Dustin O'Halloran - Lumière

Continuing with the soft stuff, although I'm starting to get an itch. Soon Bartok will strike again, with a vengeance, I am sure.

This is a recently issued album by Dustin O'Halloran, who hails from the same musical ecosystem as Max Richter, Peter Broderick, Nils Frahm and Johann Johannsson. O'Halloran seems to have garnered a loyal following with two previous CDs with solo piano work (I haven't heard them). And he has produced a film score for Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. Here he mixes piano with string quartet in a suave soundscape that would present a perfect foil for a dentist's waiting room. Max Richter is never far away. Ann thought it reminded her of Cliff Martinez's soundtrack for Soderbergh's Solaris, and she's right. But Solaris is a far more rewarding work. Lumière is a little bit too much of chocolate box romanticism to keep one involved. There are a few moments here and there of genuine, touching introspection. But for the best part it doesn't really catch fire.

Brian Eno - Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks

This is an ambient classic, composed by Brian Eno almost twenty years go and played by Eno, his brother Roger and Daniel Lanois. Whilst the web teems with exalted reviews, I'm a little less enthused about the music. The first half is, however, particularly fine, with gossamer textures brooding over vast and lifeless lunar spaces. Most fans of this album reserve their most ecstatic hyperbole for An Ending (Ascent) as a particularly fine track. It's cute but really not that special: an undulating series of chords with vague hymnic undertones. Too short as well to transport the listener into the groove. This delicate atmosphere is then suddenly punctured by incongruous country-and-western recollections (with Lanois on steel guitar). Frankly, it's hard to bear. Luckily the final two, longer tracks reconnect with the bleak atmosphere of the first half. As with all ambient, mood is everything. Given the right setting - night and sunrise experienced from a cosy bivouac on the summit of the Matterhorn, maybe - this kind of music could have a memorable impact ...

Max Richter - Infra/Jonsi & Alex - Riceboy Sleeps

I'm making further inroads in ambient territory. With very mixed results, however. Max Richter's Infra was a disappointment. Apparently it was recorded in a single day and as far as I'm concerned one can tell. It's listenable but kind of banal. In contrast to his Memoryhouse it doesn't have the kitschy slip-ups. But neither does it flourish some of the rare gems on that disc. It's a fairly monochrome album, almost literally so as a lot of it is radio static, mixed with some wistful, neo-romantic chamber music snippets. I listened to it only once and it didn't make a big impression on me.

Riceboy Sleeps is the result of a collaboration between Sigur Ros's frontman Jonsi and his partner Alex Somers. It's a genuine ambient album, 70 minutes of acoustic clouds wafting through the speakers. I believe that given the right setting and mood, the album can have an impact. It certainly captures something of the ethereal, unearthly atmosphere of the Icelandic interior. As soft background music for a meditation session, or as an acoustic accompaniment for a long car ride it certainly won't disappoint. But I don't think there is much more to say about it.

Maura Susanna - Terra Mia

Whilst I was at Valtournenche, my hostess Adelaide at B&B Pankeo gave me a CD of a local singer-songwriter, urging me to give it a good listen. Maura Susanna hails from St Vincent, in the main Aosta Valley, just where the Valtournenche branches of. It was fifteen years ago since she had recorded an album. Terra Mia is a varied and multi-lingual collection of canzone - in Italian, French and the local Francoprovençâl - which surveys fairly typical terrain.There are more than hints of Ornella Vanoni, Angelo Branduardi and french chansonnier(res) I am not able to name. But it's all very well done: songs are all of a piece, genuine, earthy, tastefully arranged. It's a genuinely pleasurable collection. There's more music in this album than in PJ's hyped Let England Shake. I listened to the disc numerous times on the way back and also spun it couple of times since my return. My two favourite songs are Outor du Vèn (based on a Chopin Prelude, op. 28, nr 20) and Sole Freddo (text and music by Maura herself).

Bryars - Piano Concerto/Feldman - Durations, Coptic Light

Last week I was in Geneva to give a talk at a conference. Later I drove to the Valtournenche to discuss my Matterhorn photo project with a potential author for an essay to be included in the book. The rental car had a CD player but I forgot to bring any music. So I popped into the local FNAC and bought two discs for listening on the road. I must say none of them gave me particular pleasure. 

