ECM New Series Releases Pur ti miro

Wu Wei, Martin Stegner, Janne Saksala

Wu Wei, sheng; Martin Stegner, viola; Janne Saksala, double bass 

ECM New Series 2843
Release Date: November 21, 2025
Pre-Order/Pre-Save: https://ecm.lnk.to/PurTiMiro

Downloads and CDs available upon request.

“An entirely new world of sound opened up for me. I had never heard early music like that before: so rich in colour, so immediately moving,” says violist Martin Stegner of his first experience playing Monteverdi with Wu Wei, master of the sheng. The range of colours that Wei can coax from his instrument is remarkable, as is the sonic blending of sheng, viola and double bass in this Chinese-German-Finnish trio. Bassist Janne Saksala, who like Stegner, is also a member of the Berlin Philharmonic, shares the violist’s sense of improvisational curiosity.  Here the trio plays Claude Monteverdi’s Si dolce è’l tormento and Pur ti miro from L’incoronazione di Poppea, J. S. Bach’s organ trio sonatas Nos 1 and 4, and Antonio Vivaldi’s D minor Trio Sonata, in a programme completed by “Buremarsj frå Beiarn”, a bridal march from Norwegian folk tradition. “Over time our programme kept growing, even though it’s a challenge to arrange works for this unusual combination of sounds. We don’t aim to interpret early music in a strictly historically correct way. All of us come from different musical and cultural backgrounds and it is precisely this diversity that consciously flows into our interpretations.” The players “explore the freedom the music offers. With respect, but also with a desire for discovery”.

The sheng, whose history goes back three thousand years, is a free reed polyphonic instrument, with vertical bamboo pipes cased in a metal bowl. Its sound has been likened to the singing phoenix of Chinese legend, “silvery and fleeting as the wind.” Wu Wei plays a custom developed sheng with a key mechanism that gives him full access also to the Western tonal system. 

Born in Gaoyou in China’s Jiangsu province, Wu Wei studied the sheng at the Shanghai Conservatory and came to Germany on a DAAD scholarship in 1995, and has been based in Berlin since then, establishing a reputation as a soloist not limited by idiomatic constraints, playing in contexts from Chinese traditional repertoire to European baroque and classical music, contemporary composition, jazz, electronic music and free improvisation. A number of composers have written music for him, among them Unsuk Chin, Jukka Tiensuu and Guus Jansen, and he has worked with new music groups including Ensemble Modern and the Ensemble Intercontemporain, jazz groups including the NDR Big Band, and orchestras such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Seoul Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony. Wu Wei was last heard on ECM in 2021 as a member of the multicultural collective led by singer Cymin Samawatie and drummer Ketan Bhatti, the Trickster Orchestra. 

Martin Stegner studied violin at the Mannheim University of Music, before switching to viola, with a stipendium from the Karajan Academy. His first professional engagement was as principal viola with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. In 1996 he joined the Berlin Philharmonic. As soloist and chamber musician his repertoire extends from Bach to Piazzolla and beyond. In parallel with classical activities he has long been a committed improviser, and in 2008 co-founded the Berlin Philharmonic Jazz Group. In 2014 he made his first appearance on ECM, playing on the album Phoenix by the Berlin based band Cyminology, with whom he has also toured.  Like Wu Wei he also appears on the debut album of the Trickster Orchestra. Other affiliations have included work with Markus Stockhausen.

Janne Saksala is first principal bass of the Berlin Philharmonic, a position he has held since 2008.  He began studying the instrument in his hometown of Helsinki at the age of 14, and continued at Berlin’s Hochschule der Künste from 1986. In 1991 he was a prizewinner at the ARD International Music Competition in Munich. A busy career as chamber musician and soloist has brought him together with artists such as Tabea Zimmermann, Isabelle Faust, Leonidas Kavakos, Leif Ove Andsnes, Pekka Kuusisto and Guy Braunstein. Passionate also about teaching the bass to the next generation of players, Saksala has been a mentor for many musicians.  In 2023 he took up a position as double bass professor at Berlin’s Universität der Künste and is a guest lecturer at numerous universities around the world.

Pur ti Miro was recorded at Teldex Studios, Berlin, in October 2022. CD booklet includes liner notes by Martin Stegner in German and English.

