Jan Garbarek / The Hilliard Ensemble REMEMBER ME, MY DEAR

25 years on from the release of Officium, the groundbreaking alliance of Jan Garbarek and The Hilliard Ensemble, comes Remember me, my dear, recorded during the final tour the group made in October 2014. The program is emblematic of the range of repertoire the Norwegian saxophonist and British vocal quartet explored together– from Pérotin, Hildegard von Bingen, Guillaume le Rouge, Antoine Brumel to Komitas , Arvo Pärt and more. It could be said that the Hilliard/Garbarek combination, in concert, transcended its source materials, with early music, contemporary composition and improvisation interfused in the responsive acoustics of sacred spaces. And this final album reminds us that the unique Garbarek/Hilliard combination, and its unprecedented exploration of sound, was consistently breathtaking.

Dresdner Philharmonie / Dennis Russell Davies ALFRED SCHNITTKE Symphony No. 9

Composed shortly before his death in 1998, Schnittke’s ultimate symphony – actually his very last work – is a “Ninth” in a most unusual sense: Put down with a shaky left hand by an artist who had survived four strokes and was laterally debilitated, it is an impressive triumph of spiritual energy over physical constraints. The composer’s widow Irina treated the barely-legible manuscript as a testament and was long doubtful whom to entrust with the difficult task of deciphering and reconstructing the highly expressive three movements for large orchestra (some 38 minutes of music). She finally settled on Moscow-born Alexander Raskatov, who not only provided a thorough score but, convinced that Schnittke had intended to write a fourth movement, also developed the idea to add an independent epilogue, the “Nunc Dimitis” (“Lord, let thy servant now depart into thy promis'd rest”) for mezzo soprano, vocal quartett and orchestra. It is based on the famous text by orthodox monk Starets Siluan and on verses by Joseph Brodsky, Schnittke’s favourite poet. Both pieces were given their first performances in the Dresden Frauenkirche in summer 2007 by the musicians of this world première recording which feautures long-standing ECM protagonists the Hilliard Ensemble and conductor Dennis Russell Davies. (ECM Records)

The Hilliard Ensemble / Christoph Poppen J.S. BACH Morimur

In music of the baroque era it was popular to use the medium of numbers for conveying secrets and riddles, and Bach studies have illuminated many new 'meanings' in his sacred works. Now 'Morimur' explores the coded references, and hidden messages in his solo violin music, opening a window on Bach's thought at a time when he was deeply affected by the sudden and tragic death of his wife, Maria Barbara, in 1720. Building on the research of Professor Helga Thoene, violinist Christoph Poppen and the Hilliard Ensemble have realised a unique project for ECM New Series: They offer a stunning experience by interweaving the verses of the 'hidden chorales' of the Ciaccona with Bach's harmonically complex violin part. (ECM Records)

You are about to hear one of the world’s greatest and best-known pieces in a completely new light. Indeed, you may be about to change your view of the composer whom the entire musical world reveres above all others: Johann Sebastian Bach. The work is the Partita in D Minor for solo violin, and the person responsible for what seems set to be a thorough revision of Bach and his music is a German musicologist by the name of Helga Thoene. The radicality of the rethink Thoene’s work requires is matched by the excitement her discoveries bring. ... Thoene has discovered the presence of a multitude chorales shot through the textures of the Sonatas and Partitas. ... The German violinist Christoph Poppen and the Hilliard Ensemble have just recorded the Partita and “its” chorales on a CD entitled Morimur, for the Munich-based label ECM, presenting the music first separately, and then combining the violin and voices. The effect is stunning. The Chaconne in this new incarnation is one of the most moving things I have heard in years – spookily so, since what you are now hearing hasn’t been heard since the thoughts passed through Bach’s mind. You are, in effect, eavesdropping on the greatest mind in musical history from inside Bach’s own head. (Martin Anderson / Fanfare)