Bryars I've known for quite a while. I particularly admire his two quartets, recorded in the early 1990s by the Balanescu Quartet for the Argo label. As the Second Quartet seems to take off where the First ends, I have taken to the habit of listening to them back-to-back, as one single giant quartet. They espouse a sweet, lyric minimalism that is accessible but never dull. The Third Maconchy quartet I listened to recently has something of that same flavour (although likely the music is a little more muscular than the Bryars). However, I also have his Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet (featuring Tom Waits) and I don't think this has been in the CD player more than twice. I bought this Naxos disc partly on the strength of the soloist. I think Ralph van Raat has offered some interesting programs on the Naxos label and I was eager to give him the benefit of the doubt in this Bryars recital. There are two solo pieces - After Handel's Vesper and Ramble on Cortona - and a Piano Concerto (The Solway Canal). Here Van Raat gives a little background on the genesis of the latter work and his appreciation of it. The concerto is indeed a rather strange work, half an hour long, in a single movement and with an unorthodox orchestration involving a male chorus The tempo and dynamics are almost static. The music meanders in much the same way as a river would. The piano part does not sound virtuosic at all. It is buried throughout into the orchestral and choral matrix.  It seems Bryars wanted to create a dreamlike atmosphere but it is a fine line between reverie and somnolence. I am tempted to tilt towards the latter. I don't have a problem with tonality, neo-romanticism and lyricism per se, but here there is simply not enough tension to keep me involved. I tend to agree with this Guardian critic who was baffled by the featurelessness and the lack of striking musical ideas. The same applies to the solo pieces which are curiously dull and seem almost deliberately under-composed. This is not minimalism anymore but a kind of forced dilettantism. I am not sure what the point is.

Onwards then to something very different compositionally, but strikingly similar aurally. I have always been intrigued by Feldman's Coptic Light (1986) but never had a chance to hear it. With Bryars it shares a floating kind of rhythm, a slow tempo, muted dynamics, and kaleidoscopic but subtle (if you wish) shifts in texture. Coptic Light sounds like a heaving, breathing animal, 23 minutes long. It deploys a huge orchestra but that is nowhere in evidence. Dynamics never seem to rise above forte. Towards the end it becomes a tad more engaged and sounds like a geriatric version of the Sacre, with just a hint of ritualistic frenzy. Durations I-V are a set of chamber pieces written almost 30 years earlier. Scored for various ensembles - including less obvious instrumenst such as tuba and vibraphone - they actually sound like miniature versions of Light. The same kind of wave-like, heaving patterns throughout. It's all not unpleasant to listen to. I easily cycled four or five times through the complete disc without it ever getting on my nerves. But it never really catches fire either. Maybe it's the recording or playing which is to blame (Coptic Light is played by the DSO, in principle a very good orchestra, conducted by Michael Morgan, who has apparently been assistant conductor of Solti and Barenboim at the CSO).

Nils Frahm - Wintermusik

Originally compiled and produced as a Christmas gift for family and friends, Wintermusik is certainly meant to be exquisitely beautiful, but it does not sound like it wants to be a crowd pleaser.  Nils Frahm plays three instruments - piano, celesta, reed organ - with beguiling simplicity. Dynamics are pp throughout, tempo is steady and slow start to finish. This is a mood study, mere texture and harmony. It is the musical equivalent of a Kertesz picture: a modest, plain, but subtle and magical slice of life as it slips day after day through our fingers. Or take this little amateur video that somebody slapped on top of the first track of the album: a train ride through a wonderfully open, snowy landscape at dusk. Captures the wistful atmosphere to perfection. If Frahm can do this when he is 28, what will he be able to offer at 82? I am very sorry I won't be around to hear it.

