GÉRARD PESSON Aggravations et final

Gérard Pesson is a leading French composer of his generation, albeit one whose music bears the mark of a true Germanophile. This is perhaps best heard in the last two works on this disc: Wunderblock (Nebenstück II) “underwrites” the Maestoso from Bruckner’s Sixth Symphony in a manner reminiscent of Hans Zender’s transcriptions. For all the distortions and parasitical incursions from elsewhere, the substructure of the original is audible throughout.

This kind of homage is one aspect of Pesson’s output generally; another is best represented by the playful Cassation for string trio, piano and clarinet, whose evanescent centrepiece is the opening of Tristan as reworked by Wagner himself many years later. Most of the musical argument, however, is embodied in a language clearly derived form Lachenmann’s musique concrète instrumentale: here the musicians (as with the orchestra and chamber ensemble in Aggravations et final and Rescousse, respectively) engage in rhythmical scrapings, upward glissandi and breath-sounds, albeit in a rather different expressive intention from that of the German composer. That intention seems more overtly playful and allusive, and (dare I say it) more “French” in its focus on minute details; what is sometimes missing is the granite-like logic of Lachenmann’s long-term planning. Lest I appear to judge one composer according to the values of another, I should say that Pesson’s own notes are not always as helpful as one might wish. (In them one recognises the Frenchman, just as Lachenmann’s mark him out as German.) What is beyond doubt, and admirably, is the precision of these performances (by no means forgetting the pianist Hermann Kretzschmar in Vexierbilder II), which would do any composer proud. (Fabrice Fitch / Gramophone)

Peter Eötvös / Ensemble Modern HELMUT LACHENMANN Schwankungen am Rand

The New York Times recently asked the question "Who is the most influential European composer of the moment?" and answered that no name "comes to mind more immediately than that of Helmut Lachenmann: The best of his work takes you by the hand and will not let you go until it has shown you things you could not have suspected."

The first New Series disc by the great German composer/inventor resounds with startling sound-events, realized brilliantly – and dramatically – by the Ensemble Modern and the Ensemble Modern Orchestra, under the inspired direction of Peter Eötvös. These compositions from 1974/75, 1983/84 and 1992 represent key moments in Lachenmann's restless voyage of sound-discovery. But as he reminds us, uncovering "new" sounds is but the beginning of the process: "The discovery of a sound, or even a new soundscape ... does not merely open up a new creative paradise to the composer; at the start it generates 'problems' ... It is, after all, a question of the permanent opening up of aural perception..."

In an insightful liner note, Lachenmann writes of the way in which the composing of "Schwankungen am Rand" („Fluctuations at the Edge“) changed his work and his life: "When the project was completed, I was no longer the person I had been; I was ready for adventures in other thought zones. Finally, I seemed to have arrived at a place that allowed me to look in all directions..." The compositional process had been a laborious one. Taking his cue from the "thunder sheets" used in his former teacher Luigi Nono's Diario Pollacco I, Lachenmann had spent weeks exploring the sound properties of sheets of steel: "I began banging on them every which way, dragging them across the floor over soft and hard surfaces, plying them with metal rods. I struck them, scraped them, dropped them edge first onto the floor, so that the glissando-ing metal sheet bent, doubled up, contorted, acquired nicks ... and at some point these objects turned into radically deformed monster violins with super-pizzicato-fluido sounds, or they took on the character of huge, exceedingly reverberant flexatones ..." An ensemble was implied of real and imaginary instruments, incorporating "an arsenal made up of sources of sonance and resonance ranging all the way to the naked white noises of loudspeakers, 'crumple zones' of crushed wrapping paper crackling, and expansive echo chambers." In the process, Lachenmann found himself asking what, in this context, does a tone, an interval, a chord, a figure, mean? And what, indeed, is music?

"Schwankungen am Rand" is an important pioneering work, and one that prompts Jürg Stenzl, in a CD booklet essay to assert that, to certain extent Lachenmann "reinvented instrumental music [...] To claim that Lachenmann's works present a challenge is seemingly to state the obvious. But our musical culture has scarcely anything so exciting, fascinating, moving and terrifying to offer its inquisitive listeners as the music of Helmut Lachenmann."
Both the Ensemble Modern and its larger offshoot, the Ensemble Modern Orchestra have worked closely with Helmut Lachenmann. When the expanded EMO gave its premiere performances in 1998, it played "Schwankungen am Rand", under the direction of Peter Eötvös. Eötvös is also the dedicatee of "Mouvement – vor der Erstarrung", and the Ensemble Modern gave the German premiere of this dark work in 1984, a performance described by the composer as "incredibly inspired and precise". Lachenmann has called "Mouvement" a "final attempt to strike water out of the dead monument known as music"; it is, he says, "a music of dead movements, almost of final quivers."

