Christina Jensen 9/19/25 Christina Jensen 9/19/25

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

Christina Jensen 9/19/25 Christina Jensen 9/19/25

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.

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).

Christina Jensen 9/12/25 Christina Jensen 9/12/25

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

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.

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

Christina Jensen 7/23/25 Christina Jensen 7/23/25

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/

Christina Jensen 7/23/25 Christina Jensen 7/23/25

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.

Christina Jensen 6/10/25 Christina Jensen 6/10/25

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'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.

Christina Jensen 5/9/25 Christina Jensen 5/9/25

ECM New Series Celebrates Keith Jarrett: Eighty on May 8

Keith Jarrett poses with hand on forehead. — 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!

Christina Jensen 4/25/25 Christina Jensen 4/25/25

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'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

Christina Jensen 2/14/25 Christina Jensen 2/14/25

March 14: ECM New Series Releases Patrick Demenga's Recording of Alexander Knaifel's Chapter Eight

ECM New Series Releases Patrick Demenga's Recording of Alexander Knaifel's Chapter Eight

ECM New Series Releases

Alexander Knaifel: Chapter Eight

Patrick Demenga, violoncello
The State Choir Latvija, Youth Choir Kamēr and Riga Cathedral Boys Choir
Andres Mustonen, conductor

Release Date: March 14, 2025
ECM 2637
CD: 0028948598533

Press downloads and CDs available upon request.

Chapter Eight: Canticum Canticorum is among the most remarkable compositions of Alexander Knaifel. Written in 1992 and 1993 and based upon the eighth chapter of the Old Testament Song of Songs, the Song of Solomon, it is conceived as a “community prayer”. In his imagination, while writing it, Knaifel said he “heard it in the most reverberant church acoustics.” 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. Many of Knaifel’s works implied a spiritual or contemplative dimension and in its obituary of the Russian composer, who died last year, Gramophone wrote that “his style proved ideal for the ECM aesthetic, allowing the luminous, meditative qualities of the music to shine through.” Those qualities are evident as Estonian conductor Andres Mustonen subtly directs three Latvian choirs: the State Choir Latvija, the Youth Choir Kamēr and the Riga Cathedral Boys Choir. “Andres Mustonen managed to make the choral voices float,” wrote Michael Dervan, a witness to the performance here, in the Irish Times. “The sounds sometimes seemed to emerge as imperceptibly as a cloud slowly forming in a clear sky. In the welcoming rococo interior of Lucerne’s Jesuit Church, the effect was of prolonged, quiet ravishment.”

Alexander Knaifel was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in 1943, and grew up in St Petersburg. Setting out, initially, to be a cellist, he studied with teachers including Mstislav Rostropovich at the Moscow Conservatory in the early 1960s. As a composer he was soon allied with an emerging Soviet avant-garde, a network of friends such as Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Pärt, Sofia Gubaidulina and Valentin Silvestrov. Like them, he subsequently found his way to a more personal idiom. His own compositions, from the mid-1970s onwards, include a number of slowly evolving pieces: “quiet giants” was his own term for these works, whose quest for beauty often has a metaphysical dimension or a sacred subtext. Knaifel sought to convey something of the heart of faith by, as he put it, "speaking in a low voice, hoping to hear a voice within oneself.”

The premiere performance of Chapter Eight took place in Washington’s National Cathedral in 1995, with Mstislav Rostropovich in the cellist’s role.

Further recordings of the music of Alexander Knaifel on ECM are Svete Tikhiy (2002) with Oleg Malov, the Keller Quartett, Tatiana Melentieva, and Andrei Siegle, Amicta Sole (2005), with Rostropovich and Melentieva plus the Glinka College Boys Choir and the Hermitage Orchestra, Blazhenstva (2008) with Melentieva, Ivan Monighetti, Piotr Migunov, the Hermitage Orchestra and the Lege Artis Choir, and Lukumoriye (2018), with Malov, Migunov, Melentieva, and Lege Artis.

Swiss cellist Patrick Demenga was born in 1962. He studied at the Bern Conservatory, in Cologne with Boris Pergamenschikow, and in New York with Harvey Shapiro. He has premiered works by Isang Yun, Gerhard Schedl, Heinz Holliger and many others. Patrick Demenga first appeared on ECM New Series in 1995 with 12 Hommages à Paul Sacher, with music of Berio, Boulez, Britten, Dutilleux, Ginastera, Henze, Holliger, Lutosławski and more.

Andres Mustonen was born in Tallinn in 1953. Renowned as both conductor and violinist, he was a founder of the early music consort Hortus Musicus, and has long juxtaposed investigations into old music with ardent championing of the new.

The State Choir Latvija is the largest professional choir in the Baltic States. Founded in 1942 its repertoire extends from the renaissance to the present day. The Latvija choir has given world premieres of Pärt’s The Deer’s Cry and Lera Auerbach’s Russian Requiem.

Youth Choir Kamēr was founded in 1990, and established a reputation for its expressive performance style. The choir has commissioned pieces from composers including John Tavener, Giya Kancheli, Dobrinka Tabakova and John Luther Adams, and participated in collaborations with Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica, Yuri Bashmet, Maxim Rysanov, and others.

The Riga Cathedral Boys Choir was first established in Latvia in 1950, and has since toured the world on many occasions.

*

Chapter Eight with Patrick Demenga and the three Latvian choirs under the direction of Andres Mustonen, was recorded at Jesuitenkirche Luzerne in March 2009, in the context of the Lucerne Festival. The Jesuitenkirche - whose acoustic properties are an essential component of this interpretation of Knaifel’s piece - was built in the 17th century, as the first large Baroque church in Switzerland north of the Alps.

