Hélène Grimaud THE MESSENGER

THE MESSENGER

 

Duo Gazzana FIVE PIECES

FIVE PIECES

Hélène Grimaud MEMORY

Music has been described as a means of rescuing that which is lost – a simple yet persuasive idea and one which informs Hélène Grimaud’s working definition of the art form. The French pianist’s latest Deutsche Grammophon recording addresses music’s unique ability to bring images of the past back to life in the present moment, to conjure up vivid evocations of time and place. Memory, set for release on 28 September 2018, explores the nature of recollection through a series of exquisite pianistic miniatures. Grimaud’s choice of repertoire embraces everything from impressionistic reveries by Chopin and Debussy to the timeless, folk-like melodies of Valentin Silvestrov.

Memory and music make perfect partners. Both are fleeting, never fixed, always subject to interpretation. Our identities are formed from memories, just as so many of our most enduring experiences are rooted in music. Hélène Grimaud wanted to explore the universal nature of memory, its place in the lives of us all. Memory, she explains, uses music to probe the many levels of human consciousness.

“Music peels back the layers of time to reveal the essence of experience,” she observes. “Momentary pain, distress, elation, fades – what remains is sensation. Sensation is the resonance of experience in the space of memory. And it is the space where music resonates within each of us – touching us, moving us, bringing us closer to ourselves. In that way, music can also help remind us that for all in our daily lives that is trivial, there’s a place where meaning is stored. And that it is not forgetfulness that is our burden, but the capacity to reflect and remember that is the wonder of being alive.” The pianist’s eloquent discourse on memory touches both the universal and the particular. It reveals, above all, much about her sensibility for music as a natural process, one shaped in the moment of creation and re-creation by instinct and intuition.

Memory follows in the wake of Grimaud’s Water album, a thought-provoking consideration of the world’s most precious resource. Her latest release complements its predecessor, not least by exploring another condition of life all too easily taken for granted until it begins to disappear.

Grimaud chose compositions that speak directly to memory, creating a programme of works which through their simplicity can bypass the barriers of rational thinking to unlock powerful moods, feelings and sensations. These miniatures are not weighty structures; rather, they possess what she aptly describes as immaterial qualities. Each of the album’s fifteen tracks suggests fleeting impressions of a thought recollected, a dream reimagined, an experience recalled to mind. Memory, she says, “serves to conjure atmospheres of fragile reflection, a mirage of what was – or what could have been”.

Her artistry flourished in the sacred space of the Himmelfahrtskirche in Munich’s Sendling  district. The recording venue, a former beer hall converted into a church a century ago, made a lasting impression on her. “The feeling of being alone in a cavernous, resonant space, a building itself constructed as a vessel for spiritual introspection, was immersive,” she recalls. “I am not necessarily a natural colourist yet to be surrounded by resonance – of the notes and between the notes – profoundly changes one’s concept of producing sound. The music must be so transparent as to allow the poetry to shimmer though.”

For composers, memory plays a central role in transmitting influence. Debussy, for instance, absorbed formative lessons from his studies of Chopin and recalled them later in life when composing pieces such as Rêverie and La plus que lente. His musical language also drew impressions from the harmonies of his friend Erik Satie. The points of coincidence emerge clearly in Memory.

Hélène Grimaud highlights the meditative character of works by all three composers, surrounding the heartfelt nostalgia of Chopin’s Nocturne in E minor Op.72 No.1 with a sequence of Satie’s minimalist miniatures, the first of his famous sets of Gnossiennes and Gymnopédies among them. The pianist also spotlights the common ground between two of Silvestrov’s subtle Bagatelles, products of the early 2000s, and Debussy’s beguiling Arabesque No.1 in E major, an early work inspired by the elegant lines and curves of Nature.