Oct 10: ECM New Series Releases Meredith Monk's Cellular Songs - First Single Out Today

ECM New Series Releases

Meredith Monk: Cellular Songs

First Single Lullaby for Lise Out Now
Listen: https://ecm.lnk.to/CellularSongs

Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble

Meredith Monk, Ellen Fisher, Katie Geissinger, Joanna Lynn-Jacobs, Allison Sniffin, voices; John Hollenbeck, vibraphone, percussion, crotales; Allison Sniffin, piano, violin 

ECM New Series 2751
Release Date: October 10, 2025

Press downloads available upon request.

“As artists, we're all contending with what to do at a time like this. I wanted to make a piece that can be experienced as an alternative possibility of human behavior, where the values are cooperation, interdependence, and kindness, as an antidote to the values that are being propagated right now." – Meredith Monk

Cellular Songs is the first Meredith Monk release with ECM since the extensive box-set Meredith Monk: The Recordings in 2022 and the first recording of new music since 2016’s On Behalf of Nature. It is also the second part of an interdisciplinary trilogy of performance works by Meredith Monk that began with On Behalf of Nature, a meditation on the precarious state of our global ecology. Cellular Songs turns attention to the very fabric of life itself, and evokes such biological processes as layering, replication, division and mutation. Monk drew inspiration, she has noted, from reading The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by physician and Pulitzer Prizewinning author Siddhartha Mukherjee, struck by the notion that “a cell is like a miraculous prototype of cooperation, offering an alternative culture or template of human behavior to one of competition and destruction.”

Cellular Songs features the women of the acclaimed Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble (Monk, Ellen Fisher, Katie Geissinger, Joanna Lynn-Jacobs and Allison Sniffin), and some of Monk’s most adventurous and daring writing for voice. The work, at once playful and contemplative, conjures cycles of birth and death throughout. “Some of the pieces have much more dissonance and chromatic harmonies, and the forms are almost like three-dimensional sculptures,” Monk notes. “Earlier, my music had much more to do with layering. Now you can almost see or hear the piece rotating as if it were a sculpture in space, though it's a musical form."

With voices and body percussion among the primary resources, Monk underlines her aim to “boil down what I am doing to its essence”. Songs are wordless, with the exception of “Happy Woman”, which also incorporates piano, violin and vibraphone by Allison Sniffin and John Hollenbeck.

Cellular Songs was premiered at the BAM Harvey Theater, Brooklyn, New York in March 2018. The Financial Times hailed the work as a “deeply affecting meditation on the nature of the biological cell as a metaphor for human society” and “an antidote to the troubled times we live in.”

In the album’s liner notes, writer Bonnie Marranca takes up this theme: “Art takes many forms to address global crises as a way of comprehending reality. Monk’s work has chosen a path different than the response that is a direct statement of conditions, following instead her Buddhist grounding in art as spiritual practice (…) Her work honors the human need for the feelings of love and joy and beauty. In the integrity of its regard, Cellular Songs is of this world but also beyond this world, like all poetic works of the imagination.”

Meredith Monk has been an ECM recording artist since 1981. In 2022, Meredith Monk: The Recordings, a box set of her New Series albums from Dolmen Music to On Behalf of Nature was issued in celebration of her 80th birthday, in an edition incorporating texts, photos, scores and more. In 2023 the full scope of Monk’s interdisciplinary work was the subject of major exhibitions at Munich’s Haus der Kunst and Oude Kerk Amsterdam.

Cellular Songs was recorded at New York’s Power Station in 2022 and 2024.

In 2024-2025 Meredith Monk celebrated her 60th Performance Season with a host of events centered in New York City, including the North American premiere of Indra’s Net, the third part of the trilogy of works exploring our relationship with the natural world. This fall she will receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Music at the Venice Biennale.

CD booklet includes performance photography by notes by Julieta Cervantes and liner notes by Bonnie Marranca, whose previous publications include the book Conversations with Meredith Monk (New York 2014, revised 2020).

Further information: www.meredithmonk.org

Oct 17: ECM New Series Releases Zehetmair Quartett's Recording of Johannes Brahms' String Quartets, Op. 51

ECM New Series Releases

Zehetmair Quartett
Johannes Brahms: String Quartets, Op. 51

Thomas Zehetmair, violin; Jakub Jakowicz, violin; Ruth Killius, viola; Christian Elliott, violoncello

ECM New Series 2765
Release Date: October 17, 2025

Press downloads available upon request.

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 newest entry into their New Series catalogue, the ensemble 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. Recorded with the Zehetmair Quartett’s characteristic intensity and richly expressive depth, the performances capture fresh and deeply felt readings of these cornerstone chamber works.