Christopher Jesina 11/15/24 Christopher Jesina 11/15/24

ECM New Series in 2024: A Year-End Review

ECM New Series in 2024 – A Year-End Review

Gidon Kremer – Songs of Fate | January 19, 2024 (ECM New Series)
Listen on Apple Music or Spotify

“What a treat this album is to explore Baltic composers who don’t often find their works recorded. In fact, many of these compositions are having their first-ever recording.” – Craig Byrd, Cultural Attache

“This is one of Kremer’s most personal undertakings. His playing — especially in Serksnyte’s ‘This Too Shall Pass’ and Weinberg’s simple, sad “Nocturne” — has the breath and rhythm of halting speech. Soprano Vida Mikneviciute imparts a similar tone to Kuprevicius’s ‘Kaddish’ and to excerpts from Weinberg’s ‘Jewish Songs.’ Jancevskis’s ‘Lignum’ for string orchestra and chimes, played with deep sensitivity by the chamber orchestra Kremerata Baltica, progresses from dissonance to resounding affirmation to an open-ended conclusion. It sounds like Kremer’s description of the album’s purpose: ‘reminding us of tragic fates along the way and that we each have a ‘voice’ that deserves to be heard.’” – David Weininger, The New York Times

On Songs of Fate Gidon Kremer approaches scores by Baltic composers Giedrius Kuprevičius, Raminta Šerkšnytė, Jēkabs Jančevskis and the Polish composer Mieczysław Weinberg, together with his Kremerata Baltica chamber ensemble and soprano Vida Miknevičiūtė – many of the works captured here appear in premiere recordings. In his performer’s note, Kremer traces the roots of this programme back to both his Jewish heritage and his extensive history of living in the Baltic states, which has and continues to lead to collaborations with countless musicians and composers from the region. The personal connotations are palpable in the music, as Wolfgang Sandner observes in his liner note, confirming: “Gidon Kremer has perhaps never before revealed himself as intimately and as existentially focused as on this recording”.

Anna Gourari – Schnittke & Hindemith | June 14, 2024 (ECM New Series)
Listen on Apple Music or Spotify

“[Anna Gourari] extracts a dizzying range of colours from Hindemith’s ingeniously constructed score. At one moment she’s playful and meditative, and then suddenly she breaks out into full-frontal percussive aggression.” – Erik Levi, BBC Music Magazine

“The two composers whom the pianist Anna Gourari brings together in her latest offering seem to create a diametrically opposed pair: Schnittke, the collagist of wild eclecticism, and Hindemith, his era’s master of orderly, workaday counterpoint. If Gourari hadn’t used the phrase ‘Elusive Affinity’ as the title of her previous ECM recording, it would work just as well here.” – David Weninger, The New York Times

After three acclaimed solo piano programmes for the label, here Anna Gourari widens the instrumental spectrum with the Lugano-based Orchestra Della Svizzera Italiana under Markus Poschner’s direction in striking performances of Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra and Paul Hindemith’s The Four Temperaments.

Gourari’s pianistic command is one of “virtuoso polish and with flawless action,” to quote the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, and her holistic, wide-reaching grasp of the instrument is on full display in Schnittke’s shape-bending polystylistic concerto. The orchestra furthermore shines in a powerful interpretation of Hindemith’s Symphony Mathis der Maler.

Contrasts emerge not only through the juxtaposition of the three works but from within the pieces, which have fiery temperaments and technically demanding scores in common.

Delian Quartett: Im wachen Traume | June 21, 2024 (ECM New Series)
Listen on Apple Music or Spotify

“The idea of playing viol music on a string quartet is not new, but the [album] as a whole very much is. As usual, ECM's sound from the Abtei Marienmünster is first-rate and succeeds in creating the mystic atmosphere the performers were looking for.” – James Manheim, All Music

Named after a lyric from the first piece in Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben song cycle, the Delian Quartett’s programme of Im wachen Traume combines said cycle – in a new arrangement for soprano and string quartet by the late Aribert Reimann – with music by Renaissance composer William Byrd and Baroque composer Henry Purcell. Most of the works appear in world premiere recordings here. The earlier English repertory bookends the album, framing Frauenliebe und Leben in a thematic embrace and, as the quartet’s violinist Andreas Moscho puts it, “in dazzling harmonies, that color the musical span from the bliss of the moment to the end of things.”

Danish String Quartet – Keel Road | August 30, 2024
Listen on Apple Music or Spotify

“[The Danish String Quartet] bring[s] to this music the same virtues as their more canonical pursuits: unified and natural phrasing, and crack ensemble playing. The arrangements are coolly resourceful, and their own tunes are so idiomatic you could easily mistake them for being “authentic” folk music.” – David Weininger, The New York Times

“The sequence presented on this album is a multi-faceted diamond“ – David Nice, BBC Music Magazine

“It’s a disc of quiet revelations and arrangements that are as exquisitely crafted as they are captivating; performed with abundant spirit and conviction, and captured in warm, close sound.” – David Kettle, The Strad

Keel Road is the latest chapter in the Danish String Quartet’s reckoning with music from – or inspired by – northern folk and traditional sources, rounding off a decade of sustained engagement with the genre. Wood Works, issued in 2014 on the Danish Dacapo label, gave notice of the extent of the DSQ’s commitment to folk, explored in parallel with their classical activities, and Last Leaf, released in 2017 on ECM New Series took the story further. A resounding success with press and public, Last Leaf ranked high amongst albums of the year at NPR, The New York Times and Gramophone, the latter magazine suggesting this might be “the best album of folk ditties from a string quartet you’ll ever hear,” an assertion now challenged by Keel Road.

Once again, the group casts its associative net wide: “We set out on a musical journey that traverses the North Sea. For centuries, the main communication channel of Northern Europe, the highway and the internet of bygone eras. And even though known for its swift upsurges and strong gales, brave sailors would again and again travel the keel road, enabling a continuous exchange of goods, culture and music. The musical keel road of this album will take us from Denmark and Norway to shores far away: to the Faroe Islands, to Ireland and England.” The journey illuminates musical affinities as well as distinctions. “While folk music represents local traditions and local stories, it is also the music of everywhere and everyone. At the end of the day, our stories and our music remain closely connected.”

Amid the traditional pieces, Keel Road subtly interweaves compositions by Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen and Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, which eloquently convey a “folk” spirit. A brief excerpt from a field recording of the Danish traditional “En Skomager Har Jeg Været” (A cobbler I was) precedes Sørensen’s reflective tune “Once A Shoemaker.”

