08.08.2024 | Timeline
(For Part I see here)
1991 – 2000
In the wake of the 40th anniversary of ECM’s New Series imprint, launched in 1984 with Arvo Pärt’s seminal Tabula Rasa, albums from the New Series catalogue are being highlighted throughout the anniversary-year 2024, chronologically retracing the path that has led through four decades of influential discoveries in notated music and beyond.
1991: Arvo Pärt – Miserere
“This latest in ECM’s continuing series of music by Arvo Pärt strikes me as being the best to date. Its predecessors were excellent, but this disc is outstanding.” So goes the Gramophone magazine verdict from 1992. The article goes on to say: “For all that Pärt’s musical language depends upon the most basic of building materials, there is no such thing as a miniature in his way of thinking”
Miserere comprises three pieces – the title track “Miserere”, “Festina Lente” (dedicated to Manfred Eicher) and “Sarah Was Ninety Years Old” – and captures performances of The Hillard Ensemble alongside the Orchestra of the Beethovenhalle Bonn under Dennis Russel Davies as well as the Western Wind Choir, organist Christopher Bowers Broadbent and more.
In a glowing review from the year of the album’s release, the French magazine Télérama raved: “It seems that Pärt has radicalised his ways yet again. His music, at once archaic and modern, familiar and foreign, simplistic perhaps, naive in its own way, creates bewitching, beautiful, fabulously beautiful atmospheres about which nothing can be said except that they are essential.”
1992: Veljo Tormis – Forgotten Peoples
The elemental power of ancient folk music is the lifeforce that drives the compositions of Veljo Tormis (1930-2017). As the great Estonian composer famously said, “I do not use folk song. It is folk song that uses me.” This sentiment is echoed in the incredible performances of the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under Tõnu Kaljuste on the 1992 recording Forgotten Peoples.
In a composer’s note accompanying the recording, Tormis notes: “Being an Estonian composer, I consider it natural that my work is based chiefly on the motifs of Estonian folklore. While exploring the archives, studying the folklore publications, and listening to recordings, I realised that Estonian folk song is part of a very ancient culture. It also became clear to me that the musical tradition belonged to a pre-Christian, shamanistic civilization, one very close to nature…”
Touching upon this folkloric aspect in an extensive article from 1992, Wolfgang Sandner, for the Germany daily paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, wrote: “The recurring melodies and ritornelle of the Isuri epic or the Ingrian roundelays can have an almost hypnotic effect. They are interpreted by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under its conductor Tonu Kaljuste, like all the other pieces on the recording, with an extraordinarily beautiful sound and as evocatively as if the singers were still living in the culture of these small, vanishing peoples with their magnificent language full of dramatic images, which are counterpointed by the almost comical calm of the melodic performance.”
Get the album here
1993: Kim Kashkashian – Lachrymae
“In this programme Kim Kashkashian distils survival quality from death and its tears: the violist makes an exemplary commitment to the music of the twentieth century” – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Kim Kashkashian – dubbed „the great artist of the moment” by French paper Le Monde in an article reviewing this album – together with The Stuttgarter Kammerorchester under Dennis Russel Davies tackles Paul Hindemith’s “Trauermusik”, Benjamin Britten’s “Lachrymae op. 48a” and Krzysztof Penderecki’s Concert for viola and chamber orchestra in performances summarily praised as “ a most valuable disc” by BBC Music Magazine in the year of the album’s release.
In his booklet text accompanying the recording, Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich makes poignant observations regarding the obscure subject matters that define the arc of the programme: “The dark sides of life, grief and death, are perhaps all that is left that has not yet been absorbed by brash and brainless entertainment. They simply don’t ‘sell’ well enough, which leaves a bit of leeway after all for genuine artistic endeavour. No wonder then that music ‘of note’ has become music ‘of need’ and less ‘beautiful’ than it once was.”
Get the album here
1994: Jan Garbarek, The Hilliard Ensemble – Officium
The press greeted Officium with unanimous praise upon the album’s release, suggesting the impact and influence the recording would wield until the present already decades ago.
“Fastidiously performed, sometimes ecstatic, and lovingly recorded, Officium is an authentic conversation between jazz and the European classical tradition.” – The Guardian (1994)
“There have been jazz-classical crossovers before. But no previous fusion has produced anything quite so strange and haunting as this. It is a sound that seems to draw out deep and dark thoughts, and then fade into oblivion without consolation or warning.” – The Times (1995)
“Officium” more than lives up to the hype and perhaps constitutes Garbarek’s most emphatic and ambitious artistic statement to date.” – Time Out, 1994
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1995: Giya Kanchelo – Exil
Exil, Giya Kancheli’s moving song cycle with settings of Psalm 23 and poems by Paul Celan and Hans Sahl, for soprano and mixed chamber ensemble, conducted by Vladimir Jurowski , was released in 1995, to critical acclaim:
“Exemplary performances and recording make this a valuable addition to the discography of one of the precious voices in the music of our time” – Gramophone Magazine
Of Kancheli, Time Magazine spoke in highest regard already upon the record’s release, writing: “From strife-torn Georgia comes a man who may well be the most important Soviet composer since Shostakovich: Giya Kancheli, whose dolorous yet spiritually radiant music gives eloquent voice to the ongoing tragedy of his native Georgia. In Kancheli’s hands the sounds of silence are hauntingly eloquent.”