"Die ... zwei Gefühle ...", incorporating texts of Leonardo da Vinci, was written in 1992 while Lachenmann was working on what has since become his most highly-acclaimed work, the opera "Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern"; in expanded form, the piece was subsequently incorporated into the opera.

In the context of the present CD, "Die ... zwei Gefühle ..." traces a connection to the Nono-inspired "Schwankungen am Rand". It was written "near the Sardinian town of Alghero, in the empty house of my friend Luigi Nono, who had died two years earlier. And like him, I had been driven by my burning desire to perceive the enormous confusion of diverse and strange forms brought forth by ingenious Nature ..." (ECM Records)

HEINZ HOLLIGER Scardanelli-Zyklus

Heinz Holliger's brilliance as an oboist has long tended to overshadow his achievements as a composer, so it is all the more important to declare that the Scardanelli Cycle is a major work by one of the most prodigiously gifted musicians of our time.
Scardanelli is one of the names with which Holderlin signed the poems of his madness. The poems, named after the seasons, are not in themselves crazy, but they are obsessive, and it is their search for intensity of expression through economy of materials which Holliger has so imaginatively matched. As a committed modernist of the electro-acoustic generation he knows how to explore the complex components of apparently simple sounds, and the insert-notes miss the point with their talk of subversion and denial. At his best Holliger achieves a refined expressiveness whose inherent instability is eloquently reinforced as his textures fine down to microtonal oscillations. At his best, too, he attains a poised gravity worthy of the texts.
The Holderlin settings—The Seasons—are interspersed with various instrumental pieces: Scardanelli Exercises for small orchestra: (t)air(e) for flute: excerpts from Tower Music for flute, orchestra and tape: and—the most recent composition—Ostinato funebre for orchestra. Not all of this is on the highest level. The pieces with flute don't steer clear of some rather routine modernist gestures, although these are countered by more searching, more personal melodic writing. Also, to my ears the use of extended vocal techniques in the later choral movements allows delicacy of colour to shade into muddiness: the very last movement suffers in this respect, although without seriously undermining the impact of the work as a whole.
The performance brings together Terry Edwards's outstanding team of British singers, the leading German contemporary music ensemble, and the formidably versatile Aurele Nicolet, with superb results. The recording achieves an excellent balance between clarity and atmosphere, reinforcing the definitive status of this presentation of a work which by its very nature will not often be heard in the concert-hall.' (Arnold Whittall / Gramophone)

Ensemble Modern ZAPPA The Yellow Shark

During his last years, Frank Zappa concentrated on his "serious music," trying to impose himself as a composer and relegating the rock personality to the closet. His last two completed projects topped everything he had done before in this particular field. The Yellow Shark, an album of orchestral music, was released only a few weeks before he succumbed to cancer (the computer music/sound collage album Civilization Phaze III was released 14 months later). This CD, named for a plexiglas fish given to Zappa in 1988, culls live recordings from the Ensemble Modern's 1992 program of the composer's music. The range of pieces goes from string quartets ("None of the Above") to ensemble works, from very challenging contemporary classical to old Zappa favorites. The latter category includes a medley of "Dog Breath Variations" and "Uncle Meat," "Pound for a Brown," "Be-Bop Tango," and the Synclavier compositions "The Girl in the Magnesium Dress" and "G-Spot Tornado" transcribed for orchestra. Being more familiar, these bring a lighter touch, but the real interest of the CD resides in the premiere recordings. "Outrage at Valdez," the piano duet "Ruth Is Sleeping," and "Food Gathering in Post-Industrial America, 1992" are all the gripping works of a mature composer, strongly influenced by Varèse and Stravinsky but overwhelmed by them. But the crowning achievement is "Welcome to the United States," a more freeform piece based on the U.S. visa form. Zappa shined when ridiculing stupidity. The average fan of the man's rock music will most probably feel lost in The Yellow Shark, but for those with interests in his serious music it is an essential item, more so than the London Symphony Orchestra and Orchestral Favorites albums. (François Couture)