On paper, the two quartets appear to be the very first ones Johannes Brahms ever wrote. In reality however, the composer had actually come up with roughly 20 quartets prior to these two, or so he confided to a close friend. Brahms ended up torching all initial drafts, making Op. 51 his first two of a total three published quartets – all works, which challenge the previously established compositional practices in the genre. In his liner essay, Wolfgang Stähr observes their progressive quality closely, noting how especially in the first of the two – the C minor quartet – „Brahms blurs the boundaries between movements by continually developing already familiar material… He does not think in terms of traditional, defined themes; rather, he reveals musical aspects such as the dotted rhythm, which takes on a life of its own and asserts itself prominently throughout the entire quartet, driving melodies upward, plunging them into the abyss, or holding them captive in endless repetitions.”

The Zehetmair Quartett has consistently explored both the core Romantic repertoire and more contemporary composers throughout its New Series tenure; in the present context though, their 2003 performance of Schumann’s first and third quartets (ECM 1793) offers a striking analogue (celebrated by the Financial Times as a “reference recording”). Here once again Thomas Zehetmair and Ruth Killius, in this incarnation of the quartet joined by violinist Jakub Jakowicz and violoncellist Christian Elliott, prove a rare mastery of two cornerstone 19th century works.

In reference to Beethoven, Brahms famously said: "You can't have any idea what it's like always to hear such a giant marching behind you!" In casting both his first string quartet and symphony in C minor, the key so indelibly marked by Beethoven’s most towering creations, Brahms may have sought both to honour the master and to wrest himself free from his shadow. With their powerful approach, full of sparkling dynamics, the Zehetmair Quartett here reveals the full potential of how profoundly Brahms succeeded at both.

Regrettably, it is the last of the quartet’s recordings to feature cellist Christian Elliott (1984-2025). “It was a joy to work with him on the ever-changing character of the voices, to sense the meaning of every phrase and bring it to life. The void he leaves behind is painful – Christian, we miss you.”

Recorded at Konzerthaus Blaibach in 2021, the album was produced by Manfred Eicher. The booklet includes a liner essay by Wolfgang Stähr in German and English.

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Founded in 1994 by the Austrian conductor and violinist Thomas Zehetmair, the Zehetmair Quartett counts among the most esteemed string quartets worldwide. Highly regarded for its thoughtful, distinctive interpretations, the quartet perform with great expressive intensity. Alongside the standard repertoire, the foursome is equally compelling in its profound understanding of contemporary music.

First introduced to ECM’s New Series through the Lockenhaus Edition in 1985, the quartet has since gone from strength to strength: Its New Series recordings of Bartók’s Fourth and Hartmann’s First String Quartet, as well as Schumann’s First and Third, have received prestigious awards including the Diapason d’Or de l’Année, the Gramophone Award (Record of the Year), the Edison Award, and the Klara Award for Best International Production of the Year.

The quartet’s recording of Hindemith’s String Quartet No. 4 and Bartók’s No. 5 again won the Diapason d’Or de l’Année, while The Guardian said “in the Hindemith the Zehetmair Quartet really have set a new benchmark.” In November 2014, the quartet was honoured with the Paul Hindemith Prize of the City of Hanau in recognition of its outstanding musical achievements and contributions to the composer’s legacy. In 2013, a recording with works by Beethoven, Bruckner, Hartmann, and Holliger followed (“an amazing variety of sonorities” – BBC Music Magazine).

Sept 26: ECM New Series Releases Dobrinka Tabakova's Sun Triptych

ECM New Series Releases

Dobrinka Tabakova
Sun Triptych

Whispered Lullaby; Suite in Jazz Style; Fantasy Homage to Schubert; Organum Light; Spinning a Yarn; Sun Triptych

Maxim Rysanov, viola; Dasol Kim, piano; Roman Mints, violin, hurdy-gurdy; Kristina Blaumane, violoncello; BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Dobrinka Tabakova

Release Date: September 26, 2025
ECM New Series 2670

Downloads and CDs available upon request.

Dobrinka Tabakova’s ECM New Series debut, String Paths, made an immediate impact on its release in 2013. The Washington Times hailed it as an “exciting, deeply moving, original and triumphant” recording, while The Strad praised its “glowing tonal harmonies and grand, sweeping gestures.” Music from String Paths was incorporated in Jean-Luc Godard’s films Adieu au langage (Goodbye to Language) and Le livre d’image (The Image Book), and the album received a Grammy nomination.

