Maia Cabeza FOLK ROOTS

FOLK ROOTS

HEINZ HOLLIGER - GYÖRGY KURTÁG Zwiegespräche

Zwiegespräche is a meeting of spirits. “We compose the same way,” said György Kurtág to Heinz Holliger on hearing this recording, which emphasises works for oboe by these two major composers. Both of them reference the entire history of music in their pieces, both incorporate dedications and messages to friends and colleagues in the fabric of their work, and both draw upon literature as an inspirational source. Both, moreover, love the miniature as an expressive form; short pieces by Kurtág and Holliger are interwoven. Holliger’s sequence Airs (2015/6) is inspired by seven texts by Swiss poet Philippe Jaccottet, whose voice is heard here. The release of Zwiegespräche is timely. Heinz Holliger turns 80 on May 21, his creativity as composer and his resourcefulness as instrumentalist undimmed. The album concludes with Holliger’s Sonate für Oboe solo, composed in 1956, and still played by its author with absolute authority.

Christoph Poppen / Deutsche Radio Philharmonie JÖRG WIDMANN Elegie

Jörg Widmann (born 1973 in Munich), is widely acclaimed as both a composer of fierce originality and a soloist of great resourcefulness. As a chamber musician he frequently performs with artists including Tabea Zimmermann, András Schiff, Kim Kashkashian, Helene Grimaud and Heinz Holliger. A number of fellow composers – including Holliger, Wolfgang Rihm and Aribert Reimann – have dedicated works to him. Meanwhile his own works have been premiered by distinguished interpreters: Pierre Boulez, for instance, gave the first performance of Widmann’s orchestral work “Armonica” with the Vienna Philharmonic, and Mariss Jansons directed the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks in a first performance of his Beethoven tribute “Con brio”.

Widmann, who studied composition with Kay Westermann from the age of 11, subsequently making further studies with Wilfried Hiller, Hans Werner Henze, Heiner Goebbels and Wolfgang Rihm, has an expansive understanding of the structural and sound-colour possibilities of the music of our time. It has served him well both in his own writing and in his responses to the music of others.

After a well-received ECM debut as soloist last year on Erkki-Sven Tüür’s concerto “Noēsis” (where he was heard alongside his violinist sister Carolin Widmann) now comes a portrait album that addresses Widmann’s creativity as composer and player.

Christoph Poppen conducts the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie in two major works of broad scope: “Messe” for large orchestra and “Elegie” for clarinet and orchestra. In between are the Fünf Bruchstücke from 1997, fascinating miniatures that find Widmann the clarinettist in speeding dialogues with Heinz Holliger, the latter making his recording debut as pianist. The Fünf Bruchstücke belong among Widmann’s first published works and also among several he has written to explore and extend the potentialities of his own instrument.

With small or large instrumental forces, Widmann’s work retains its power. As Markus Fein has written, “Whoever encounters the music of Jörg Widmann for the first time is astonished at its directness and intensity…The music breaks like a raging torrent over the listener.”

Jörg Widmann has received many awards for his work including the Arnold Schoenberg Prize of the Vienna Schoenberg Centre, the Claudio Abbado Composition Award, the SWR Composition Award, the Elise L. Stoeger Prize of the Lincoln Center Chamber music Society, New York, and more.

Concerts with Widmann’s music in 2011 include a programme of his works with the Collegium Novum Zürich at the Luxemburg Philharmonie on April 8. His music was chosen to open the Brahms Tage in Baden-Baden in May. Also in May, Franz Welser-Möst conducts the Cleveland Orchestra on a US tour playing Widmann’s Flute Concerto, with Joshua Smith as soloist.

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)

HEINZ HOLLIGER Romancendres CLARA SCHUMANN

A fascinating concept album circling around the fragility of artistic sensibilities in German musical and literary romanticism. Two important pieces by Swiss composer Heinz Holliger (born 1939), both of them inspired by Robert Schumann, are combined with a chamber work by Clara Schumann. They all intersect in the year 1853, when 20-year-old Johannes Brahms first visited the Schumann couple in Düsseldorf. The initial piece, Clara’s three wonderfully melodic romances for cello and piano, is followed by Holliger’s imaginative and multi-faceted hommage to Robert’s “Romances” in the same scoring. Much to Brahms’ approbation they were burnt by Clara in 1893 as she feared her late husband’s reputation could suffer if compositions from the onset of his mental illness would be publicised. All that survives is a vivid description by violinist Joseph Joachim. Holliger takes this verbal account as a starting point for a music that subtly meditates upon the double character of love and death, music and silence, romances and cinders. “Gesänge der Frühe” first performed in 1988 is scored for choir, orchestra and tape. Schumann’s last piano work of the same title from 1853 is superimposed in a most visionary way with texts from the late period of Friedrich Hölderlin – another romantic genius who fell prey to mental illness. (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)