Patricia Kopatchinskaja BARTÓK / EÖTVÖS / LIGETI

Peter Eötvös evidently wants us to hear his music as the continuation of a grand Hungarian tradition, in which he is only two steps removed from the country’s greatest ever composer. This album makes the case, and without over-emphasizing the connections. The individuality of each composer is just as evident as their similarities, and the connections themselves are subtle. The portamento-based sliding textures, for example, in the Eötvös concerto, when heard in any other context may seem like a legacy from electronic music, but when placed directly after Bartók’s Second, there is a clear link with the earlier composer’s trombone glissandos. There’s Bartók in the Ligeti too, or rather, there’s Ligeti in the Bartók; the strident woodwind chords in Bartók’s second movement sound surprisingly similar to Ligeti’s ocarinas and distuned horns.
But this narrative is merely a subplot to the album as a whole, and despite the fact that one of the featured composers stands at the podium, it is the soloist who dominates proceedings. Patricia Kopatchinskaja has a distinctive voice as a violinist, with both her style and her technique marrying Eastern European Gypsy music with Central European classical traditions. She is drawn to classical works that include folk elements, and by emphasizing their earthy textures and infectious rhythms, she is able to rescue them from both the formality and the arbitrary sophistication of the concert hall.
The distinctive flavor of Kopatchinskaja’s playing is most clearly evident in the Bartók, where comparison with the already burgeoning catalogue demonstrates just how different her approach is. Kopatchinskaja’s tone is focused and vibrant. It has a kind of neon aura that could almost suggest electronic manipulation of the sound. The cult (or myth?) of naturalness that pervades the classical recording industry means that this sort of sound is all but unheard in the concerto repertoire. As a result, her timbre alone makes Kopatchinskaja sound like an import from the folk world. Something has to give, of course, and while Kopatchinskaja gives an intensely musical reading of the Bartók, many will find it lacking in a number of respects. Kopatchinskaja’s sound is either on or off: She can play quietly, but even then she dominates proceedings. And the quieter passages, especially in the first movement, don’t have that urbane late-Romantic sensibility that most violinists find there. The payoff is in the loud and propulsive music, and here Kopatchinskaja comes into her own, dropping all pretentions to classical respectability and going back to her roots as a folk fiddler, roots Bartók himself would surely have recognized.
The Eötvös concerto is entitled Seven and was written in memory of the seven astronauts who died in the Columbia space shuttle disaster in 2003. Not that it is a particularly mournful piece. The emotional profile of the work balances the enthusiasm and excitement of space exploration with this significant reminder of its dangers. So the music is full of invention and sonic exploration, but is continually reined back to a human scale, not least by the focus on the soloist within the large ensemble. (In fact, seven ensembles are used, spaced judiciously around the hall—there’s certainly a case here for a surround-sound recording.) The most radical aspect of the concerto is its form: four accompanied cadenzas, each more substantial than the last, and culminating in a finale proper. The work was not written for Kopatchinskaja (it was premiered by Akiko Suwanai) but her insistent and incisive tone works to the benefit of the complex textures. Eötvös lets his imagination run free in his use of the orchestra, but there is never any danger of the soloist getting lost in the sound. Her playfulness is also an asset here, and when Eötvös’s score begins to sound too intellectual for its own good, the vibrant musicality of the soloist always ensures a sense of immediacy and emotional engagement.
Ligeti’s Violin Concerto is possibly the ideal vehicle for Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s unique approach. Elsewhere she seems to be continually fighting against classicized and normative models of Eastern European folk music within the established canon—even in the Bartók. But Ligeti speaks her language. Ligeti’s late music relies heavily on intractable sound complexes, and on mind games of order and chaos. But both are motivated by a desire to get back to his Eastern roots, to short-circuit the sophisticated mechanisms of new music and reveal beneath them the more astringent and primal sounds from which all music originally grew. And there is no violinist better suited to this paradigm than Kopatchinskaja. Comparisons between her reading and those already available—Saschko Gawriloff, Christina Åstrand, Frank Peter Zimmermann—show that the qualities she brings to the work are similar to those we find in the Bartók. Her focused ever-present tone prevents the opening appearing out of nothing. And the solo line always dominates, even on the rare occasions when it shouldn’t. But the polyrhythmic complexity of the solo writing is clearer and more engaging here than on any previous recording. And, most importantly, there is never any feeling that Kopatchinskaja is trying to civilize this music. She knows exactly where Ligeti is coming from, and like him, she has no intention of rounding off the edges in pursuit of spurious classical elegance.
Eötvös the conductor is a sensitive and perceptive accompanist. Twenty years ago, Pierre Boulez would have been the natural, perhaps only, choice for conducting a program like this (he conducted the premiere of the Eötvös and the first recording of the Ligeti). Eötvös has been gradually taking over that role in recent years, and the clarity he brings to the textures, the impeccable orchestral discipline, and the feeling of life and vibrancy in every orchestral passage show him to be ideally qualified as Boulez’s successor. Great playing too from both the Frankfurt RSO and Ensemble Modern, with both ensembles and soloist recorded in transparent and immediate audio.
A triumph, then, for all concerned, and a must-have for anyone interested in the music of Ligeti or Eötvös. Those thinking of buying the set for the Bartók should be warned that Kopatchinskaja’s reading is idiosyncratic and bypasses much of the classical sophistication heard on other recordings. But Kopatchinskaja works only on her own terms, and as with her previous discs, everything here is as distinctive as it is compelling. (FANFARE: Gavin Dixon)