The British-Bulgarian composer’s new album, again produced by Manfred Eicher, brings back some of the String Paths cast, including close associates violist Maxim Rysanov, violinist Roman Mints and cellist Kristine Blaumane.  Friends and colleagues since conservatory days at the Guildhall School, all now leading soloists in their own right, they have grown up with the expressive language and colours of Tabakova’s music and are among its ideal interpreters.

In addition, the BBC Concert Orchestra, with whom she held the position of Composer-in- Residence from 2017 to 2022, presents her works Sun Triptych and Fantasy Homage to Schubert. In the album’s musical constellation, these works have a central role, with the more chamber-like pieces – including Whispered Lullaby, the Suite in Jazz Style and Spinning a Yarn – surrounding or connecting them, “growing out of this nebulous, still world, and melting back into it,” as Tabakova says.

Two pieces for viola and piano open the album: Whispered Lullaby is a gentle, yearning song, originally composed for a children’s opera, Midsummer Magic. The Suite in Jazz Style, an imaginative chamber meditation on jazz gestures, atmospheres and textures, is a successor to the Suite in Old Style on String Paths, also written for the wide ranging skills of violist Maxim Rysakov.

Spinning a Yarn, a piece with a touching, archaic folk-like quality, features Roman Mints on both violin and hurdy-gurdy, “a beautiful, interesting - and capricious! - instrument. To have that link to a folkloric past is also very important to me.” As the Washington Times remarked: “Tabakova may be using the musical materials of tradition, but through them she has broken new paths.”

The Fantasy Homage to Schubert recontextualizes Schubert’s Fantasy in C Major, originally for violin and piano, resetting its opening melody “in a completely transfigured environment,” and directing it heavenward. Conjuring images of slowly turning planets, Tabakova paints a picture of “floating in space, free of gravity – comets and celestial bodies passing by. And, as the Schubert melody is heard for the first time, we catch a first glimpse of Planet Earth.”

The radiant Sun Triptych evokes the changing play of light on the natural world over the course of the day. Dobrinka Tabakova: “The solace I find in nature permeates this work. The first movement builds up gently, ascending lines in the solos, increasingly denser and richer chords in the strings...The sustained textures of the first movement become hazy tremolos in the second movement, ‘Day’, as the shimmering of the strings suggest the buzzing of insects and the heat haze when the sun is at its strongest. In the final movement, a retrograde of some of the gestures in the first movement is applied to bring the close of the journey with ‘Dusk.’”

Organum Light was written in response to a commission from vocal group Opus Anglicanum; since the piece drew inspiration from the polyphonic viol consort works of Gibbons and Purcell, transferring the music to a string ensemble was, Tabakova notes, a very natural step.

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Dobrinka Tabakova was born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, in 1980 and moved with her family to the UK in 1991; she has lived in London since then.  She studied piano and composition at the Royal Academy of Music Junior Department and at the age of 14 won the Jean-Frédéric Perrenoud composition prize at the Vienna International Music Competition. Tabakova graduated from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and King’s College London, and also participated in master classes with composers including Iannis Xenakis, John Adams and Louis Andriessen.

A meeting with Manfred Eicher at the Lockenhaus Festival – where her Suite In Old Style was performed in 2007 – led subsequently to the recording of String Paths, the first album devoted entirely to Tabakova’s music.

For five years from 2017, Tabakova was Composer-in-Residence for the BBC Concert Orchestra, also taking over the role of conductor at the end of this period.

Whispered Lullaby, Suite in Jazz Style and Spinning a Yarn were recorded at Berlin’s Meistersaal in August 2020. Fantasy Homage to Schubert, Organum Light and Sun Triptych were recorded at Watford Colosseum in July 2021. The album was completed and mixed at Bavaria Musikstudios in Munich in January 2025 by Manfred Eicher and Dobrinka Tabakova with Michael Hinreiner (engineer).

CD Booklet includes a liner note by Dobrinka Tabakova and recording session photos.

Further information: https://www.dobrinka.com/ and www.ecmrecords.com

Sept 5: ECM New Series Releases New Arvo Pärt Album - And I heard a voice

ECM New Series Releases
Arvo Pärt: And I heard a voice

Vox Clamantis
Jaan-Eik Tulve, conductor

Featuring: Nunc dimittis; O Holy Father Nicholas; Sieben Magnificat-Antiphonen; Für Jan van Eyck; Kleine Litanei; And I heard a voice...