Thomas Zehetmair / Ruth Killius MANTO AND MADRIGALS

Violinist Thomas Zehetmair and violist Ruth Killius have shared many years as musical collaborators in the Zehetmair quartet. The couple’s spectacular duo performance at last autumn’s ECM festival in Mannheim raised the expectactions for their new programme, a carefully composed anthology of contemporary pieces for violin and viola. Next to Bohuslav Martinů’s virtuosic and accessible “Madrigals”, written in 1946 in American exile, the central piece here is “Drei Skizzen” by Heinz Holliger, a triptychon with the instruments tuned in the scordatura of Mozart’s fomous “Sinfonia concertante” for violin, viola and orchestra. It was commissioned by the duo as an encore piece for their frequent renderings of Mozart’s masterworks on the concert platform. Its first movement “Pirouetts harmoniques” is entirely based on shimmering harmonics, whereas the second one is an exuberant perpetuum mobile. The cycle concludes with a six-part chorale that requires both string players to hum an extra voice. This idea, which is realised by the duo to a most stunning effect effect, was itself inspired by Giancinto Scelsi’s solo piece “Manto” for a “singing viola player”. The programme is complemented by compositions by Nikos Skalkottas, Béla Bartók and short pieces by Rainer Killius and Johannes Nied. (ECM Records)

Reto Bieri CONTRECHANT

Reto Bieri’s New Series debut is a brilliant recital for solo clarinet that looks at new developmental possibilities in the ‘language’ of the instrument in modern music. Bieri quotes with approval Heinz Holliger’s statement “My entire relation to music is such that I always try to go to the limits”. Here the Swiss clarinettist has brought together pieces from the border regions of compositional exploration, as well as the pathways that link them. Under examination here are, for instance, the border region “between silence and the birth of sound and noise, a magical region”, touched upon in the music of Salvatore Sciarrino, Heinz Holliger and Gergely Vajda. Then there is the juncture of speech, sprechgesang and melody (referenced in Holliger and Luciano Berio), as well as the border region linking gesture, dance, ritual and game – as in Holliger, Elliott Carter and Péter Eötvös.

In Holliger’s “Contrechant”, the piece that gives Bieri’s album its title, all the regions are illuminated, calling for “a new kind of virtuosity from the player”, a challenge to which Reto Bieri rises. With the exception of the late Luciano Berio, the clarinettist has worked closely with each of the featured composers to realize optimum performance of these pieces. What a fascinating group of composers it is, too: from Elliott Carter – at 102, America’s Grand Old Man of new music – to Gergely Vajda, former student of Eötvös, who wrote “Lightshadow-trembling” when he was only twenty.

Paul Griffiths, in his liner notes, emphasizes the ‘singing’ quality of the performances: “Song. Some of the titles nudge us in that direction – Lied, Contrechant, Rechant – but what makes the conclusion inescapable is the fluency, the nuanced variety of Reto Bieri’s playing. This is indeed song: song without words … song in which sound alone sings”.

Bieri views the choice of pieces for the present album as an extension of the ideal repertoire suggested by the 1995 ECM solo clarinet recording “dal niente” by Eduard Brunner, with music of Lachenmann, Stockhausen, Stravinsky, Boulez, Scelsi and Yun. (Both solo clarinet discs were recorded at Propstei St Gerold, with Manfred Eicher producing). “Contrechant” is destined to prove no less influential. (ECM Records)

András Schiff / Dénes Várjon / Budapest Festival Orchestra / Heinz Holliger SÁNDOR VERESS Hommage à Paul Klee

Sándor Veress represents a high water mark in Hungary’s rich musical heritage. He belongs between the generations of Bartók and Kodály, his teachers, and of Ligeti and Kurtag, his pupils. He experienced both world wars and Hungary’s police state afterwards, emigrating to Switzerland at age 45. Veress also taught Heinz Holliger, who was responsible for this fine recording, a loving tribute to his teacher.

The Hommage à Paul Klee, the first of the three works on this disc, is nowhere near as grim as one might expect from someone escaping tyranny. It is a seven-movement work combining transcendent soundscapes with a frisky jazziness, presumably reflecting in music seven of Klee’s paintings. It has been adapted for ballet no doubt due to the both celestial and playful moods which Veress manages to invoke through his limpid musical lines. That said, its fifth movement, marked Allegretto (Stone Collection), is an exciting and rhythmic tour de force, with pizzicato strings adding infectious momentum to the rambunctious pianos. Similarly, the near-mystical reverie in the next-to-last movement – an Andante (Green in Green) – is followed by a tumultuous Vivo (Little Blue Devil) that charges in a headlong rush to close the Hommage.