Arvo Pärt – Tabula Rasa | September 6, 2024 (ECM New Series)
Listen on Apple Music or Spotify

“For anyone who fancies listening to Tabula Rasa as music rather than part of a continuum, this handsome reissue fits the bill.” – Kieron Tyler, The Arts Desk

In 1984, ECM brought a new sound into the musical world with the release of Arvo Pärt’s Tabula rasa, the first album on the label’s New Series imprint. As Paul Griffiths wrote in his liner notes for a 2010 special-edition produced in collaboration with the composer’s publisher Universal Edition: “This was the beginning, also, of an extraordinary association between composer and record producer, an example of loyalty and collegiality unique in our time. Pärt’s mature career is documented on ECM albums produced by Eicher (…) If Pärt gave ECM one of its enduring foci, ECM gave Pärt a forum he could not otherwise have found.”

Now, on the occasion of the 40th New Series anniversary, this gatefold vinyl reissue with enclosed booklet presents the record in its original guise. The record also marked the intersection of some of the most long standing, significant musical collaborators in the label’s history: Arvo Pärt, Gidon Kremer and Keith Jarrett.

Brahms & Schumann – Yuuko Shiokawa, violin & András Schiff, piano | October 11, 2024 (ECM New Series)
Listen on Apple Music or Spotify

New Music Friday: The best albums out Oct. 11 – NPR Music

After tackling the sonatas for violin and piano of Bach, Busoni and Beethoven in 2017, a “thoughtfully determined and subtly interconnected programme” according to Strad magazine, the duo of Yuuko Shiokawa and András Schiff returns with striking renditions of Brahms’s Violin Sonata No. 1 and Schumann’s Violin Sonata No. 2. When the violinist and pianist made their first joint appearance on the label with the 2000 recording of Schubert’s C major fantasy for violin and piano, Gramophone magazine was in awe with their performance, raving how “from the start, there's an air of magic,” and calling the renditions “interpretations of rare penetration and individuality: a must for the Schubert section in your collection.” Now turning their gaze to the Schubert-admirer Schumann and his contemporary Brahms, the duo offers a deeper look into the core repertory of Romantic chamber music.

Anja Lechner – Bach, Abel, Hume | October 18, 2024 (ECM New Series)
Listen on Apple Music or Spotify

“The cellist Anja Lechner has been such a bright star on the ECM firmament, that it’s hard to believe this is her first solo album for the label. Having engaged with musical traditions including tango, Armenian folk songs and Byzantine hymns, she now mines the deeply personal repertoire of viola da gamba music to reframe some of the most treasured works written for cello.” – Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, The New York Times

“Playing on a cello that predates Bach – a Rugieri from 1680 – Lechner creates a provocative dialogue between two of the suites and selected pieces by Hume and Abel that were originally composed for the viola da gamba.” – Thomas May, The Strad

For her first solo-violoncello album on ECM’s New Series, Anja Lechner devotes herself to a particularly unique convergence of three composers from vastly different contexts: J.S. Bach, Carl Friedrich Abel and Tobias Hume. In the past, her extensive discography has captured the cellist as part of the renowned Rosamunde Quartett, as well as alongside seminal artists from both trans-idiomatic sound worlds and the realm of classical music, gracing her with rare musical farsightedness. With her distinct perspective on works composed for both violoncello and viola da gamba, Lechner – “one of the most gifted cellists in the world” (Strings) – sheds a fresh light on music written within a span of two centuries.

Framing the first two solo suites from the famous group of six Bach wrote for the violoncello are Abel and Hume compositions, originally conceived for viola da gamba, which are given new color and breadth through Lechner’s interpretation on cello – in parts newly arranged by herself. Connecting all three composers is a certain improvisatory notion within the fabric of their work, second-nature for composers and musicians between the 16th–18th centuries, when these three lived.

Alexander Lonquich, Münchener Kammerorchester – Ludwig van Beethoven: The Piano Concertos | November 8, 2024 (ECM New Series)
Listen on Apple Music | Spotify

After a first appearance on ECM’s New Series with premiere recordings of Israeli composer Gideon Lewensohn’s works on Odradek (2002), two subsequent solo recitals plus a duo programme with violinist Caroline Widmann (2012), here pianist Alexander Lonquich, alongside the Münchener Kammerorchester, rises to a more extensive challenge, in performing the entirety of Beethoven’s piano concertos, programmed in chronological order. Beethoven’s five completed piano concertos – the C major op. 15, the B flat op. 19, the C minor op. 37, the G major Op. 58 and the “Emperor”, in E flat major, op 73 – were composed between about 1793 to 1809, documenting the composer’s development over two decades.

In his detailed liner note, the German pianist calls these recordings a, “very special experience, for performers and listeners alike. The usually common placement of the individual works in the context of a symphony concert all too often runs the risk of confirming and reinforcing what is already traditional, while this chronological order draws attention to stylistic leaps in the compositions and allows the listener to experience Beethoven's development as the author of these outward-looking creations that illustrate his pianistic virtuosity between 1790 and 1809.”

Christina Jensen 10/4/24 Christina Jensen 10/4/24

Nov 1: ECM New Series Releases Danish String Quartet's Keel Road on Vinyl

ECM New Series Releases Danish String Quartet's Keel Road on Vinyl

ECM New Series Releases Danish String Quartet's Keel Road on Vinyl

US LP Release Date: November 1, 2024

Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, violin; Frederik Øland, violin; Asbjørn Nørgaard, viola; Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, violoncello

“Folk tunes are not just a part of our repertoire, but an important element of our identity as musicians” – The Danish String Quartet

ECM New Series 2785
Listen: https://ecm.lnk.to/KeelRoad

Press downloads available upon request.

Keel Road is the latest chapter in the Danish String Quartet’s reckoning with music from – or inspired by – northern folk and traditional sources, rounding off a decade of sustained engagement with the genre. Wood Works, issued in 2014 on the Danish Dacapo label gave notice of the extent of the DSQ’s commitment to folk, explored in parallel with their classical activities, and Last Leaf, released in 2017 on ECM New Series took the story further. A resounding success with press and public, Last Leaf ranked high amongst albums of the year at NPR, The New York Times and Gramophone, the latter magazine suggesting this might be “the best album of folk ditties from a string quartet you’ll ever hear,” an assertion now challenged by Keel Road. Keel Road was released on CD and digitally on August 30, 2024, and will be released on vinyl in the US on November 1, 2024

Amid the traditional pieces, Keel Road subtly interweaves compositions by Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen and Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, which eloquently convey a “folk” spirit. A brief excerpt from a field recording of the Danish traditional “En Skomager Har Jeg Været” (A cobbler I was) precedes Sørensen’s reflective tune “Once A Shoemaker."