Hélène Grimaud compares Valentin Silvestrov’s keyboard miniatures to the image of ‘breathing light’, a poetic metaphor that might easily stand for the haunting impressions left by Memory. (Deutsche Grammophon)

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Anja Lechner / Agnès Vesterman VALENTIN SILVESTROV Hieroglyphen der Nacht

Released in time for the great Ukrainian composer’s 80th birthday on September 30, Hieroglyphen der Nacht features Valentin Silvestrov’s music for solo violoncello and for two cellos. German cellist Anja Lechner has had a long association with Silvestrov, first documented on the Grammy-nominated leggiero, pesante in 2001. Here she plays, alone, Augenblicke der Stille und Traurigkeit (of which she is the dedicatee), Lacrimosa, Walzer der Alpengöckchen, and Elegie (which calls for her to play both cello and tamtams). Lechner is joined by French cellist Agnès Vestermann, a frequent duo partner, to play Drei Stücke (dedicated to both musicians), 8.VI. 1810…zum Geburtstag R.A. Schumann, Zwei Serenaden, and 25.X.1893…zum Andenken an P.I. Tschaikowskij. As so often with Silvestrov, the compositions often take the form of metaphorical conversations with composers of the past and the present. Tchaikovsky and Schumann are amongst the composers referenced here, while Lacrimosa is a reaction to music of his friend Tigran Mansurian. “My own music is a response to and an echo of what already exists,” says Silvestrov, viewing his oeuvre as a series of “codas” to music history. Hieroglyphen der Nacht was recorded at Lugano’s Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, and produced by Manfred Eicher. (ECM Records)

Olga Andryushchenko 20th CENTURY PIANO WORKS

Olga Andryushchenko was born in Moscow and educated at the Central Special Music School, and the Faculty of Historical and Modern Performing Arts of the Moscow Tchaikovsky State Conservatory under Alexei Lubimov. She also studied organ. She completed her postgraduate studies at the same conservatory, and was also a DAAD scholarship-holder at the Cologne Hochschule für Musik.

She has won a number of important prizes and awards, including the 4th International Piano Competition “Franz Schubert and the Music of Modernity” in Austria (2000), the Premium Piano Seiler 2nd International Piano Competition in Germany (2001), the Premio Vanna Spadafor International Piano Competition in Italy (2004), the Bach Competition in Leipzig (2006), the Musica Antiqua International Fortepiano Competition in Belgium (2007), the A. Scriabine International Piano Competition in Paris (2008), the N. Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Paris (2008), and the Fortepiano Competition in Schloss Kremsegg (2011).

She was a soloist of the Moscow State Philharmonic Society (2002–2004), and performs both as a soloist and in ensembles, playing piano, organ, fortepiano or harpsichord. She has also given a number of piano recitals and played with orchestras in many cities of Russia, Austria, Germany, Sweden, Italy, the United States, Belgium, Finland, Great Britain, Canada, France, Japan and elsewhere.

VALENTIN SILVESTROV Bagatellen und Serenaden

Early in the morning in the Himmelsfahrtskirche in Sendling, before the Munich Chamber Orchestra began the first day’s work on the sessions, Silvestrov sat at the piano and began, quietly, to play. A solo piano recording wasn’t planned, but the microphones were set up for the orchestra, which included piano... Producer Manfred Eicher let the machines run anyway, and snared the first of these pieces, finding in these lontano audio snapshots a special poignancy, and encouraging Silvestrov to continue playing after the orchestra session.  There is a quality to the bagatelles almost like eavesdropping on private thoughts: the pieces sound as if created in the moment. But Silvestrov scholar Tatjana Frumkis specifies otherwise: “The bagatelles form a sort of improvised cycle… Yet what we hear is not improvisation in the strict sense: everything has been fully crafted in the composer’s mind down to the nethermost detail… The living flow of the music is sped up or restrained by a prevailing sense of rubato. The dynamics are governed by the softest pianissimos that seem to expand infinitely in the interior of the church. The listener is granted an opportunity to experience one of the composer’s unique autographs, a sound-ideal with his characteristic weightless attack (‘as if on springtime ice’).” The highly unusual recording reveals a great deal about Silvestrov as musical thinker – the bagatelles are like an x-ray of his melodic imagination – and help us understand both the sources from which his larger pieces flow and the kinds of demands he makes of his interpreters. This is not the first time that Silvestrov has recorded his own music, for his debut ECM disc Leggiero, pesante already included, as a postscript, his solo performance of ‘Hymne 2001’. It is, though, the most extensive documentation to date. (ECM Records)