Although neither in sonata form nor theme-and-variations structure, this Hommage à Paul Klee is a (two-) piano concerto in all but name. It convincingly blends tuneful folk forms within a near-austere aesthetic. Weightless although far from light, its ethereal transparency beautifully suits the simple yet evocative paintings that the Hommage seeks to mirror. Its shape as a suite of movements bears comparison in a number of intriguing ways to Frank Martin’s 1974 Polyptyque for violin and two small string orchestras. Claudio Veress, who runs a website for his father’s music, reports that the composer was a great admirer of Martin’s music. This work suggests that the sentiment may have been reciprocated.

Gidon Kremer EDITION LOCKENHAUS

Five-CD limited-edition box set, issued in time for the 30th anniversary of the Austrian chamber-music festival. “Edition Lockenhaus” returns long out-of-print titles to the catalogue, with some of the finest musicians of the New Series, including Gidon Kremer, Kim Kashkashian, Heinz Holliger, Thomas Zehetmair, Thomas Demenga, Robert Levin, Eduard Brunner and many more. Gidon Kremer: “The artistic atmosphere in Lockenhaus soon has everybody speaking on the same wavelength.” The set opens with previously unreleased recordings – from 2001 and 2008 – with Sir Simon Rattle and Roman Kofman conducting Kremerata Baltica in revelatory performances of Richard Strauss’s “Metamorphosen” and Olivier Messiaen’s “Trois petites Liturgies de la Présence Divine”: the committed interpretations convey the spirit of Lockenhaus. Discs two through five focus on music of César Franck, André Caplet, Francis Poulenc, Leos Janácek, Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich and Erwin Schulhoff. Original liner notes, an interview with Kremer, and new texts complete a very special edition. (ECM Records)

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. 

Sylvia Nopper / Kai Wessel / Olivier Darbellay / Matthias Würsch / Swiss Chamber Soloists HEINZ HOLLIGER Induuchlen

Issued simultaneously with “Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis” (ECM 2229), his dazzling account of Bach’s music for oboe, “Induulchen” puts the focus upon Heinz Holliger as composer of idiosyncratic genius, defining a sound-world of his own. Here, Holliger’s creativity draws inspiration from arcane Swiss sources, setting the poetry of Anna Maria Bacher who writes in the endangered idiom of “Pummattertisch”, and verse by the late Albert Streich, who wrote in Brienz-German. As conductor Holliger draws committed performances from a cast of gifted chamber musicians and singers Sylvia Nopper and Kai Wessel. The outcome is intriguing, mysterious and often strangely beautiful.

Holliger has described Anna Maria Bacher’s poetry as “a force of nature, like an avalanche or a thunderstorm”. It has inspired one of Holliger’s most complex works of verbal art. In the liner notes Michael Kunkel writes that it is near-impossible to describe the cycle Puneigä sequentially: “Multiple sound-worlds coalesce in a single work distinctly rich in connections, contrasts and perspectives that is nonetheless comprised of a number of short, atmospherically and stylistically similar songs and interludes (…)
“New Music’s literary canon revolves around a relatively small selection of names: Hölderlin, Beckett, Celan, Mandelstam, Robert Walser, Nelly Sachs... For Holliger, not entirely uninvolved in the establishment of this canon, it is increasingly difficult to continue working with a body of literature that has worn thin in numerous musical reworkings. In this context, his long-standing penchant for dialects and local idioms, preferably of a Swiss nature, becomes very topical indeed: The poetry of Anna Maria Bacher and Bernadette Lerjen-Sarbach (Gränzä, Borders) or the legends of the Upper Valais (Alb-Chehr) were, from a composer’s point of view, still untouched and had, for Holliger, similar significance as art forms outside the realm of high culture as for his teacher Sándor Veress, for Anton Webern (op. 17) or Béla Bartók (Cantata profana). And in Induuchlen (Darkening), Albert Streich’s Brienz-German verses provide even more opportunity to dip into Bartók’s ‘pure fountain.’”

Heinz Holliger / Anita Leuzinger / Anton Kernjak ROBERT SCHUMANN - HEINZ HOLLIGER Aschenmusik

Heinz Holliger’s lifelong fascination with the music of Robert Schumann finds further expression on this newest release: on Aschenmusik, a new interpretation of the Swiss oboist-composer’s “Romancendres” is framed by Schumann’s own works. “Romancendres” refers to the lost “Cello Romances” which Clara Schumann burned on Brahms’s advice, an act of destruction which outraged Holliger and fuelled the composition of this “music from the ashes” in 2003. It’s a portrait of Schumann, packed with quotations, projected like a lifetime passing through the mind of a dying man. “Romancendres” is prefaced by Schuman’s “Romances” for oboe and piano, masterpieces which have been part of Holliger’s repertoire for 60 years, and by the rarely-played “Studies in Canon Form” which find Holliger on the oboe d’amore. The album closes with Schumann’s first sonata for violin and piano, with cello substituting for violin. Holliger: “Schumann himself thought it could also be played on a cello. I find it grandiose with this combination of instruments.” Strong performances by Holliger himself and by Anita Leuzinger, solo cellist from the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, and by Austrian pianist Anton Kernjak make this album another important addition to Heinz Holliger’s ECM discography. Aschenmusik is issued in time for Holliger’s 75th birthday on May 21^st.