With characteristic attention to detail, the Danish String Quartet creatively colour the album’s arrangements with the addition of instruments including spinet, harmonium, bass and clog fiddle. Guest musicians Ale Carr (cittern) and Nikolaj Busk (piano), meanwhile, both members, with Rune, of the folk trio Dreamers’ Circus join the DSQ for a performance of Carr’s “Stormpolskan."

Keel Road’s musical stopover in Ireland proves particularly productive, as the quartet interprets pieces composed by Turlough O’Carolan (1670-1738), the legendary harpist from County Meath. Unusual among the itinerant harpists of his day, O’Carolan drew influence not only from local tradition but also from then-contemporary European composers including Vivaldi and Corelli, intuitively seeking his own blend of form and folk spontaneity.

For the Danish String Quartet traditional music has been part of the group’s story since their early days: “As we came together to form the quartet, folk melodies naturally blended into our rehearsals. We were experimenting with lots of different tunes, each of us adding a personal touch. This evolved into a serious endeavour over time.”

Now widely recognized as one of the most adventurous string quartets, the Danish String Quartet celebrated their 20th anniversary in the 2022/3 season. 2023 also saw the completion of their five volume PRISM series on ECM, which explored musical and contextual relationships between Bach fugues, Beethoven string quartets and works by Shostakovich, Schnittke, Bartók, Mendelssohn, and Webern.

The group made their ECM debut in 2016 with music of Thomas Adès, Per Nørgård & Hans Abrahamsen, reflecting their special affinity for contemporary composition.

“What they do know is how to be an exceptional quartet, whatever repertory they play.” — Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times

Keel Road was recorded at Copenhagen’s Village Recording Studio in November 2022, and mixed at Munich’s Bavaria Musikstudios in March 2024.

The Danish String Quartet celebrates the release of Keel Road with concerts in the US and Europe. Further details and information at www.danishquartet.com and www.ecmrecords.com.

Christina Jensen 9/25/24 Christina Jensen 9/25/24

Nov 8: ECM New Series Releases Alexander Lonquich's recording of Beethoven Piano Concertos

ECM New Series Releases Alexander Lonquich's recording of Beethoven Piano Concertos

ECM New Series Releases

Ludwig van Beethoven: The Piano Concertos

Alexander Lonquich
Münchener Kammerorchester

Alexander Lonquich, piano
Münchener Kammerorchester
Daniel Giglberger, concertmaster

Release Date: November 8, 2024
ECM New Series 2753-55
CD: 0289 487 6904 9

Press downloads available upon request.

Alexander Lonquich, one of the foremost performers in chamber music and as a soloist, has said that “every encounter with a work of art is at the same time an exploration of one's own existential position. This is the only way to make music today.” The New York Times has called him “an original at the piano who features both orderliness and suppleness”, and his musical authority has brought him to some of the most prestigious festivals and stages across the world and led to collaborations with renowned orchestras and musicians alike. After a first appearance on ECM’s New Series with premiere recordings of Israeli composer Gideon Lewensohn’s works on Odradek (2002), two subsequent solo recitals plus a duo programme with violinist Caroline Widmann (2012), here pianist Alexander Lonquich, alongside the Münchener Kammerorchester, rises to a more extensive challenge, in performing the entirety of Beethoven’s piano concertos, programmed in chronological order. Beethoven’s five completed piano concertos – the C major op. 15, the B flat op. 19, the C minor op. 37, the G major op. 58 and the “Emperor”, in E flat major, op 73 – were composed between about 1793 to 1809, documenting the composer’s development over two decades.

In his detailed liner note, the German pianist calls these recordings a “very special experience, for performers and listeners alike. The usually common placement of the individual works in the context of a symphony concert all too often runs the risk of confirming and reinforcing what is already traditional, while this chronological order draws attention to stylistic leaps in the compositions and allows the listener to experience Beethoven's development as the author of these outward-looking creations that illustrate his pianistic virtuosity between 1790 and 1809.”

Almost no other genre in Beethoven’s body of work was created within as condensed a time-span as his piano concertos – his quartets, symphonies and piano sonatas for instance he wrote over the entire span of his artistic life. Accordingly, his rapid stylistic evolution, from a deeply Mozart-inspired thinker to the utterly independent and influential composer he is known to be, can be traced in detail over the course of these concertos.

Lonquich talks about this evolution in his liner note, also addressing the always technically challenging qualities of Beethoven’s works: “The one aspect of the concertos he performed himself that cannot be ignored is a tendency towards virtuosity: the cadenzas of the first movements written down by him give an impression of his exuberant playing, while in elaborations written years later, such as in the 1809 C major concerto's candenza, he certainly did not shy away from stylistic breaks; we also know, in contrast to his interpretative demands concerning the piano sonatas, that even the final versions were little more for him than templates for spontaneous or prepared variation – the audience had to be surprised time and again. With op. 37, the period of orientation towards the past definitely comes to an end; what follows is itself a model.”

The concertos were captured at the Rathausprunksaal, Landshut in January 2022.

Christina Jensen 9/20/24 Christina Jensen 9/20/24

October 18: ECM New Series Releases Anja Lechner's New Album featuring Bach, Abel, Hume - First Single Out Now

ECM New Series Releases Anja Lechner's New Album featuring Bach, Abel, Hume

ECM New Series Releases

Anja Lechner
Bach, Abel, Hume

Anja Lechner, violoncello

First Single Hume’s A Question Out Now
Listen: https://ecm.lnk.to/BachAbelHume

Release Date: October 18, 2024
ECM New Series 2806
CD: 0289 4875881 4

Press downloads and CDs available upon request

For her first solo-violoncello album on ECM’s New Series, Anja Lechner devotes herself to a particularly unique convergence of three composers from vastly different contexts: JS Bach, Carl Friedrich Abel and Tobias Hume. In the past, her extensive discography has captured the cellist as part of the renowned Rosamunde Quartett, as well as alongside seminal artists from both trans-idiomatic sound worlds and the realm of classical music, gracing her with rare musical farsightedness. With her distinct perspective on works composed for both violoncello and viola da gamba, Lechner – “one of the most gifted cellists in the world” (Strings magazine) – sheds a fresh light on music written within a span of two centuries.