ECM New Series 2780
Release Date: September 5, 2025

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 decade long artistic partnership between Pärt and producer Manfred Eicher. Of their ECM 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 turns 90, shows that the rapport between choir and composer, rooted in a shared feeling for both ancient plainchant and contemporary music, continues to deepen. 

The new album, focusing primarily on recent compositions by Pärt, also reaches back to embrace the Sieben Magnificat-Antiphonen, written in 1988, and based upon the scriptural verses intoned in the Roman Catholic liturgy during evening prayers in the week before Christmas. In the liner notes, Kristina Kõrver indicates how Pärt allows the character of each text to influence his settings of it. Thus, reference to the Laws of Moses in O Adonai are expressed in a “more archaic sound and ascetic expression”, while Jesse (O Sproß aus Isais Wurzel) incorporates dissonance “like a little flower pushing its way through the pavement”, as Pärt once said.

On Für Jan van Eyck (composed in 2019), Vox Clamantis are joined by organist Ene Salumäe in this dedication to the great Flemish painter. Inspired by the altarpiece Adoration of a Mystic Lamb in St Bavo’s Cathedral Ghent, the composition is based upon the Agnus Dei section of Pärt’s Berliner Messe (refer to the New Series album Te Deum). 

O Holy Father Nicholas (2021) was written for the opening of the new St Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church and National Shrine at Ground Zero in New York.  The original church was destroyed in the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. Pärt’s choral work is based on the English text of a prayer from the Orthodox liturgy, a text he had previously set in its Russian version on the Alleluia-Tropus, and which was sung by Vox Clamantis on Adam’s Lament and The Deer’s Cry.

Title piece And I heard a voice (2017) is, to date, the only work of Pärt’s set to sacred text in his mother tongue, with words based on a passage from upon the 1938 Estonian translation of the Book of Revelation, where the phrase “they rest from their labours” is expressed as “they breathe from their labours [nad hingavad oma vaevadest]”. As the booklet essay notes, “the incessant repetition of these words becomes the most important image of the work, the symbol of eternal life.”

The Kleine Litanei (2015) pays homage to the Irish Benedictine monk, theologian, and philosopher St Virgil (c. 700-784). Nunc dimittis (2001) sets text from the Gospel of St Luke; here Pärt makes freer use of  his tintinnabuli technique, emphasising the meaning of the words through the deployment of variated texture, and underlining the word lumen (light).

Vox Clamantis, comprised of singers with a passion for plainchant, early polyphony and contemporary composition, was founded by conductor Jaan-Eik Tulve in 1996. Arvo Pärt, Helena Tulve and Erkki-Sven Tüür are among the composers who have written works for them.

The ensemble’s ECM discography includes Arvo Pärt’s The Deer’s Cry. Vox Clamantis also appears – alongside the Latvian Radio Choir and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir – on Pärt’s Adam’s Lament, which won a Grammy Award in 2014.

Other recordings include Cyrillus Kreek: The Suspended Harp of Babel, and Filia Sion (Gregorian chant to works by Perotin, Hildegard von Bingen and Petrus Wilhelmi de Grudencz),  Erkki-Sven Tüür’s Oxymoron, Arboles Iloran por lluvia with works by Helena Tulve, and an album with music by Henrik Ødegaard.

And I heard a voice was recorded in 2021 and 2022 in Haapsalu Cathedral and produced by Manfred Eicher. 

A special release concert with Vox Clamantis takes place on September 11 at the Church of St John the Baptist in Kärdla, on the island of Hiiumaa, Estonia.  Further details of the many musical events around Pärt’s 90th birthday can be found at the web site of the Arvo Pärt Centre: https://www.arvopart.ee/en/arvo-part-90-sunnipaeva-aasta/

August 29: ECM New Series Releases Rolf Lislevand's new album Libro primo

ECM New Series Releases

Rolf Lislevand: Libro primo

Works for archlute and chitarrone by Johann Hieronymous Kapsberger, Giovanni Paolo Foscarini, Bernardo Gianoncelli and Diego Ortiz

ECM 2848
Release Date: August 29, 2025

“Il libro Primo”, a writer or a musician's first volume of works, can often hold the most inspired and radical creations of an artist. This recording is dedicated to the works of Italian composers for lute in the first half of the 17th century, largely published in their first printed books. – Rolf Lislevand (from the performer’s note)