GAVIN BRYARS Vita Nova

Vita Nova includes four pieces by Bryars in which ECM appeared to be, at least partially, attempting to cash in on the new age-y vogue of the early '90s for the sort of quasi-medieval music made relatively popular by assorted singing monks, Arvo Pärt, and the Hilliard Ensemble with Jan Garbarek. Indeed, that latter group is on hand here to perform "Glorious Hill," and the results are as blandly attractive as the listener might guess given the following recipe: Take a mushily mystical text (in Latin), set to vaguely medieval sounding music, and spice with a dash of chromaticism and a pinch of minimalism. It's all handsomely produced and sung but terribly precious and overly palatable. How far Bryars had come from the rich reality of the tramp singing "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet" in his masterpiece from the '70s. Unfortunately, the remainder of the disc also fails to deliver much more than prettiness. The longest composition, "Four Elements," falls into the same gauzily impressionistic, rudderless rut of much of his '90s work, and the introduction of David James, the same countertenor used in "Incipit Vita Nova," seems tacked on just to fit in with the ostensible "medieval" feel of the album. The same applies to the use of a recorder on the final piece, "Sub Rosa." That work, however, does contain glimmers of the unique beauty and clarity of Bryars' earlier work as found on Hommages. But those instances are far too meager to be able to recommend this recording to anyone but listeners attempting to slowly crawl their way out of the new age morass.

(Brian Olewnick)

The Hilliard Ensemble GESUALDO Quinto Libro di Madrigali

An aristocrat who forged an idiosyncratic style of musical expression, Don Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, was one of those composers in music history who can truly be described as being ahead of his time. Gesualdo was a highly expressive composer and a virtuoso performer on the bass lute. Yet his chromatic progressions baffled his contemporaries and had to wait until the 19th-century era to find resonance in artistic parallels. Among his most important compositions are six books of five-part madrigals dating from between 1594 and 1611. The last two books in particular – this recording by the Hilliard Ensemble brings new performances of Book 5 – displays his dissonant musical language with its extreme harmonic disruptions, striking tempo contrasts and a distinctly modern feel for drama. The Hilliard Ensemble’s expressive singing, here also featuring soprano Monika Mauch and countertenor David Gould, conjures up that sound described by the great music historian Hans Redlich as growing out of “the antithesis between extravagant/debauched eroticism and self-castigating longing for death”. (ECM Records)

The Hilliard Ensemble NICOLAS GOMBERT Missa Media Vita In Morte Sumus

A rightful successor to Josquin Desprez, with whom he studied, Nicolas Gombert had been long neglected at the time of this recording. The mass represented here, split as it is among a choice selection of motets, is exemplary of his gift for rewriting. His vocal lines are characterized by their restlessness, both in terms of composition (the virtual lack of rests in the score) and mood (in its constant search for resolution).

How do Hilliards bring their own sensibility to music already so fine? By doing what they always do so well: allowing their entire beings to resonate with every note they sing. Augmenting their usual quartet, the Hilliards welcome bass Robert Macdonald and tenor Andreas Hirtreiter (making a trio of tenors for three of the motets herein) for this long-overdue recording. Macdonald’s presence is especially felt in the six-part motet, Media vita in morte sumus, that opens the program. Like much of what follows on this disc, the music is dark and bottom-heavy. This doesn’t mean, however, that moments of light are nowhere to be found, for in the escalations of tense polyphony that abound there is the illumination of obscurity. Like a stained glass window, one comes to know it through its variations in opacity and translucence, and then only through a glow whose source remains as intangible as the reverence that gave it life.

Gombert takes the Media vita in morte sumus as source for his five-part Missa Media Vita. Scattered among a selection of motets, the voices of the Missa tumble into one another in a music resigned to its own finitude. Harmonies tend toward the dissonant and tight, so that moments of consonance shine with an airy quality that seems to bypass the mind completely and head straight to the prayerful heart. There is gravity in this music, both in its sense of seriousness and in terms of force. One need listen no further than the Kyrie, which through its introductory tenor line shifts the angle of light to a gallery of rolling landscapes. Between the subtler interactions of the Sanctus and the continued magic of the tenor lines in the Agnus Dei, one cannot help but hear in their amen(d)s a visceral resolution.

Throughout the remaining motets, the brilliance of David James steals the heart, especially in O crux, splenidor cunctis. His duetted lines with tenors in the Salve Regina seem also to fly, scanning pasture for supplication. Unexpected changes await in Anima Mea, which moves with the timidity of a newly baptized child, while the closing Musae lovis, a tribute to Josquin, surrounds us in folds of ever-changing breath.

Gombert’s is music one can easily get lost in. In doing so, the listener learns to shut out the individual voice in favor of the grander tabernacle it embodies. His motives work in ropes more than threads. Like members of a shepherd’s flock, herded by divine command, they may not understand the constitution of the voice that guides them, but through the sound alone they know to press on with their brothers and sisters into the setting sun. (ECM Reviews)

Polyphony / Stephen Layton ARVO PÄRT Triodion

There's a line in this disc's title track, from an Orthodox ode addressed to Saint Nicholas: "therewithal hast thou acquired: by humility - greatness, by poverty - riches." This might have been written about Arvo Pärt's compositional technique, here liberated from the minimalist strictures of earlier decades, treading a fine line between agony and ecstasy in a way unparalleled since Bach.