Framing the first two solo suites from the famous group of six Bach wrote for the violoncello are Abel and Hume compositions, originally conceived for viola da gamba, which are given new colour and breadth through Lechner’s interpretation on cello – in parts newly arranged by herself. Connecting all three composers is a certain improvisatory notion within the fabric of their work, second-nature for composers and musicians between the 16th–18th centuries, when these three lived.

Opening the programme are works by Hume, preserved in the very first print edition, namely the collection “The First Part Of Ayres” from 1605. The Scottish composer (and former soldier)’s pieces can be understood as depictions of moods or frames of minds, each of the 116 dances and miniatures in the collection (mostly notated in tablature) corresponding to slightly different temperaments. “A Question”, “An Answer”, “Harke Harke” – a narrative is broached, to be concluded with the final piece on the album, Hume’s tuneful “Touch Me Lightly”. The composer’s lyrical qualities are emphasized in Anja Lechner’s thoughtful interpretation, bringing new, subtle characteristics to the fore.

Of the 150 years later composer Carl Friedrich Abel, Anja Lechner addresses the Arpeggio and Adagio, each in d minor. Lechner endows the already intense scores with her own expressivity in these fluid performances. It’s a fitting preamble to Bach’s violoncello suites Nos. 1&2 in G major and d minor, where the cellist channels the full range of her deep experience in the genre and delivers powerful readings of this core repertory.

Reviewing a solo recital from 2022, where Lechner likewise performed one of Bach’s violoncello suites, among other works, the German daily paper Süddeutsche Zeitung praised cellist’s unique “delivery, which always underlines her precise articulation in a most musical fashion”, noting how her performances are marked by a “sense of longing anchored in deep and serious elegance”. The same dedicated and impassioned sense of abandon can be heard and felt here. And at the end, as Kristina Maidt-Zinke notes in the album-accompanying liner notes, “one marvels at the lightness and inner logic with which three worlds have ever so gently touched one another”.

The album, recorded at the Himmelfahrtskirche in Munich, was produced by Manfred Eicher.

“One of the most gifted cellists in the world, often bridging the gap between contemporary and traditional, east and west, and arranged and improvisational music” – Greg Cahill, Strings, USA

Starting from her deep roots in classic music, Anja Lechner’s musical path has led her to explore a wide range of trans-idiomatic expressions and improvisational traditions, with a discography that embraces a multitude of collaborators from various countries and cultures.

The violoncellist’s projects for ECM include a long-running artistic collaboration with Argentine bandoneonist-composer Dino Saluzzi (El Encuentro, Navidad de los Andes, Ojos negros and, with the Rosamunde Quartet, Kultrum); music by composer-philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff (Chants, Hymns and Dances), a recording made in partnership Greek pianist Vassilis Tsabropoulos which topped the US classical charts and several recordings with the Tarkovsky Quartet. She recorded two albums with the quartet’s pianist François Couturier (Moderato Cantabile, Lontano) as well as the highly acclaimed 2018 duo recording of Schubert works in duo with guitarist Pablo Marquez (Die Nacht) and more. Lechner was the cellist of the Munich-based Rosamunde Quartet, whose acclaimed ECM New Series recordings include music by Mansurian, Schoeck, Larcher, Webern, Shostakovich, Burian, Haydn, and Yoffe.

Christina Jensen 9/11/24 Christina Jensen 9/11/24

Oct 11: ECM New Series Releases Yuuko Shiokawa & András Schiff's New Recording of Brahms & Schumann

ECM New Series Releases Yuuko Shiokawa & András Schiff's New Recording of Brahms & Schumann

ECM New Series Releases

Brahms & Schumann
Yuuko Shiokawa, violin & András Schiff, piano

First Single Available: Brahms' Violin Sonata No. 1 in G major, op. 78: Adagio
Listen Now

ECM New Series 2815
CD 0289 4875 878 4
Release: October 11, 2024

Press downloads and CDs available upon request

After tackling the sonatas for violin and piano of Bach, Busoni and Beethoven in 2017 – a “thoughtfully determined and subtly interconnected programme” according to Strad magazine –, the duo of Yuuko Shiokawa and András Schiff returns with striking renditions of Brahms’s Violin Sonata No. 1 and Schumann’s Violin Sonata No. 2. When the violinist and pianist made their first joint appearance on the label with the 2000 recording of Schubert’s C major fantasy for violin and piano, Gramophone magazine was in awe with their performance, raving how “from the start, there's an air of magic,” and calling the renditions “interpretations of rare penetration and individuality: a must for the Schubert section in your collection.” Now turning their gaze to the Schubert-admirer Schumann and his contemporary Brahms, the duo offers a deeper look into core repertory of Romantic chamber music.

Brahms’s First Violin Sonata in G major, known as the “Regenliedsonate” (Rain Sonata)”, with its final movement incorporating motifs from his two songs “Regenlied” (Rain Song) and “Nachklang” (Lingering Sound), is presented in an evocative guise. In his liner note, Wolfgang Stähr notes how, from those two previous songs, “Brahms adopts not only the theme, but also the “rainy,” onomatopoeic, dripping piano accompaniment. He had given these two poetically and melodically linked songs to his lifelong friend Clara Schumann for her 54th birthday.” In an overwhelmed response, she wrote she couldn’t believe “that anyone feels about this tune as rapturously and wistfully as I do.” The motif from the “Regenlied” appears twice, its triple d in dotted rhythm opening both the first and the third movement, bringing the overreaching theme full circle.

The Brahms sonata stands in an inviting juxtaposition with Schumann’s at times vigorously driving Sonata in D minor. Completed almost 30 years prior, in 1851, the sonata was premièred by Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim in 1853 – the link between Clara Schumann and Brahms kept well maintained. That same year, Brahms and Schumann, together with Albert Dietrich, composed the collaborative F-A-E Sonata, whose c minor scherzo, contributed by Brahms, was most likely inspired by the second movement in b minor of this Schumann sonata.