On his newest recording for ECM’s New Series, lute virtuoso Rolf Lislevand turns to the revolutionary Baroque literature for archlute and chitarrone, interpreting the works of some of the most significant 16th-17th century lute composers. In striking solo performances, the Norwegian lute player explores the progressive nature of pieces by Johann Hieronymous Kapsberger, Giovanni Paolo Foscarini, Bernardo Gianoncelli and Diego Ortiz. The modernity of this music’s melodic and rhythmic sensibility throughout can be surprising, not only substantiating Lislevand’s deeper dive into this repertoire, but also revealing a broad idiomatic reach that can still sound highly contemporary today.

“The new style marked a departure from traditional Renaissance polyphony,” Lislevand writes in the performer’s note accompanying the disc. The so-called nuove musiche gave “rise to unusually dissonant and bold harmonic idioms as well as an altogether newfound ability to express the emotional content of text accompanied by previously unheard notions of rhythmical intricacy.”

In a way, the album can be understood as a continuation of his last New Series recording, 2016’s La Mascarade, which saw him approach the works of Louis XIV court composers Robert de Visée and Francesco Corbetta in a programme that BBC Music Magazine called “a hauntingly beautiful musical chiaroscuro”. Turning its focus from France towards Baroque Italy, Libro primo too deals with the juxtaposition of light, bright sounds with obscurer, darker-toned shadings, respectively linked to the archlute and the chitarrone. As the repertoire and musical forms evolved during the 17th century, so did the instruments, with the newly invented lutes reflecting the contrast and tension between light and dark – the chitarrone (or theorbo) being inhabited by a somber, bass-heavy sound, while the archlute has a bright, overtone-rich character.

Lislevand takes historically informed liberties in his interpretations throughout the programme, 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”. Delving deeper into the musical fabric of the time, he also decided on a different tuning for the archlute than is commonly used today, “giving the music an adventurous timbre, more in line with the nuove musiche.” 

The Toccata was among the principal new forms in Baroque lute music, of which Kapsberger was a pioneer. Lislevand interprets several of his Toccatas here, delivering them with lyrical precision but also playful spontaneity, as he improvises connecting interpolations. The same improvisatory approach graces Foscarini’s Tasteggiata, which Lislevand transcribed from the Baroque guitar to the archlute, adding harmonic ideas and setting it in a rondeau form.

Two Recercardas by the Spaniard Diego Ortiz make up the only pre-17th century portion of the music included here. Their qualification for this otherwise strictly Italian Baroque programme is an unexpected inner-musical connection to the century younger pieces by Kapsberger. “In two different timelines,” Lislevand explains, “both composers employ unique rhythmical fantasy and skill in order to achieve expressivity.” 

“As Baroque composers were contemporarily within their own time, playing their own compositions and improvising in performance according to the idiomatic set of tools available back then, so are we performers contemporarily within our own time today,” says Lislevand. “Caught in an ongoing creative process, we can’t help but incorporate ourselves into the flow of history by approaching the music from a constantly evolving point of view.” Thus, the Norwegian lute virtuoso, with his own expressive approach, brings this four centuries old music thoroughly into the present.

Recorded at Moosestudios, Norway between 2022 and 2023, and mixed in Munich in 2024, the album was produced by Rolf Lislevand and Manfred Eicher.

July 18: ECM New Series Releases Signum Quartett's A Dark Flaring - Works for String Quartet from South Africa

ECM New Series Releases

Signum Quartett
A Dark Flaring
Works For String Quartet From South Africa

 Compositions by Priaulx Rainier, Arnold van Wyk, Péter Louis van Dijk, Mokale Koapeng, Robert Fokkens, Matthijs van Dijk 

Florian Donderer, violin; Annette Walther, violin; Xandi van Dijk, viola; Thomas Schmitz, violoncello 

Release Date: July 18, 2025
ECM 2787

Press downloads and CDs available upon request.

A Dark Flaring marks the Signum Quartett’s return to ECM’s New Series after debuting for the label with striking performances on Erkki-Sven Tüür’s acclaimed chamber music recording Lost Prayers (2020). Here, the quartet has put together a unique programme dedicated to South African composers, born in the 20th century, whose works for string quartet are united by the way they blend respect for the past with an instinct for the future in a wide-flung idiomatic scope. The grid of references unravelled between the six composers here – their dates of birth span from 1903 to 1983 – is as geographically wide as it is idiomatically deep, with large musical bridges connecting inspirations ranging from South African Xhosa and Zulu traditions through the late Renaissance to 19th century Romanticism as well as 20th century impressionists and minimalists. There’s even a nod to popular culture, as Matthijs van Dijk’s (rage) rage against the borrows inspiration for its title from the rock group Rage Against The Machine.