In his earlier vein, Pärt often reached spiritual feast through the technical famine of systematic patterning and repetition. In the music on this new CD, all composed between 1996 and 2002 and featuring six première recordings, Pärt instead suggests austerity through the use of a much broader and freer palette. This is particularly palpable in the Nunc Dimittis, where gorgeous textures, harmonies and sonorities conjure a feeling of purity and emptiness.

Elsewhere, Pärt has a couple of surprises up his sleeve. The opening track, Dopo la vittoria, begins in sprightly madrigalian form, entirely appropriate to a commission from the City of Milan. It sets an Italian text describing the conception of the Te Deum by Saints Ambrose and Augustine, an unusually postmodern exercise for Pärt, but one which does nothing to detract from the sincerity of the setting, suggesting instead a celebration of the sanctifying power of centuries of worshipful use.

The weirdest moment on the disc comes with My heart's in the Highlands, a setting of a Burns poem which apparently has a highly personal significance for the composer. It's one of only two tracks on the disc which recall Pärt's earlier, more systematic approach, giving Burns' wistful evocation of the bucolic North to a monotone counter-tenor over a strictly controlled organ accompaniment, and making the text suddenly sound like a mystical allegory of longing for the divine.

There's little of the balletic brilliance that Pärt displayed in such works as the Stabat Mater or Tabula Rasa, and mercifully as little of the thunderous severity of his Passio mode. Instead there's a quiet and cumulative power to these works, given performances of luminous purity by Polyphony and Stephen Layton. By the time we arrive at the Salve Regina, a kind of penitential cradle song which closes the disc, we're ready to fall at the feet of the Maker and beg for forgiveness, simultaneously harrowed and consoled. (BBC Music)

The Hilliard Ensemble HEINZ HOLLIGER Machaut-Transkriptionen

Swiss composer Heinz Holliger's Machaut-Transkriptionen comprises a spacious cycle of pieces written over a ten year period beginning in 2001. An imaginative re-investigation of the work of the great 14th century French composer-poet Guillaume de Machaut, it is scored for four voices and three violas.

Note-for-note transcriptions of Machaut give way to Holliger's increasingly creative refractions of the music. In Heinz Holliger's works, the succinct term 'transcriptions' conceals multi-layered variants of the enigmatic source material and the most subtle diversification of sound, using the technical possibilities of the 21st century. In the complete, almost one-hour cycle, Machaut's original compositions, performed a cappella, have been interwoven with Holliger's variations. Four of the transcriptions have been arranged for three violas alone. The traditional monophonic Lay VII, Amours doucement me tente, however, appears in a new four-part vocal setting, and in the concluding Complainte from 'Remede de Fortune' the singing voices join the violas.

As Holliger notes, his in-depth study of Machaut opened up new vistas for his compositional activity and his admiration for the source material is mirrored in the outstanding performances of the violists and singers. The Machaut-Transkriptionen proves a perfect vehicle for the Hilliard Ensemble's set skills as interpreters of both old and new music, and this recording, made in 2010 in Zurich, captures the vocal group at the heights of its powers. Their own affinity for Machaut is also documented on their album of his Motets. 

Jan Garbarek / The Hilliard Ensemble OFFICIUM NOVUM

The inspired bringing together of Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble has resulted in consistently inventive music making since 1993. It was the groundbreaking “Officium” album, with Garbarek’s saxophone as a free-ranging ‘fifth voice’ with the Ensemble, which gave the first indications of the musical scope and emotional power of this combination. “Mnemosyne”, 1998’s double album, took the story further, expanding the repertoire beyond ‘early music’ to embrace works both ancient and modern.
Now, after another decade of shared experiences, comes a third album from Garbarek/Hilliard, recorded, like its distinguished predecessors, in the Austrian monastery of St Gerold, with Manfred Eicher producing. Aptly titled, there is continuity in the music of “Officium Novum” and also some new departures. In ‘Occident/Orient’ spirit the album looks eastward, with Armenia as its vantage point and with the compositions and adaptations of Komitas as a central focus. The Hilliards have studied Komitas’s pieces, which draw upon both medieval sacred music and the bardic tradition of the Caucasus in the course of their visits to Armenia, and the modes of the music encourage some of Garbarek’s most impassioned playing. Works from many sources are drawn together as the musicians embark on their travels through time and over many lands. “Officium Novum” journeys from Yerevan to Byzantium, to Russia, France and Spain: all voyages embraced by the album’s dramaturgical flow, as the individual works are situated in a larger ‘compositional’ frame. (ECM Records)