PJ Harvey - Let England Shake

PJ Harvey's 'Let England Shake' has been recently released to overwhelming critical acclaim but to my mind it is not a great album. It's easy enough on the ear. Too easy in fact. There's some Björk, some U2 (from the Joshua Tree days) and just a snuf of good old angry PJ. The poppyness, however, jars with the solemn overall theme for this album: war. She sings about how England has been shaped by Gallipolli, by D-Day and the Great War. But the lyrics are none too subtle ('big guns shooting', 'orphaned children', 'limbs pointing upwards' ...). And they miss the biting irony that another war-obsessed brings to the theme. In Roger Waters' The Wall, The Final Cut and Amused to Death, the pain and waste of war, and also its paradoxical, perverse beauty are brought into relief much more poignantly. PJ's musings on the whole leave me pretty cold. They are pedestrian, derivative and occasionally veer into unpalatable bombast. And yet she has shown in the past, with albums such as 'To Bring You My Love', 'Is This Desire' and 'White Chalk' that she is able to conjure visions of epic, biblical anger and mystery. Here it didn't happen. There are two or three songs which have the fingerprints of a PJ in great form. The second song, which was pre-released, is short but refreshingly direct and unadorned. Despite the simplicity it encapsulates a complex mix of emotions. It's likely the best of the whole album. I also like 'Bitter Branches', which is a fairly unpretentious rock song that goes straight to the quick. 'England' has those Björk overtones, with PJ singing in that unnaturally high tessitura and weird accent, but it sort of works. Not a 'beautiful' song but one that certainly bears repeated listening. 'Battleship Hill' starts chillingly awful - I first thought it was a splash of Enya - but then the song unfolds beautifully, with very effective layered vocals. 'The Glorious Land' comes quite close to being memorable but I'm really unsettled by that gimmicky bugled theme. Also PJ intoning that campy 'Oh America' is a real downer here. There is a lot where my attention starts to drift and a few things that really make me grab for the remote. The final song is one of them: a monotonous, incongruous children song that speaks about an ex-soldier that can't get his friend dying on the battlefield out of his mind. Listen to 'The Ballad of Bill Hubbard' on Waters' Amused to Death and you know what I mean.

Max Richter - Memoryhouse

Max Richter himself then. He's a German-born British composer (1966), who has come on the radar with his evocative score for Ari Foldman's Waltz with Bashir. I've been skirting Richter's orbit for many years without actually making the connection. He studied with, amongst others, Berio, and was co-founder of the contemporary music ensemble Piano Circus. I remember their recordings on the Argo label. In 1996 he collaborated with the dance band Future Sound of London on their album Dead Cities. I actually have that in my collection (thanks to PC who made it part of our exchange project). In 2002 Richter produced his first solo album, Memoryhouse, which went out of print but was reissued a few years ago on the Fat Cat label.

I will be brief about the album itself. It's skillfully composed, lush film music for a non-existent motion picture (apparently it has been used for a BBC documentary on the nazi extermination camps). With its sweeping melodies, rich orchestration (at times) and general mood of loss and nostalgia it would do extremely well as a aural foil for a pompous period drama. However, I find it lacks subtlety. Some of the tracks (Sarajevo) are way over the top to my taste (think Gorecki's Third in overdrive). So, it is only suitable for moderate consumption. There is, however, one track which I find truly spellbinding and that is Maria, The Poet, 1915. It simply superimposes a recording of Maria Tsvetaeva declamating a poem in unbelievably stirring and musical Russian on a slow, darkly-melancholic, oceanic, undulating string melody. It's not subtle either, but it really moves me everytime I hear it!

In its genre, Memoryhouse has something to offer. I am quite certain Richter will grow into one of the most prominent film composers around. I hope he will flex his muscles on more serious undertakings too.

Nils Frahm - The Bells

I got to Nils Frahm via a little detour. A few weeks ago I saw an impressive movie. Waltz with Bashir is an animation movie directed by Ari Folman that recounts the horrors of the 1982 Israeli campaign in the Lebanon. I was not only struck by the film but also by the music, written by Max Richter,  a composer unbeknownst to me. I poked a little bit around and hit a seemingly rich vein of many other musicians I hadn't heard about. One of them is Nils Frahm, a young German pianist, born in 1982. The Bells is a solo piano album, improvised and recorded over two nights in November 2008 in a Berlin church. Five and a half hours of music was condensed into a 40 minute recital. Instigator behind the scenes was Peter Broderick, another young and eclectic musician I hadn't heard of before.

Frahm's recital is impressive. Whilst harmonically, formally and gesturally the music doesn't break any new ground, I feel it is never banal or cloying. We are somewhere in the territory explored by Brad Mehldau, Keith Jarrett or Vasilis Tsabropoulos. Frahm does not have the stature (yet) of these giants in the contemporary solo piano niche, but what ties him to these men is the basically uplifting and hymnic vein that runs through the whole recital. His tone - lean, but full and deep - makes it easy and rewarding for the listener to connect. In some tracks (Said and done, Down down, My things) he really reaches for the level of exultation that we find in some of Mehldau's most brilliant extemporisations. The recital is short but it is well sequenced. There is not a weak moment in a natural flow between rapture and introspection which ends with the rather modest and laconic Somewhere nearby. Throughout one senses a disciplined and authoritative musical imagination, a passion that is kept in check by a desire for understatement and a genuine identification with the instrument.