The complicated historical and in the same breath cultural backdrop that goes hand in hand with musical repertory composed over this specific period, in the South African context, is not only impossible to ignore but moreover serves as catalyst, canvas and disrupter – sometimes all at once – for most of the music presented here. The country after all didn’t become united until 1910, when South Africa was declared a self-governed country under the Commonwealth in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer Wars. Apartheid ensued following the World Wars – racist segregational policies that lasted until 1990 and continue to be worked through, digested and dealt with today. 

Whether writing at home or abroad, all six composers reflect their country’s complex and troubled history through music which is strikingly original. As Shirley Apthorp notes in the CD’s liner note, Mokale Koapeng’s Komeng, which opens the disc, “owes what is perhaps this recording’s most overt debt to the ancestors, drawing for its inspiration on ‘Umyeyezelo’, a celebratory song by Nofinishi Dywili.” Dywili was particularly accomplished in her use of complex polyrhythms, which Koapeng acknowledges by setting triple against duple metre. As Apthorp writes. “’Umyeyezelo’ is a song for the completion of Ulwaluko, the Xhosa initiation ritual which marks the transition from boyhood to manhood. ‘Komeng’ treats Dywili’s melody gently, using rocking rhythmic figures and col legno, a technique of striking the string with the wood of the bow, a direct invocation of the Uhadi.”

The programme continues with Matthijs van Dijk’s aforementioned rage, a piece that reflects the composer’s multi-disciplinary background by its use of a variety of techniques and sounds, densely packed into this explosive one-movement work. Similar in its dynamic scope, yet far more Romantic in its formal fabric, Arnold van Wyk’s Five Elegies For String Quartet (1940-1941) represent some of the earliest repertory here, only surpassed by Priaulx Rainier’s Quartet For Strings, which she completed in 1939. A student of Nadia Boulanger, among others, Rainier, as some of the other composers included here, moved to England for her studies. She lived there for most of her life, creating music that always remained, in one way or another, tied to the earliest music she heard growing up in Zululand, South Africa. As with many of the other works in this programme, the South African roots of the music can be found most prominently in its rhythmic components, bound to ostinatos and repetition.

Great variety in form and texture invigorate the Signum Quartett in its performances here, seemingly inciting a whirlwind of emotions as they travel across these broad musical streams. Gramophone magazine has described the quartet’s sound as “passionate, often brilliant, but also clear and lean” and their sensitive approach to these dynamically contrasting works is further evidence of the quartet’s accomplished craft. They excel with precision also in “iinyembezi”, a composition by Péter Louis van Dijk, which owes its heritage to John Dowland’s “Flow My Tears” on the one hand, and Xhosa tradition on the other. Downland’s theme is extrapolated through a series of variations, while an extended pizzicato section evokes the sound of the Mbira – the African thumb piano. What seems couldn’t be further musically apart, here unites coherently on the brink of tonality.  

And like the works of his fellow compatriots, Robert Fokkens’s Glimpses of a half-forgotten future can’t evade a certain dichotomy in its musical inspirations either, with debt owed to Western classical composers John Cage, Morton Feldman and French spectralists, while at the same time drawing inspiration from the Xhosa Uhadi – the South African musical bow whose build and percussive qualities are reminiscent of the Brazilian Berimbau. Fokkens contextualises his string quartet – a stark reflection on the inevitability of our own demise – with the poem that gives this album its name: 

Through now's incessant numbness
Flickers a glint,
A startling glimmer,
A dark flaring...

The album was recorded at Sendesaal Bremen in March 2022. The CD includes liner notes by South African journalist and music critic Shirley Apthorp.