Alexei Lubimov /SWR Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra / Andrey Boreyko ARVO PÄRT Lamentate

Written for large orchestra and solo piano, and commissioned for a series of live events at Tate Modern, “Lamentate” was inspired by Pärt’s encounter with the enormous sculpture “Marsyas”, by Bombay-born artist Anish Kapoor. 150 metres long, “Marsyas” filled the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall for a year. Named for the Greek satyr flayed alive by the god Apollo, the piece consists of three enormous steel rings joined by a single span of dark red PVC membrane. The colour was intended by the artist to suggest blood and the body, and the sculpture dwarfed the viewer, too large to be viewed in its entirety from any single position: “I wanted to make body into sky”, says Kapoor.
For Arvo Pärt the dimensions of the work were breathtaking: “My first impression was that I, as a living being, was standing before my own body and was dead – as in a time-warp perspective, at once in the future and the present. ... In this moment I had a strong sense of not being ready to die. And I was moved to ask myself just what I could still manage to accomplish in the time left to me.”
“Lamentate” then, is a lament not for the dead, but for the living, who must struggle “with the pain and hopelessness of this world.” The solo piano role is designated by the composer to represent “one”, the individual, buffeted by fate. It can be viewed, he writes, “as a first person narrative”. Pärt: “The work is marked by diametrically opposed moods... Exaggerating slightly, I would characterize these poles as ‘brutal-overwhelming’ and ‘intimate-fragile’.” In the present recording, the solo protagonist Alexei Lubimov sails the sea of circumstance with extraordinary fluency, negotiating ferocious tidal waves and ominous calms. The luminescent quality to his playing, which recently served Silvestrov’s “Metamusik” and “Postludium” so well is very much to the fore, sustaining the sense of quasi-improvisational freshness that was one of Pärt’s original goals for this work. Conductor Andrey Boreyko, marshalling the instrumental forces of the SWR Radio Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart, maintains the emotional pressure throughout a very engaged performance of a work that concludes in a dialogue of reminiscences, of laments and consolations.

The Hilliard Ensemble TRANSEAMUS

Having recorded more than 20 albums for ECM since the mid-’80s, the Hilliard Ensemble caps its sublime discography before retirement with a final release: Transeamus: English Carols and Motets, a collection of polyphony – in two, three and four parts – from the 15th-century. The album’s main title translates as “we travel on,” fitting as a nod of goodbye from one of the most venturesome and beloved of classical vocal groups. Also fitting is the fact that this British vocal quartet’s very first recording included music from the court of Henry VIII, so Transeamus brings their odyssey through the ages full circle. The album includes many of the group’s favorite pieces from this era, including previously unrecorded items from its concert programs by the likes of John Plummer, Walter Lambe and William Cornysh. More of the album’s works are by composers rendered anonymous by time, yet all of this music is rich with enduring personality.

Hilliard Ensemble countertenor David James writes in his album note: “The sweet harmonies might appear uncomplicated, but this transparency of sound creates a cumulative effect that is mesmerizing. The album ends with ‘Ah gentle Jesu.’ We know the composer’s name, Sheryngham, but virtually nothing else. On paper, it is a simple dialogue between Christ on the cross and a penitent sinner; however, the intensity of the music is so overwhelming that, from our experience in concert, both listener and performer are left in stunned silence.”

Transeamus includes several ancient carols on a Christmas theme, including ‘Marvel Not Joseph’, ‘Ah! My Dear Son’ and ‘There Is No Rose’. But the lyrical matter varies through the album. Hilliard baritone Gordon Jones explains: “The subject of the carol at this time is mixed, but it’s usually Christmas, the Virgin Mary and the Saints. The type of carol represented on this album is a sacred – but probably non-liturgical – piece in Latin and/or English.

They were in popular use and are sometimes associated with dance. It has been suggested, because of their form – burden/refrain, similar to the continental rondeau – that they were used as processional pieces in church. Yet the evidence for this seems to be vanishingly slim. The pieces about St. Thomas manage to weave matters of English history and politics into the texts.”
About the repertoire, James adds: “This is music that we were born and bred to sing – it’s quintessentially English. We started singing many of these pieces as boys in choirs, so singing this music is for us like going home.”
The Hilliard Ensemble recorded Transeamus at their favourite recording venue, the Alpine monastery of St. Gerold in Austria, a stone’s throw over the border from Switzerland. “Most of our ECM albums have been recorded in the chapel at St. Gerold,” James explains. “It’s very quiet, being high up in the mountains – a wonderful place for recording our kind of music.

