Thomas Larcher ARNOLD SCHÖNBERG - FRANZ SCHUBERT Klavierstücke

Consummation. This is what the piano music of Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951) and Franz Schubert (1797-1828) have in common, the bridge that Thomas Larcher brings to this welcoming solo recital, his first for ECM. To underscore this point, he shuffles Schönberg’s Klavierstücke op. 11 with Schubert’s posthumous Klavierstücke D 946. By turns halting and didactic, the opening pairing opens into the fresh air of Schubert’s precisely syncopated revelry. The contrasts between the two composers are obvious to the ear, but to the heart Schönberg is an extended exhalation to Schubert’s inhalation. Where Schönberg plots slow, jagged caverns, Schubert runs furtively above ground in the sunshine. Yet both seem so urgent to tell their stories, offering lifelong journeys from relatively young minds.

Similarly, the subtle miniatures that make up the Sechs kleine Klavierstücke op. 19 of Schönberg unfurl scrolls upon scrolls of experience, far into the future, where Schubert’s rolling Allegretto c-Mollo D 915 reads like a thrumming postscript.

One need not expound at great length in order to capture the spirit of this music. Its connections are fierce, their execution nimble as a dancer’s feet. Close your eyes, and let it show you a different sort of light. (ECM Reviews)

Thomas Demenga / Erich Höbart THOMAS LARCHER Naunz

Austrian composer Thomas Larcher, born in 1963, has the singular ability to write music that can sound sweet without sounding naïve or simplistic. Larcher can also certainly write music that's powerfully assertive, but if his work has a characteristic sound, it could be described as emotionally expressive in a meditative, often melancholy way. Naunz, for piano (1989), couldn't be called easy; Naunz's musical logic tends to be unpredictable and is seldom immediately obvious, although close attention reveals an emotional through-line, and it is full of beautiful, clarion major thirds that are used utterly unconventionally, but that help keep the listener anchored. Similar compositional approaches are evident in each of the works recorded here, which reward close and focused listening and are emotionally honest and make sense on a subliminal, if not always rational level. The most substantial work on the album is Kraken, in which pianist Larcher is joined by cellist Thomas Demenga and violinist Erich Hobarth. The variety of instrumental colors available to the trio, which Larcher deploys with the utmost delicacy, opens up an even broader range of expressive possibilities than the solos works. The brief Antennan-Requiem für H. inhabits much the same contemplative world as the other pieces, but it is performed entirely inside the piano. Larcher's work should appeal to fans of new music that defies easy categorization and that expresses a distinctive, communicative compositional voice. The sound of the ECM album, produced by Manfred Eicher, is characteristically immaculate and lively. (Stephen Eddins)

Tamara Stefanovich / Mark Padmore / Thomas Larcher THOMAS LARCHER What Becomes

A Padmore Cycle, Thomas Larcher's songs written in 2011 for tenor Mark Padmore, sets poems by Hans Aschenwald and Alois Hotschnig. The gnomic texts sometimes seem to occupy similar territory to those of Schubert's great song cycles. But if Larcher's settings, which are beautifully tailored to the colour, clarity and expressive strengths of Padmore's voice, evoke any specific 19th-century song composer it is Schumann.

Larcher accompanies the songs himself, but he entrusts three of his solo-piano works to Tamara Stefanovich. None of the Poems, "12 pieces for pianists and other children", lasts more than three minutes. As with the seven longer numbers of What Becomes, they range between winsomeness and nagging obsessiveness, although Stefanovich plays both sets with tremendous gusto. She finds a bit more in the prepared piano writing of Smart Dust , but even here there is a nagging sense that Larcher's music rarely amounts to anything more than the sum of its parts. (Andrew Clements / The Guardian)

Thomas Demenga / Thomas Larcher / Teodoro Anzellotti CHONGURI

Cellist Thomas Demenga offers up a colorful program of encores in Chonguri. From the pizzicato tour de force of the title piece by Sulkhan Tsintsadze, which imitates the selfsame four-stringed instrument of the composer’s native Georgia, it’s clear we’re in for a lively and eclectic treat. Pianist Thomas Larcher accompanies Demenga for most of the program, which includes nods to the familiar and not so. Of the latter, Catalonian composer Gaspar Cassadó’s Danse du diable vert is among the more spirited pins in the album’s geographic and chronographic spread. Two Chopin nocturnes give us a taste of home, in a manner of speaking, with the c-sharp minor presented to us in one of the more beautiful arrangements one is likely to find (though I’ll always be partial to Bela Banfalvi’s). The balance here is superb. A dash of Webern keeps us on our toes, his three Little Pieces sparkling with a charm that is, I daresay, romantic. Of romance we get plenty more in the three Fauré selections sprinkled throughout, of which Après un rêve is a highlight, and in Liszt’s evocative La lugubre gondola.

Four Bach chorales, in Demenga’s arrangements, for which he is joined by accordionist Teodoro Anzellotti form the album’s roof.Sounding somewhere between an organ and a hurdy-gurdy, the sheer depth of tone from Demenga’s cello in these is inspiring.He also offers two pieces of his own, of which the programmatic New York Honk is a delightful end.

Demenga’s playing is such that one can feel the lineage that binds all of this music together into a masterful patchwork as idiosyncratic as it is (seemingly) inevitable. Such programming epitomizes the ECM New Series spirit insofar as it charts the contemporary while paying due respect to the antique in what amounts to one of Demenga’s finest recordings to date and a label landmark. (ECM Reviews)

Kim Kashkashian / Till Felner / Quatuor Diotima THOMAS LARCHER Madhares

The creative output of Austrian composer (and pianist) Thomas Larcher (born 1963) whom the London Times recently called “a musical talent of unbounded sensitivity and distinction bound for 21st- century glory” has been championed on ECM New Series since 2001. Last fall Larcher’s piano piece “What becomes” attracted wide-spread attention when premiered on Leif Ove Andsnes’ international tour with the project “Pictures, Reframed” in which musical performances were juxtaposed with video images by concept artist Robin Rhode. In the Daily Telegraph Ivan Hewett spoke of “a real 21st- century picture of childhood, rudely energetic and unsentimental”. “Madhares”, the third release dedicated exclusively to Larcher’s works, assembles some of the finest ECM musicians such as Kim Kashkashian, Till Fellner and the Munich Chamber Orchestra conducted by Dennis Russell Davies to present a gripping cross-section of Larcher’s recent orchestral output, enhanced by the third string quartet “Madhares” which is played by the youthful French Quatuor Diotima. Larcher’s recent pieces are marked by intense sonic imagination, great rhythmic energy and a virtuoso impact that makes for an immediately rewarding listening. In the upcoming months his music will be performed in musical centers such as Amsterdam, London, Heimbach chamber music festival (composer in residence) and many more.