VALENTIN SILVESTROV leggiero, pesante

Of all the words in music’s vocabulary, one of the commonest is "farewell" Many of the world’s greatest songs are addressed to the departing: the recently dead, lost lovers, missed opportunities. Music speaks of these things as memory speaks, makes us aware both of distance and of remaining closeness. Nothing is lost, music says: it is here. But also: it is here only because it cannot come back. … When it addresses leave-taking specifically, it has terms that include some of the oldest in the Western tradition. A four-note scalewise descent in the minor mode has been an image of lament since the Renaissance, and perhaps it accounts for the atmosphere of sadness that often gathers around minor-key harmony. A final cadence, particularly in slow music, can also sound like a valedicition, because this is the point at which music not only expresses passing but itself recedes.
This vanishing and this eternal presence have been the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov’s persistent topics through the last three decades, since he was in his 30’s and, like his Soviet contemporary Arvo Pärt, heard the past sounding through the gaps in modernism. …
At the opening of the First Quartet, for instance, there are the falling phrases and the omnipresent cadences that convey appeased grief, all at a very relaxed tempo and in a harmonic ambience as straightforward as that of a folk song. The Barber Adagio is only a step away. But then the picture begins to cloud. An expected harmony does not arrive and cannot be found. The instruments start slowly circling because they cannot think what else to do. Inexplicable dissonances creep in. The music seems to be losing its way, and eventually it just comes to a sounding stop on a sustained soft discord, fading into toneless whispers.
There is an effort here to refresh aged notions. Because Mr. Silvestrov’s turns of phrase are never quite completed – or because any completion sounds partial and tentative – they reach to some extent from the realm of the borrowed to speak firmly and newly. And they help themselves do so both by taking on novel timbres ( the vibratoless sounds of the quartet) and by extending a strong appeal to their performers (an appeal to which a particularly powerful, rich and vital response comes from the cellist Anja Lechner and the pianist Silke Avenhaus in two works). (Paul Griffiths, The New York Times)

Murcof / Vanessa Wagner STATEA

Statea is essentially about augmentation: Murcof's electronics enhancing Vanessa Wagner's piano. But the idea goes further. Statea is the result of an impromptu live performance that took place in 2010 at La Carrière De Normandoux, an old quarry in France that was turned into a contemporary arts centre. One artist's concert was taking place after the other's, so Wagner bridged the gap by playing pieces by Erik Satie. Murcof joined her, and their improvisation has since grown.
Statea revolves around minimalist piano compositions, including Aphex Twin's lyrical "Avril 14th." On the surface, that may seem like a wildcard inclusion, nestled next to Arvo Pärt and György Ligeti, but it's part of a wider narrative: augmenting the minimal music tradition itself. Some selections even pre-date minimalism's 1960s New York origins, ascribed to forefathers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Only Glass appears here, his Kafka-inspired "Metamorphosis 2" concluding Statea with one of the record's purest recordings.  

Statea is less of a music history lesson than a dialogue between its collaborators. When they perform together, Murcof and Wagner take turns leading the charge, and it's the same here. Their version of John Cage's "In A Landscape" starts out with naturalistic playing from Wagner, before Murcof begins smearing the keys like watercolours. His electro-acoustic touches are subtle at first, but become intense enough that Wagner is all but phased out by the end. "In A Landscape" is morphed into something else entirely. "Musica Ricercata No. 2" is more of a melodramatic call and response between the two players. Wagner's playing is dynamic and emotive, but Murcof's rebuttals are more stinging. It goes to show the gulf between traditional musicians, limited to an instrument's physicality, and those with technology's endless possibilities.
For all of its alluring electronics, Statea would be nothing without the clarity of Wagner's piano. It's such contrasts—classical and ambient, the past and the present, the accentuated and the ambiguous—that make the record more than the sum of its parts, sounding richer and more nuanced with every listen. As a snapshot of a performance-based collaboration, Statea is strong, but the project's full scope can only be experienced in the concert halls that birthed it. (Holly Dicker)

Gidon Kremer / Kremerata Baltica THE ART OF INSTRUMENTION: HOMAGE TO GLENN GOULD

Nonesuch Records releases The Art of Instrumentation: Homage to Glenn Gould, by violinist Gidon Kremer and his Kremerata Baltica chamber orchestra, on September 25, 2012, which would have been Gould’s 80th birthday. The album comprises 11 pieces and arrangements by contemporary composers that quote from or are inspired by works, mostly by Bach, that Gould famously recorded during his career; two Arnold Schoenberg pieces also are drawn upon in one piece.

