Claudio Constantini / Louiza Hamadi 20TH CENTURY TANGO

20TH CENTURY TANGO

Dino Saluzzi / Gidon Kremer / Andrei Pushkarev GIYA KANCHELI Themes From the Songbook

“Georgian film is a strange phenomenon, special, philosophically light, sophisticated and at the same time childishly pure and innocent,” Federico Fellini once said. “There is everything that can make me cry, and I ought to say that it (my crying) is not an easy thing.”

There is certainly an element of whimsy and nostalgia permeating the imaginative, gentle arrangements featured on “Themes From the Songbook.” The disc is inspired by “Simple Music for Piano,” a collection published in 2009 by the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli in which he reprised melodies from his large catalog of music for film and theater.

“Themes From the Songbook” was arranged as a surprise 75th-birthday present for the composer by Sandro Kancheli, his son, and Manfred Eicher, the ECM producer. It features 20 arrangements of the senior Mr. Kancheli’s incidental music, performed by the Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer, the Argentine bandoneónist Dino Saluzzi and the Ukrainian vibraphonist Andrei Pushkarev.

The disc opens with the poignant “Herio Bichebo.” Mr. Saluzzi teases out the wistful theme of this patriotic song, addressed to Georgians living in Turkey, from the film “Earth, This Is Your Son.” The disc concludes with the same song, with Jansug Kakhidze singing and conducting the Tbilisi Symphony Orchestra.

Bandoneón and vibraphone combine to elegiac effect in the gentle theme from the film “Bear’s Kiss.” Mr. Kremer joins in the mysterious tune from music for Arthur Miller’s “Crucible.”

Mr. Kremer plays the solitary theme from the film “Don Quixote” in Variation 1; Mr. Saluzzi performs the same melody, with beautiful shadings, in Variations 2 and 3. The mood is shattered with the jaunty themes from the play “The Role for a Beginner” and the Waltz from “The Eccentrics.”(Vivien Schweitzer)

Jean-Luc Godard NOUVELLE VAGUE

This is the complete soundtrack - music, dialogue, sounds - of Jean-Luc Godard's Nouvelle Vague, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990.'In making this film,' Godard said at a press conference later that year, 'I heard a great deal of music; music produced by Manfred Eicher.I can well imagine how musicians are inspired and influenced by these sounds. And I too have immersed myself in this music, and I have felt,in my work, like a musician.' Interviewed at the Toronto Film Festival of 1996, Godard returned to this theme: 'Manfred began our relationship by sending me some music. It was new music of Arvo Pärt and, especially, David Darling, which I had never heard of before. And after listening, I wrote to him and asked him to send me more records of his company. And I had the feeling, the way he was producing sound that we were moreor less in the same country: he with sounds, me with images. And the music that he sends me is music that brings me to some ideas in moviemaking. In fact, some of the records brought me to a picture called Nouvelle Vague and later other ones... and I began to imagine things due to that kind of music.' Cahiers du Cinéma: 'The Nouvelle Vague soundtrack is magnificent. The intertwining of the various forms of music, voices and sounds is one of the most extraordinary ever heard, even including Godard's oeuvre.' Includes the voices of Alain Delon, Domiziana Giordano, Roland Amstutz, Laurence Cote, Jacques Dacqmine, Christophe Odent, Laurence Guerre, Joseph Lisbona, and others. (ECM Records)

Rosamunde Quartett DINO SALUZZI

The Kultrum collaboration between Argentinian bandoneon master Dino Saluzzi and the Munich-based German-Austrian-Australian Rosamunde Quartet was initiated in 1996. Featuring Saluzzi's chamber music for bandoneon and string quartet, Kultrum is both a "departure" and an extension of Dino's previous ECM recordings (in fact the title echoes that of his first disc for the label), in which - as Swiss critic Peter Rüedi has noted - he acknowledges and then transgresses the boundaries: between composition and improvisation, between so-called serious and popular music, between folk music and jazz and tango.

The genesis of the project, however, can be traced back specifically to Saluzzi's solo album Andina of 1988 and a small piece added as a postscript to that session. The sound of the bandoneon on "Memories" seemed to imply a wave of orchestration, and the suggestion that a string quartet could bring this out more fully was left for Saluzzi to ponder.

In the interim, the Rosamunde Quartet - whose tastes are unusually comprehensive for a classical ensemble - raised Saluzzi's name among a list of enthusiasms from Haydn to Nono in the course of production discussions with ECM. A Munich concert by the Saluzzi Trio provided an opportunity for Dino and cellist Anja Lechner to meet and exchange ideas and in June 1996, the Saluzzi-Rosamunde collective began rehearsing together.

Saluzzi insists that tango players would have been inadequate interpreters of his new music. "I needed freedom from the tango form. At the same time, I also feel responsibility to conserve the tradition, and it's dangerous to move, but we have to move." Not least to defend the territory from the numerous classical players claiming Argentine inspirations this season - now that Piazzolla is safely dead!

The Kultrum project has toured over the last two years, to critical and public acclaim, as Saluzzi and the quartet have honed the material. A few days before the recording at the Austrian monastery of St Gerold (site of such significant New Series recordings as the Jan Garbarek/Hilliard Ensemble Officium album, Giya Kancheli's Exil, Paul Giger's Schattenwelt, Michelle Makarski's Caoine and Eduard Brunner's Dal Niente), the collective played an ecstatically-received concert at Munich's Prinzregententheater. (ECM Records)

Horacio Lavandera DINO SALUZZI Imágenes

Imágenes features premiere recordings of Dino Saluzzi’s music for piano. The pieces gathered together here, written between 1960 and 2002, were variously conceived in Salta and Buenos Aires and on the road. Periodically, the great bandoneonist has set aside the instrument which has accompanied him for more than seven decades, to find expression by other means. Over the years, of course, he has written the most diverse music for ensembles of many kinds, including chamber music for his Kultrum collaboration with the ‘Rosamunde Quartett’, pieces for duo with classical cellist Anja Lechner, and works for orchestra performed and recorded with the Metropole Orchestra in Amsterdam’s Musiekgebouw. On Imagénes, Horacio Lavandera, a gifted Argentine pianist specialized in both classical music and contemporary composition – he studied with Maurizio Pollini and Charles Rosen, and has collaborated with Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Mauricio Kagel – proves to be an ideal Saluzzi interpreter, attuned both to his love of his homeland and his artistic need to travel widely.

Lavandera recorded these pieces, under the supervision of the composer, and with Manfred Eicher as producer, at Oslo’s Rainbow studio in October 2013. The album is issued in time for Dino Saluzzi’s 80^th birthday on May 20.