Devoting themselves completely to the music of these composer-friends, Yuuko Shiokawa and András Schiff once again display their own rare duo understanding throughout their third collective undertaking for ECM’s New Series. Recorded at the Auditorio Stelio Molo in Lugano, the album was produced by Manfred Eicher.

The recording can be viewed in both the context of the duo’s longstanding collaborative partnership in chamber music and Schiff’s more recent deeper foray into the music of Brahms, which includes the 2020 recording of the composer’s clarinet sonatas alongside Jörg Widmann and the critically acclaimed 2021 recording of Brahms’s piano concertos with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (“A vibrant new recording - Mr. Schiff and the outstanding players make [the concertos] sound intimate and human-scale.” – New York Times

Christina Jensen 8/20/24 Christina Jensen 8/20/24

Sept 6: ECM New Series Reissues Arvo Pärt's Tabula Rasa on Vinyl

ECM New Series Reissues Arvo Pärt's Tabula Rasa on Vinyl

ECM New Series Announces Vinyl Reissue

Arvo Pärt: Tabula Rasa

Gidon Kremer: violin
Keith Jarrett: piano
Tatjana Grindenko: violin
Staatsorchester Stuttgart: orchestra
Dennis Russel Davies: conductor
The 12 Cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
Alfred Schnittke: prepared piano
Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra
Saulius Sondeckis: conductor

ECM New Series 1275
LP: 0422 8177641 0

Vinyl Reissue Release Date: September 6, 2024

Vinyl reissue in facsimile gatefold edition, includes original liner notes in enclosed booklet

In 1984, ECM brought a new sound into the musical world with the release of Arvo Pärt’s Tabula rasa, the first album on the label’s New Series imprint.

As Paul Griffiths wrote in his liner notes for a 2010 special-edition produced in collaboration with the composer’s publisher Universal Edition: “This was the beginning, also, of an extraordinary association between composer and record producer, an example of loyalty and collegiality unique in our time. Pärt’s mature career is documented on ECM albums produced by Eicher (…) If Pärt gave ECM one of its enduring foci, ECM gave Pärt a forum he could not otherwise have found.”

Now, on the occasion of the 40th New Series anniversary, this gatefold vinyl reissue with enclosed booklet presents the record in its original guise. The record also marked the intersection of some of the most longstanding, significant musical collaborators in the label’s history: Arvo Pärt, Gidon Kremer and Keith Jarrett.

Until today the album’s enduring significance is pointed out in renowned publications:

Pärt's music reaches far beyond the conspiracy of connoisseurs who support most new classical music. He is a composer who speaks in hauntingly clear, familiar tones, yet he does not duplicate the music of the past. He has put his finger on something that is almost impossible to put into words—something to do with the power of music to obliterate the rigidities of space and time. One after the other, his chords silence the noise of the self, binding the mind to an eternal present. – Alex Ross, The New Yorker

The album that brought Pärt’s name to the West, and to the world (…). Back in 1984 Tabula rasa helped re-educate our ears and throw open the doors of our musical sensibilities to spatial domains that had otherwise been closed to us. This is without any shadow of a doubt one of the great recordings of the last century. – Rob Cowan, Gramophone (2023)

Christina Jensen 6/18/24 Christina Jensen 6/18/24

Aug 30: Danish String Quartet's New Album Keel Road Out on ECM New Series

ECM New Series Releases Danish String Quartet’s Keel Road

ECM New Series Releases

Danish String Quartet
Keel Road

Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, violin; Frederik Øland, violin; Asbjørn Nørgaard, viola; Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, violoncello

“Folk tunes are not just a part of our repertoire, but an important element of our identity as musicians” – The Danish String Quartet

Release Date: August 30, 2024
ECM New Series 2785

Press downloads available upon request.

The group made their ECM debut in 2016 with music of Thomas Adès, Per Nørgård & Hans Abrahamsen, reflecting their special affinity for contemporary composition.

“What they do know is how to be an exceptional quartet, whatever repertory they play.” — Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times

Keel Road was recorded at Copenhagen’s Village Recording Studio in November 2022, and mixed at Munich’s Bavaria Musikstudios in March 2024.

The Danish String Quartet celebrates the release of Keel Road with concerts in the US and Europe. Further details and information at www.danishquartet.com and www.ecmrecords.com

Christina Jensen 5/30/24 Christina Jensen 5/30/24

June 21: ECM New Series Releases Delian Quartett's New Album Im wachen Traume

ECM New Series Releases Delian Quartett’s Im wachen Traume

ECM New Series Releases

Delian Quartett
Im wachen Traume

Schumann / Reimann, Byrd / Pierini, Purcell

Delian Quartett
Adrian Pinzaru, violin; Andreas Moscho, violin; Lara Albesano, viola; Hendrik Blumenroth violoncello

Claudia Barainsky, soprano
Mikhail Timoshenko, baritone

Matthias Lingenfelder, viola
Andreas Arndt, violoncello

ECM New Series 2743
CD: 0289 4875875 3
Release Date: June 21, 2024

Press downloads available upon request.

Named after a lyric from the first piece in Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben song cycle, the Delian Quartett’s programme of Im wachen Traume combines said cycle – in a new arrangement for soprano and string quartet by the late Aribert Reimann – with music by Renaissance composer William Byrd and Baroque composer Henry Purcell. Most of the works appears in world premiere recordings here. The earlier English repertory bookends the album, framing Frauenliebe und Leben in a thematic embrace and, as the quartet’s violinist Andreas Moscho puts it, “in dazzling harmonies, that colour the musical span from the bliss of the moment to the end of things”.

Much has been said about Frauenliebe und Leben, from 1840 based on the poetry cycle by Adelbert von Chamisso, and many interpretations and versions of it uttered. This remodelling, however, conceived specifically for the Delian Quartett and soprano Claudia Barainsky, opens up truly new perspectives that seem to have been lying dormant within the original score all along. By transferring the piano part to four voices, Reimann dresses the cycle in an entirely new guise – one that builds on the sustained quality of the strings and utilizes both the art of reduction, to a concentrated and minimalist end, and embellishment, in form of vibratos, pizzicati and harmonic flourishes, for the purpose of emotional emphasis of both music and lyrics.

