13.12.2024 | Timeline

Year in a review (part II)

As the year is approaching its conclusion, let’s take advantage of this opportunity to reconsider the many albums that were released on ECM and its New Series imprint throughout 2024. In this second part of the roundup, we take a closer look at the New Series portion of albums released across the year.

Starting out with Gidon Kremer’s Songs of Fate programme in January, the Series was off to a strong start, the album garnering wide-spread acclaim. The New York Times called it “one of Kremer’s most personal undertakings”, while BBC Music Magazine spoke of “a fascinating and expertly performed programme”.

June saw the release of two New Series recordings, starting with the programme of Hindemith and Schnittke works performed by pianist Anna Gourari and the Orchestra della Svizzera italiana under Markus Poschner. In the German daily FAZ, Wolfgang Sandner raved, “Gourari performs her complex part with admirable brilliance”, while the New York Times spoke of “excellent performances”, where “the cohesive impression is aided mightily by Gourari’s sensitive yet exacting performances, and by the conductor Markus Poschner’s sympathetic accompaniment.”

The second album out that month, a programme of Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben song cycle arranged for string quartet and soprano – bookended by works of Purcell and Byrd –, was likewise received with praise in the international media: “The idea of poetically framing the romantic songs with early British music is bold and right,” said the German daily paper Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Keel Road, The Danish String Quartet’s second album dealing with folk idioms from across Northern Europe, was released in August – an album of “heart-warming discoveries” according to the FAZ. It sparked the New York Times to ask the question: “How can one ensemble be so good at so many things?” and to say, “they bring to this music the same virtues as their more canonical pursuits: unified and natural phrasing, and crack ensemble playing. The arrangements are coolly resourceful, and their own tunes are so idiomatic you could easily mistake them for being ‘authentic’ folk music.“

For the 40th anniversary of ECM’s New Series, launched with Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa, the album was re-issued in a facsimile vinyl edition, released in September. As influential today as ever, French paper Le Monde greeted the reissue with great approval: “’Tabula rasa’, the album-manifesto of ECM’s New Series – reissued on vinyl, forty years after its release, the album that revealed Estonian musician Arvo Pärt to the West also cemented the identity of a new label”.

In October, two more albums saw the light of day: András Schiff and Yuuko Shiokawa returned with their third duo offering, comprising Brahms and Schumann sonatas. In a rave-review, All Music noted how “the performers have a profound mutual understanding, and the listener feels that they have entered an inward realm that is deep and unfathomable. A wonderful Romantic chamber music release.”

Anja Lechner’s cello solo programme of Bach – Abel – Hume was the second October release, received with veneration by the New York Times, BBC Music Magazine and The Strad alike. The NYT called the cellist “a bright star on the firmament,” while – in a five star review – BBC Music Magazine noted that “Lechner’s playing is communicative. The Hume pieces are engagingly rhetorical and capricious. The Arpeggio and Adagio of Abel come from one of his finest sonatas and are declaimed with concentrated introspection. In the Bach Suites lightly bowed articulation and conversationally punctuated dialogue do not disappoint.”

Last but not least, pianist Alexander Lonquich returned to the label alongside the Münchener Chamber Orchestra with the entirety of Beethoven’s piano concertos in tow. The German radio programme Deutschlandfunk Kultur calls it “a recording with the spirit of chamber music and an intense narrative style. The scale-runs are pearly, the lines are singing – already the B flat major concerto shows how precisely the orchestra and soloist listen to each other, how chamber-musically they interact with each other.”