Kremer explains: “For the tenth anniversary of the Chamber Music Connects the World festival in Kronberg, Germany in 2010, I took up an idea that happens to have been voiced by a friend of mine, Robert Hurwitz, president of Nonesuch. One day, we were discussing Glenn Gould—whom Bob had known for years and with whom I had spent a long night in the studio, along with András Schiff—when Bob asked me, ‘Wouldn’t you like to arrange some of the works played by Glenn Gould for strings sometime?’

“When artistic director Raimund Trenkler asked me what could be done to make the anniversary celebration special, I knew the answer. The focus was to be on one of the greatest figures of all time—Johann Sebastian Bach—and on our times. A bridge was to be built,” Kremer continues. “The resulting program’s distant gaze extends into the realm of Bach but pays tribute at the same time to one of the greatest personae of modern interpretation, Glenn Gould. A persona, whose handwriting cannot be mistaken for anyone else’s. That is precisely what I have always valued so highly and still do—the unique.”

Kremerata Baltica was founded by Gidon Kremer in 1996 and is composed of a group of young musicians from the three Baltic States. They first performed in the violinist’s hometown of Riga, Latvia, in February 1996 and have since toured throughout the world. Kremer, who is the group’s artistic director, described the Kremerata Baltica, in an interview with the New York Times, as “a musical democracy ... open-minded, self-critical, a continuation of my musical spirit.” (Nonesuch)

The National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine VALENTIN SILVESTROV Requiem for Larissa

Musical settings of the requiem may be very public (Berlioz's, for example), or almost painfully private. Valentin Silvestrov's Requiem for Larissa falls into the latter category. "Larissa" was the composer's wife, the musicologist Larissa Bondarenko, who died unexpectedly in 1996. Silvestrov responded to her death with this requiem, believing (like Mozart) that it would be the last music he would write. Fortunately for us, Silvestrov was able to go on living, and he completed his most recent symphony in 2003.

Silvestrov has received acclaim in the West for his Symphony #5, a work that seems to exist in a place and time after all music has come to an end. While some composers have excelled at writing preludes, Silvestrov has become the master of the postlude. These are not the crystal-clear codas of Romantic symphonies, however. Silvestrov's music is usually in the process of fading into nothing, but never quite getting there. Clarity and purpose are replaced with obscurity and a sense of wandering. Romantic music is alluded to, but never achieved. It is as if Silvestrov is using the expected words, but not stringing them together in the expected sequence. In this music, purpose and direction are tenuous, at best. In Silvestrov's Requiem, composers as disparate as Mozart and Webern flit in and out of the textures… not as musical quotations, though, but as feelings, or as ghosts unable to find their final rest.

In Requiem for Larissa, Silvestrov disorients the listener even more by fragmenting the familiar Latin texts. The choir stops in the middle of a phrase as if it has forgotten what it is trying to say, or as if what it is trying to say is too painful to complete. Perhaps it is telling that the most coherent setting is that of the Lacrimosa. In the score's fourth section, the composer interpolates a text from a poem called "The Dream," written by the 19^th-century Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko. Both of these sections feature solo voices – a soprano in the Lacrimosa and a tenor in the Shevchenko setting. Elsewhere, the chorus bears the brunt of the vocal demands.

Most of the Requiem for Larissa is quiet, even pretty, but there are thundering climaxes which appear and disappear with little preparation or warning. At the end, there is no salvation, let alone comfort or resolution. Silvestrov's goal, it seems, is not to resolve matters, but to let us know that closure, if it is possible at all, is painfully elusive. Although Requiem for Larissa was written at a time of crisis in the composer's life, it seems very typical of his work, and it is a good recommendation for those coming to this composer for the first time, and for those who are beguiled by his Symphony #5.

The recording sessions took place in Kiev in 2001, and the performance probably is definitive. The singing of the National Choir of Ukraine, called "Dumka," is outstanding. It is unfortunate that the soloists are not identified; it seems likely that they are members of the choir. ( Raymond Tuttle)