It’s a very intimate space, and with just the four of us in there, it gives the music a warm sound. I think it’s the sound we have carried with us – or within us – wherever we travelled, in a way.”
Reflecting on decades of documenting music from the Middle Ages to modern times for ECM, James says: “We’ve been blessed to only record music that we really wanted to record – projects based not on commercial criteria but rather on artistic impulse. Manfred Eicher wanted us to propose music to him, and if he agreed that it seemed special and right at the time, we were off to record – even with some very obscure repertoire that another label might not have been so excited about. Manfred’s idea was always, ‘If this music moves me, then it will surely move other people.’ That sort of approach has been fantastically inspiring for the Hilliard Ensemble over the years and, I hope, for listeners around the world for many years to come.”

Kim Kashkashian TIGRAN MANSURIAN Monodia

Tigran Mansurian connects through his work to cultural and emotional groundsprings that are important to him, particularly hints of indigenous Armenian music. He also takes note of his current musical environment, and this sense of inner and outer elements combining informs both the music on these discs and the way it is played – especially by fellow-Armenian Kim Kashkashian. … The Viola Concerto is both moving and mercurial, sometimes grounded in faith or earth, at other times clouded and troubled, even close to defiance… The economically scored Violin Concerto is again rich in unaccompanied material and Leonidas Kavakos seems to relish every note, especially in the many higher-reaching passages. … “Lachrymae” for soprano saxophone and viola finds Kashkashian and Garbarek intertwined in an embrace of pitches and textures, each adapting to, or mirroring, the other’s soundworld. “Confessing Faith” for viola and voices sets prayers by the 12th-century Armenian poet and musician St Nerses Shnorhali, its bold incantations scaling peaks of expressive intensity, especially whenever the countertenor David James enters. The viola’s warm and occasionally abrasive contribution acts as a sort of humanising presence.
Monodia set me thinking along various fronts. Firstly, about the strength and innate soulfulness of Kashkashian’s musicianship, so profoundly suited to the viola. Then the creative excitement of combining unlikely instrumental timbres, and the question of music bridging different faiths, or at the very least different branches of the same faith. … Balancing and sound quality are immaculate.
(Rob Cowan, Gramophone)
 

Arvo Pärt LAMENTATE

Written for large orchestra and solo piano, and commissioned for a series of live events at Tate Modern, “Lamentate” was inspired by Pärt’s encounter with the enormous sculpture “Marsyas”, by Bombay-born artist Anish Kapoor. 150 metres long, “Marsyas” filled the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall for a year. Named for the Greek satyr flayed alive by the god Apollo, the piece consists of three enormous steel rings joined by a single span of dark red PVC membrane. The colour was intended by the artist to suggest blood and the body, and the sculpture dwarfed the viewer, too large to be viewed in its entirety from any single position: “I wanted to make body into sky”, says Kapoor.
For Arvo Pärt the dimensions of the work were breathtaking: “My first impression was that I, as a living being, was standing before my own body and was dead – as in a time-warp perspective, at once in the future and the present. ... In this moment I had a strong sense of not being ready to die. And I was moved to ask myself just what I could still manage to accomplish in the time left to me.”
“Lamentate” then, is a lament not for the dead, but for the living, who must struggle “with the pain and hopelessness of this world.” The solo piano role is designated by the composer to represent “one”, the individual, buffeted by fate. It can be viewed, he writes, “as a first person narrative”. Pärt: “The work is marked by diametrically opposed moods... Exaggerating slightly, I would characterize these poles as ‘brutal-overwhelming’ and ‘intimate-fragile’.” In the present recording, the solo protagonist Alexei Lubimov sails the sea of circumstance with extraordinary fluency, negotiating ferocious tidal waves and ominous calms. The luminescent quality to his playing, which recently served Silvestrov’s “Metamusik” and “Postludium” so well is very much to the fore, sustaining the sense of quasi-improvisational freshness that was one of Pärt’s original goals for this work. Conductor Andrey Boreyko, marshalling the instrumental forces of the SWR Radio Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart, maintains the emotional pressure throughout a very engaged performance of a work that concludes in a dialogue of reminiscences, of laments and consolations.