“Music and poetry have ever been acknowledg’d Sisters, which walking hand in hand, support each other; As Poetry is the harmony of Words, so Musick is that of Notes; and as Poetry is a Rise above Prose and Oratory, so is Musick the exaltation of Poetry. Both of them may excel apart, but sure they are most excellent when they are join’d…” Henry Purcell wrote this in 1650 – in a way, predicting the significant role poetry would play in Romantic music almost two centuries later.

Claudia Barainsky, one of the foremost interpreters of Reimann’s music, is a striking presence throughout the programme and especially expressive in the Schumann cycle, delivering the story of an enamoured woman, from her first meeting with her love, through marriage, to his death and after, with conviction and a keen sense for the text’s emotional delivery. The piano’s uniquely independent voice-leading from the original score is expanded upon in this arrangement for string quartet, with inspired translation choices made regarding range, drone-passages and how repetitive piano motifs here are cleverly spread across the two violins, viola and cello.

Andreas Moscho introduces the project in his performer’s note: “Two powers continue to overcome the changes of our fast-paced world. They have inspired human existence since forever: death, which limits us, and love, which carries us beyond our end. They also echo in the history of music. Under their influence, composers of all eras have bequeathed us with their most stirring moments. Some of them are brought together on his album. It traverses the space between light and shadow, between sorrow and joy, laying out new paths along the way: None of the works selected here were originally conceived for string quartet. In all of them, however, the string quartet seems to return home.”

All Byrd and Purcell pieces appear in arrangements by Italian composer Stefano Pierini, except for the Purcell instrumentals, “Pavane” and “Chaconne”, which are rendered in their original shape. More than mere reiterations, these Renaissance and Baroque reinterpretations inspire spirited performances by the quartet and soprano. Joining the ensemble on Byrd’s “Lullaby, my sweet little baby” and the programme-concluding Purcell piece “Hear my prayer, O Lord” is baritone Mikhail Timoshenko. Additional viola and violoncello parts on the last piece are contributed by Matthias Lingenfelder and Andreas Arndt.

As with Schumann, the synergy of poem and music comes to play here as well, in Byrd’s “Jhon come kiss me now”, which, in the version of Pierini, is based on the 1792 poem by Scottish lyricist Robert Burns. Word and song are entwined throughout Im wachen Traume, and the Delian Quartett’s impassioned performances together with Claudia Barainsky confirm Purcell when he suggests that they are indeed “most excellent when they are join’d”.

Since its inception in 2007 the Delian Quartett has gained widespread international attention, performing on major stages and festivals in Europe and alongside various important figures in the classical world. The German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has praised the quartet’s “wonderful sonority and striking plasticity of structures”. Previous recordings, among them performances of Schumann and Haydn, have been met with acclaim and garnered award nominations. One of the Delian Quartett’s main emphases is the expansion of its repertory to include the works of contemporary composers, such as Alberto Colla, Per Arne Glorvigen, Gabriel Iranyi, Christian Jost, Uljas Pulkkis and the in this album included Stefano Pierini and Aribert Reimann. Most of them have written music specifically for the ensemble.

The late German pianist and composer Aribert Reimann (4 March 1936 – 13 March 2024), known especially for his literary operas, was specialized in the contemporary Lied (art song) – he was a professor of the contemporary Lied in Hamburg and Berlin. Among his most well-known works are the operas Ein Traumspiel, Lear (based on Shakespeare’s play) and Medea. As recounted in this album’s liner note, Reimann conceived his arrangement of Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben after having dreamt about a version of the cycle performed by strings. This was in 2018 – he completed the score within two months of the dream.

Claudia Barainsky studied at the Hochschule der Künste in her home city of Berlin with Ingrid Figur, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Aribert Reimann and is internationally regarded as one of the most versatile singers of her time due to her wide-ranging repertory. She made her debut with the title role in Aribert Reimann's Melusine and was awarded the German Theater Prize "DER FAUST" for her outstanding interpretation and portrayal of the title role in Aribert Reimann's German premiere of Medea at the Frankfurt Opera. Barainsky has worked with some of the world’s leading orchestras and conductors – chamber music being her speciality.

Christina Jensen 5/24/24 Christina Jensen 5/24/24

June 14: ECM New Series Releases Pianist Anna Gourari's Recording of Hindemith and Schnittke

ECM New Series Releases Paul Hindemith | Alfred Schnittke

ECM New Series Releases

Paul Hindemith | Alfred Schnittke

Anna Gourari, Piano
Orchestra Della Svizerra Italiana
Markus Poschner, Conductor

ECM New Series 2752
CD: 0289 4875453 3
Release Date: June 14, 2024

Press downloads available upon request.

Contrasts emerge not only through the juxtaposition of the three works but from within the pieces, which have fiery temperaments and technically demanding scores in common.

Recorded at the Auditorio Stelio Molo in Lugano in December 2021, the album was produced by Manfred Eicher.

Christina Jensen 3/6/24 Christina Jensen 3/6/24

April 19: ECM Releases Fred Hersch's new album Silent, Listening

ECM

Fred Hersch: Silent, Listening

ECM Releases

Fred Hersch: Silent, Listening

Release date: April 19, 2024
ECM 2799

Press downloads available upon request.

Silent, Listening is both a highly individual musical offering and an important contribution to ECM’s line of innovative solo piano recordings. It finds US pianist Fred Hersch, one of jazz’s most outstanding soloists, putting a poetic emphasis on alert, open improvisation while also embracing original compositions and a scattering of standard tunes in his album’s graceful creative arc. Interspersing songs and spontaneously composed pieces, Hersch shapes and sustains a musical atmosphere that he describes as “nocturnal”, an atmosphere of heightened sensitivity to sound.

“I still believe in the idea of an album as a complete musical statement from beginning to end,” he says, adding that this is a perspective being lost in an impatient age. “To me, an album has to tell a story.” Silent, Listening builds upon Hersch’s alliance with Manfred Eicher, established with The Song Is You, Fred’s duo album with Italian trumpeter Enrico Rava.

“The things that I’ve been happiest with in my life as a musician in jazz,” says Fred, “have been those things that have happened most organically. And in that recording with Enrico, which was made very spontaneously, I recognized that something special was going on. I said afterwards that I’d really like to make a solo album with Manfred as producer, in the same hall – where the acoustics, to my ear, are pretty-near perfect - and on the same piano.”