Heinz Holliger / Erich Höbarth / Camerata Bern JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis

Heinz Holliger soars through Bach’s music for oboe in his first ECM recital of core classical repertoire since his 1997 account of Zelenka’s Trio Sonatas. Recorded at Radio Studio Zürich in December 2010, “Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis”, draws upon Holliger’s long artistic relationship with Camerata Bern and leader Eric Höbarth, the production rendering every detail in the music, the elegance of Holliger’s phrasing, the tactile sound of baroque bows on gut strings, crystal clear. Holliger dedicates this very special recording to the memory of his brother, theatre director Erich Holliger, and Gabriel Bürgin, pianist, friend and colleague.
Johann Sebastian Bach relied on the oboe to voice some of the most exquisite instrumental passages in his cantatas and orchestral works, these solo parts adding up to what Heinz Holliger terms a "miraculous wealth" of music for the oboe. Holliger, one of the world's consummate oboists for five decades now, as well as a prize-winning composer and conductor –presents a collection of this music drawn from the sinfonia introductions to several sacred cantatas, the sinfonia from the Easter Oratorio and versions of three Bach concertos made for oboe, strings and continuo. These include the sublime Double Concerto for Violin and Oboe, with the solo violin part played by Erich Höbarth, who also directs the Camerata Bern throughout the album. Also included is Alessandro Marcello's Oboe Concerto in D minor, a piece Bach appreciated enough to rework for solo harpsichord.

Thomas Zehetmair / Thomas Demenga BERND ALOIS ZIMMERMANN Canto di Speranza

Three keyfigures from ECM’s contemporary music roster – Heinz Holliger, Thomas Zehetmair, and Thomas Demenga – team up for an exceptional recording of three works by German post-war composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann. Zimmermann, almost half a generation older than the serialists such as Boulez and Stockhausen, integrated state-of-the-art compositional methods in his writing while constantly following his own independent, highly expressive musical language. The rhythmically energetic violin concerto (1950) which is partially based on twelve-tone models and cast in three movements, was soon hailed as a model for a post-war solo concerto, while “Canto di Speranza” (1953/57), a one-movement cello concerto, acccording to Zimmermann, emphasizes monologue and introvert meditation. “Ich wandte mich…” on the other hand is Zimmermann’s last work, finished only a few days before his suicide in 1970. Labelled by the composer as an “ecclesiastical action”, the 35-minute oratorio on biblical verse and the famous parable "The Grand Inquisitor" from Dostoevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov” is a deeply pessimistic “performance art” work - of the kind that flourished in Germany’s ‘Fluxus’ scene around 1970 - involving recitation, singing, and both gestural and acrobatic action.

Heinz Holliger / I Musici CONCERTI PER OBOE

This is not a record for the purists but, accepted for what it offers, it is an enjoyable one. The Marcello has long topped the baroque-oboe pop charts and has plenty of recordings, even on CD: Holliger's embellishment of its famous slow movement is fluent but perhaps over-elaborate for a melody whose lines are beautiful enough in their own right. The booklet tells us about Sammartini's ''Concerto No. 1 in F'', in four da chiesa movements, but not the fine Concerto (three movements, in D) on the recording, a newcomer to the catalogue. The Albinoni is a new recording not taken from the CD of six concertos from his Op. 9 by the same artists which are remasterings of originals from 1968. Lotti's small corpus of instrumental works includes only one concerto—for the oboe d'amore his preoccupation with vocal music is reflected particularly in the delightful affetuoso, a gentle siciliana and by far the longest single movement on the record. The change of instrument also brings some variety of tone-colour.
The odd man out is Cimarosa, who didn't write an oboe concerto: Arthur Benjamin it was who adapted some of his keyboard sonatas to compile one of four movements. The resultant hybrid makes agreeable listening but not more. Holliger's oboe sings beautifully and not, as the modern oboe is wont to do, down its nose. I Musici are in good form, light in touch and decently in touch with baroque style where it is called for, the harpsichord is nicely audible in the well-engineered recording.
(John Duarte, Gramophone_4/1988)