Alexandre Tharaud GÉRARD PESSON - HANS ABRAHAMSEN - OSCAR STRASNOY

                        GÉRARD PESSON - HANS ABRAHAMSEN - OSCAR STRASNOY

Reto Bieri / Meta4 QUASI MORENDO

Quasi Morendo is Reto Bieri’s third appearance on ECM New Series and follows the 2011 solo clarinet album Contrechant (with music of Berio, Carter, Holliger, Eötvös, Sciarrino and Vajda) and a powerful performance of Galina Ustvolskaya’s Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano with Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Markus Hinterhäuser, issued in 2014. 

Contrechant was widely praised for both the Swiss clarinettist’s beauty of tone and his uncommon expressiveness with extended instrumental techniques. Quasi Morendo begins with a new exploration of one of the pieces featured on that first album, Salvatore Sciarrino’s Let Me Die Before I Wake (1982), reentering its “whisper-quiet sound world of harmonics, multiphonics and tremolandos” (as The Guardian described it) and making new discoveries. “How the sounds come about is a mystery even to me,” Bieri tells liner writer Roman Brotbeck. “With special grips, even slight changes in the approach to the sound, it is possible to create particular multiphonics; through breathing and blowing (a big difference!) I can influence these sounds in the finest degree.”

Reto Bieri is then joined by the Finnish string quartet Meta4 for a profound interpretation of Johannes Brahms’s Quintet op 115 (1891). Written late in his life, it was inspired by friendship with clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld. Brahms had planned to retire in 1890, but after hearing Mühlfeld play music of Weber, Mozart and Ludwig Spohrl, he rededicated himself to composing to create works that count amongst the finest of his long career. From the liner notes: “The Clarinet Quintet is a swan song, a finale; gestures of closure dominate. Even the beginning has the effect of a coda. The strings intone a sinking elegiac melody over four bars, preparing the entrance on the clarinet.” The quintet often sounds freer, and more idyllic, than Brahms’s earlier chamber music, yet is one of his most meticulously constructed works.

The album closes with French composer Gérard Pesson’s Nebenstück (1998), a ghostly re-arrangement of Brahms’s Ballade, Op. 10 No. 4.

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)

L'Instant Donné / EXAUDI / Marion Tassou GÉRARD PESSON Musique de chambre, Cantates

The product of a close collaboration between Instant Donné and the composer Gérard Pesson, this double-album gathers chamber and vocal works with the collaboration of Ensemble EXAUDI and the soprano Marion Tassou.
Always carried by words, the music of Gérard Pesson is here inseparable from the texts of Marie Redonnet, Matthieu Nuss, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Elena Andreyev. Melding electronic incursions crossed with a nod to the past, most notably Baroque music, poetic catalyst and a legacy asserted by the composer, this recording is beautiful introduction to his utterly singular world.