In May 2023 Hersch returned to Lugano’s Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI. “I came with some ideas of tunes of mine I might want to play, and with some little snippets of things that were like launching pads for improvisation. ’Silent, Listening’, the title piece, for instance, has written material at the beginning and the end, and I improvise on its motives and feel.”

“Little Song” is a Hersch composition, written originally for the duo with Rava, which receives its recorded premiere here. As for the standard pieces chosen, “I had no idea I was going to play those. I just sort of felt them in the moment, and then the spontaneous compositions arose to offset the tunes.” To name the latter, Hersch brought along a list of titles culled from a Robert Rauschenberg monograph – “Rauschenberg was always good with titles” - hence “Volon”, “Aeon” and more.

“I play a little more inside the piano than I usually do,” says Hersch of the exploratory, freely-structured pieces. “People don’t necessarily associate me with open improvising, but it is something that I have done a lot of, over the years. In fact, the recording with Enrico also included an improvisation that worked really well. And Manfred’s very positive response to that encouraged me to go further in this direction, alternating tunes and not-tunes on the solo album.”

Among the standards, Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington’s “Star-Crossed Lovers” sets the scene with a sparse, haunted interpretation that cleaves to the melody. “It’s such a beautiful melody, and sometimes it’s enough to state it. I learned the tune from Jimmy Rowles who used to play the song , as did Tommy Flanagan. I knew both of them well when we all worked at Bradley’s in New York, and recorded a version of ‘Star Crossed Lovers’ on my very first album back in 1985.”

“The Winter of my Discontent” is a tune that Hersch began playing after meeting its composer Alec Wilder in 1978. “Wilder made contact – also at Bradley’s, as it happens - and sent me books of his songs, and that’s one I’ve been playing ever since, in different formats including duo and trio. In Lugano, the mood of what I was playing seemed to suggest and lead to it.”

“Softly As In a Morning Sunrise” is, in Fred Hersch’s mind, “always associated with Sonny Rollins at the Village Vanguard. Sonny’s version is the gold standard for me. Sonny Rollins is my hero, frankly. As a jazz musician he has everything, and I’ve been strongly influenced by him.”

“Akrasia” is an instance of a Hersch composition that took on a second life in the studio. Its title, meaning “acting against one’s better interests”, is an allusion to life in lockdown when, Fred says, he found himself spending too much time indulging in detective novels and computer games. “You know you shouldn’t be doing it, but… Anyway, ‘Akrasia’ is a longer composition and, when we started recording it in Lugano, I suddenly realized that the music was on the floor, and I couldn’t see it! So I played the beginning of it and then just kept going, improvising, and it turned into something unexpected but, we felt, interesting.”

This openness to contingency and willingness to honour the flow of things was also, Hersch says, reflected in his performance of Russ Freeman’s “The Wind”, which provides one of the album’s most magical sequences. Fred says that his younger, perfectionist self might have balked at his delineation of the melody but that, at 68, he is trying “not to micromanage everything anymore. What we got was a great first take” – gentle, but full of feeling – “that would have been impossible to recapture with the same spirit.”

The in-the-moment spontaneity of Silent, Listening makes it, similarly, a self-contained one-off. Hersch enjoys the challenge of finding new musical solutions for new spaces and his upcoming touring activities include solo piano performances in both the US and Europe. Dates include Merkin Concert Hall, New York City (April 16), Piedmont Piano Company, Oakland CA (April 28) ,Dakota, Minneapolis MN (April 29), SPACE, Chicago IL (April 30), Cleveland OH (April 31), Firenze, Italy (May 11), Festival Ste Germain, Paris, France (May 18), Stadtcasino, Basel, Switzerland (May 21), Innsbruck, Austria (May 23),), Flagey, Brussels, Belgium (May 31), Ghent, Belgium, June 1. Additionally Fred Hersch plays duo concerts in France with Avishai Cohen in Nantes (May 6) and Coutances (May 8), and appears with the Stockholm Jazz Orchestra in Stockholm, Sweden on May 17. He plays in trio with Drew Gress and Joey Baron in Treviso, Italy on May 25. Hersch returns to Europe for another round of concerts in October.

For biographical and other details, visit Fred’s web site: www.fredhersch.com

Further ECM recordings with Fred Hersch are in preparation.

Christina Jensen 12/15/23 Christina Jensen 12/15/23

ECM New Series releases Gidon Kremer's Songs of Fate

ECM New Series

Gidon Kremer: Songs of Fate

ECM New Series Releases

Gidon Kremer: Songs of Fate

Vida Miknevičiūtė, Soprano
Gidon Kremer, Violin
Magdalena Ceple, Violoncello
Andrei Pushkarev, Vibraphone
Kremerata Baltica

Barcode: CD 0028948598502
Catalogue number: ECM 2745
Release Date: January 19, 2024

Weinberg's Aria, Op 9
First Single Available Now: https://ecm.lnk.to/SongsOfFateFP

Press downloads available upon request.

"Gidon Kremer has perhaps never before revealed himself as intimately and as existentially focused as on this recording," observes Wolfgang Sandner in his liner note accompanying the Latvian violinist's new album Songs of Fate, recorded in July 2019 and July 2022 and set for release by ECM New Series on January 19, 2024. The first single, Weinberg's Aria, Op. 9, is available now.

Together with his Kremerata Baltica chamber ensemble and soprano Vida Mikneviciüte, Kremer approaches scores by Baltic composers Raminta Serksnyte, Giedrius Kuprevitius, Jekabs Janevskis and the Polish-Jewish composer Mieczysiaw Weinberg.

In a performer's note, Kremer explains how, reflecting on the different threads that create the fabric of this programme, "I realise - to my own surprise - that in many ways, this project revolves around the notion of 'Jewishness'."

Poignant deliveries of excerpts from the chamber symphony The Star of David and Kaddish by Giedrius Kuprevitius as well as the Jewish Songs by Mieczyslaw Weinberg emphasize this connotation. Bookending Songs of Fate are premiere recordings of Raminta Serksnyte's This too shall pass and Jekabs Janevskis's Lignum, bringing the voices of a younger generation of composers to the fore.