Get the album here
1996: Erkki-Sven Tüür – Crystallisatio
On Crystallisatio, a collection of five Tüür works from the nineties, “Tonu Kaljuste conducts glittering performances in a full, reverberant sound balance”, to quote a review in BBC Music Magazine from 1996. The recording features performances by the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra with the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir.
This programme marked the first collaboration of Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür with Manfred Eicher and ECM, continuing the label’s deepened relationship with music from Estonia that goes back to the very beginning of the New Series, in Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa.
Gramophone Magazine: “This is a handsomely produced, thought-provoking release. Tüür is his own man. Anyone wanting to hear up-to-the-minute new music that will not sear the ears off his or her head could do little better than try this new disc.”
Get the album here
1997 (I): György Kurtág, Márta Kurtág – Játékok
“A revelatory disc of fragmentary piano ‘games’ by this 71-year-old Hungarian composer, interspersed with his own moving transcriptions of Bach for four hands. This conjunction
of contrasting styles gives a powerful focus to Kurtág’s own declamatory, often childlike and infinitely varied music.” – The Observer, 1997
Játékok captures wonderful two and four handed piano accounts of Kurtág’s Játékok (Games) and Bach Transcriptions, performed by Kurtág himself and his wife Márta.
In The Times, Hilary Finch called the miniaturesque pieces “rare and wonderful crystallisations out of ancient musical bedrock, irresistibly interspersed with the intense and quiet beauty of Kurtág’s loving Bach transcriptions”, while concluding: “As ever, a unique programme is recorded to perfection, and supported by thoughtful and illuminating liner notes.
Featured on the right is an excerpt from the first page of the liner note in English, embellished with a fragment of Kurtàg’s handwritten manuscript copy of the first “flower piece”.
Get the album here
1997 (II): Jean-Luc Godard – Nouvelle Vague
“[Godard’s] use of sound has a way of creating fresh caverns of poetic depth.”
–New York Times
At the press conference in 1990 Filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard talked about his inspiration for the soundtrack of Nouvelle Vague: “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.”
The complete soundtrack of the movie was released on ECM’s New Series in 1997 and the CD edition contains a 100 page booklet with the full dialogue in three languages plus an extra booklet with stills from the movie.
Cahiers du Cinéma declared “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.” ECM’s edition incorporates a liner essay by blind cinephile Claire Bartoli who describes Godard as a “magician, the ferryman from another reality. He dislodges the sounds of the world, fashions them, isolates them from the life peculiar to them: a bark, a strain of music, a few words by a writer, the ring of a bell, the sound of waves (…) Emotion is engendered by the very substance of the sound. Nouvelle Vague invents concrete music that does not hew to the beat, that toys with the irrational.”
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1998: Dino Saluzzi, Rosamunde Quartett – Kultrum
Kultrum, with Argentinian bandoneon master Dino Saluzzi and the Rosamunde Quartett was released in 1998. Featuring Saluzzi’s chamber music for bandoneon and string quartet, Kultrum is both a “departure” and an extension of Dino’s previous ECM recordings in which he acknowledges and then transgresses the boundaries: between composition and improvisation, between so-called serious and popular music, between folk music and jazz and tango.
„Saluzzi´s eminently listenable but uncompromised compositions draw an his own diverse background in tango, chamber music and avant-garde jazz; the result is evocative of all of these. Excitement, poignancy, virtuosity and sheer emotional strength permeate these eight pieces. (…) The uniqueness of this disc, among the best recordings I´ve heard this year, is paramount. Highly recommended.“ (Gramophone, Editor´s Choice)
Get the album here
1999: Arvo Pärt – Alina
„A minimum of notes employed to maximum effect, expertly sustained in performance.“ – Gramophone Magazine
There have been other recordings of “Für Alina” and “Spiegel im Spiegel” but none like those on this disc, realized with the participation of the composer. Here Pärt, aided by exceptional interpreters, revisits those seminally important compositions which marked the birth of a new, “prismatic” period in his work, establishing a link between compositions embodying the fundamental traits of the “tintinnabuli style.” Three interpretations of the duet ‘Spiegel im Spiegel’ (Mirror in the Mirror), for violin or cello and piano, become “formal pillars positioned before, between and after two solo renderings of ‘Für Alina’”, the latter performed with interpretive freedom by Alexander Malter.
„It is the voice of internal exile, self-communing and highly personal but wholly accessible for anyone willing to listen. The big danger of listening to Alina, is that much of what you hear afterwards will suddenly sound like noise – too much noise. But it´s a risk worth taking.“ – Gramophone magazine
„Das alles ergibt eine klangliche Weite, nachgerade einen Charakter des Vormusikalischen, der alle erdenklichen Möglichkeiten einzuschließen scheint, ohne sie gebrauchen zu müssen.“ – Fono Forum
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2000: Bruno Ganz – Wenn Wasser Wäre
“A beautiful production, superbly annotated“ – Gramophone (2001)
Fifteen years after his acclaimed New Series readings of Hölderlin, Celan and René Char – “a blessing among poetry recitals” – here it was “The Waste Land” of T.S. Eliot and the poetry of Giorgos Seferis that formed the basis of actor Bruno Ganz’s recording. The poetry is linked by excerpts from the music of György Kurtág, Giya Kancheli and Nikos Xydakis.
As BBC Music Magazine raved in the year of the album’s release, “even by ECM’s standards, this is a bold, visionary production (…) The images, texts and music create a powerful atmosphere, where the whole adds up to much more than the sum of the parts.”
Get the album here