ECM New Series Celebrates Keith Jarrett: Eighty on May 8

Photo by Rose Anne Colavito

ECM New Series Celebrates Keith Jarrett: Eighty on May 8

Keith Jarrett’s Classical Releases on ECM New Series Include: 

1988: J.S. Bach – The Well-Tempered Klavier, Book I
1988: J.S. Bach – Goldberg Variations
1991: J.S. Bach – The Well-Tempered Klavier, Book II
1992: Dmitri Shostakovich – 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op.87
1993: J.S. Bach – The French Suites
1994: J.S. Bach – Three Sonatas for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord
1995: G.F. Handel – Suites for Keyboard
1996: W.A. Mozart – Piano Concertos, Masonic Funeral Music, Symphony in G Minor
1999: W.A. Mozart – Piano Concertos, Adagio and Fugue
2013: J.S. Bach – Six Sonatas for Violin and Piano
2015: Barber / Bartók / Jarrett
2023: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach – Württemberg Sonatas 

Keith Jarrett’s Complete ECM Discography:
www.ecmrecords.com/artists/keith-jarrett

As Keith Jarrett turns 80 today, May 8, ECM reflects with gratitude on an extraordinary musical journey, documented in a discography unprecedented in creative range. 

At ECM the story began with 1971’s Facing You – the first of his many collaborations with producer Manfred Eicher – and it continues with the upcoming New Vienna, due in a few weeks. A relationship of more than half a century at one label, based on artistic affinity and friendship. 

Beyond the legendary improvised solo piano recordings, where the perennially-popular Köln Concert is but one of very many highlights – including Bremen-Lausanne, Sun Bear Concerts,  La Scala, Radiance, Rio, Budapest Concert and more –  there are the great Jarrett bands to consider, each with its profound impact on jazz history. The American quartet with Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden and Paul Motian, and the European quartet with Jan Garbarek, Palle Danielsson and Jon Christensen, were bands of strikingly different temperament. Jarrett’s writing for the groups underlined the individual and collective strengths of the players. And the mystery and intensity of The Survivors’ Suite remain as compelling as the lyricism and buoyancy of Belonging or My Song. The association with Jan Garbarek led to evocative music with string orchestra on Luminessence and Arbour Zena, the latter also featuring Charlie Haden. Jarrett and Haden’s closeness as jazz improvisers is in evidence, too, on the ‘reunion’ albums Jasmine and Last Dance.

For 30 years, Jarrett’s trio with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette set standards in multiple senses. Raising the bar for interpretive performances of music of the Great American Songbook, honoring the melodies of Broadway songwriters and bebop instrumentalists, but also playing standards with an exhilarating sense of freedom on numerous recordings including the definitive jazz club box set At The Blue Note. And sometimes, indeed, setting standards aside – in albums of sustained group creativity such as Changeless, Inside Out and Always Let Me Go. Also of musical-historical significance: the night when Paul Motian substituted for DeJohnette, documented on At The Deer Head Inn and The Old Country. 

Jarrett’s improvised projects outside of jazz have resolutely defied classification – from experiments with the mighty baroque organ of Ottobeuren Abbey (Hymn/Spheres) to intimate clavichord discoveries (Book of Ways), and multi-instrumental undertakings (Spirits, No End).

A recording of Sacred Hymns introduced the music of G. I. Gurdjieff to a new audience, and Jarrett’s contribution to Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa, partnering Gidon Kremer in a realization of Fratres, was no less revelatory or crucial. From the 1980s onwards, in parallel with his jazz activities, he went on to establish himself as an insightful interpreter of music of classical tradition with performances of J.S. Bach and C.P.E. Bach, Händel, Mozart, Shostakovich, Bartók, and Samuel Barber. 

Speaking of his thoughtful Bach renditions, Jarrett once said: “Correct playing has nothing to do with disputes over style.  The first thing to consider is if there is music being made.” Amen.  This has seldom been in question, of course, in any context with Keith Jarrett’s participation!

May 23: ECM New Series Releases Erkki-Sven Tüür's ÆRIS recorded by the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra

ECM New Series Releases

Erkki-Sven Tüür: ÆRIS
Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, Olari Elts

Release Date: May 23, 2025
ECM 2784

Press downloads and CDs available upon request.

On May 23, 2025, ECM New Series releases ÆRIS, the ninth album on the label 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 says, “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 changing and gradually take on lives of their own.” The album was recorded at Tallinn’s Estonian Concert Hall.

Track List:
1. Phantasma for orchestra (2018) [13:12]
2. Symphony No. 10 "ÆRIS" for horn quartet and orchestra (2021) [29:45]
3. De Profundis for orchestra (2013) [18:01]
Dedicated to Olari Elts

Recorded September 2022
Estonian Concert Hall, Tallinn
Tonmeister: Tammo Sumera
Executive Producer: Manfred Eicher
An ECM Production