The recording has a lot of presence. 2 mikes at the piano and 3 more to record the resonant acoustics of the church. At one point the bells of the Grunewaldkirche intrude gently in the musical proceedings. But they are only a natural complement to an affirmative musical fabric in which their celebratory intonations are woven deeply into. 

I look forward to hearing more from Nils Frahm.

Jon Balke & Amina Alaoui - Siwan/Ralph Towner - Anthem/Trygve Seim - Different Rivers

After the intense listening experiences with Mahler's Seventh and the BFO Wagner concert, I felt like a pause. For a moment I wanted something less demanding, something simpler. And so I ended up rummaging in my collection of ECM cds, selecting three different recordings to carry me through the previous weekend.

What happens to be common to all of them is a desire to blur the boundaries between genres. Towner, with his solo guitar, straddles classical and jazz. Trygve Seim and his jazzband explore territory connecting jazz and folk. Jon Balke and Amina Alaoui offer an adventurous combination of Western baroque music and Arab-Andalusian songs from the Muslim period. And all of them flirt with the boundaries between the written and the improvised.

Siwan is likely the most tantalising project of them all, emerging from an eclectic literary and musical constellation. Amina Alaoui is a formidable scholar and artist, and one of the most gifted interpreters of the Gharnati tradition: the songs that survived at the Granada court, the last holdout against the Reconquista, and have survived centuries through oral transmission. Jon Balke is a Norwegian composer and jazz, folk and fusion pianist who won fame with his Magnetic North Orchestra. It is Balke who composed the music for the Siwan album, with Alaoui stepping in for poem adaptation and melodic co-composition.  Jon Hassell is an American experimental trumpetist. Kheir Eddine M'Kachiche is an Algerian violinist and long-time accompanist of Amina Alaoui.They are backed up by a full-fledged baroque ensemble led by Bjarte Eike. Moorish and Iberian poets from the turbulent 11th and 12th centuries offer the literary raw material for Alaoui's songs. There are two excursions to 16th century Spain with Lope de Vega and St John of the Cross, the mystic who established the order of the barefoot Carmelites.

The journey starts with a purely instrumental invocation led by Kheir Eddine's mysterious violin. The following, short song O Andalusin connects most poignantly. Richly harmonised it opens a vast and colourful panorama on a world that was on the verge of disappearing. Alaoui's voice is powerful and strikingly husky. The unfolding music is generally in a slow tempo, mournful (Ondas do mar de Vigo), longing or pensive (Ashiyin Raïqin) in tone , with discrete ostinato percussion sometimes lending an air of inevitability (Itimad). There are more lively intermezzos too with songs that sound strikingly contemporary (Jadwa, A la dina dana). Alaoui switches from Arabic to Spanish and Portuguese with admirable facility. The unfamiliar blend of sonorities (baroque orchestra with harpsichord, lute, theorbo and recorder, Balke's synths, Hassel's nasal trumpet, oriental percussion) works wonderfully well. The hypnotic finale is built around two long extemporations (10 and 12 minutes long, respectively): Thulâthiyat ('trilogy') is based on a poem by the great Sufi mystic Husayn Mansour Al-Hallaj (857-922) that describes the stages of the ascetic's path. Alaoui writes in the liner notes: "At first the consciousness remains external to the essence of ecstasy. It becomes an astonished spectator, then becomes disoriented, and finally joins the paroxysm, dispossessed by the ego in ecstasy: a ceaseless transformation through vital alternation without ever achieving permanent stability." The song opens with a percussion-underpinned recitation and steadily gathers momentum to a hypnotic climax.

Toda ciencia trascendiendo is based on a gentle, sombre march rhythm wrapped in adventurously modulating unisono strings and M'Kachiche's melancholy violin. Alaoui recites in an almost matter of fact way St John's Couplets written in a state of transcendental contemplation in which he gives an account of how he found his way to a 'perfect realm of holiness and peace (...) beyond all science'. Only in the final line of each couplet, 'toda ciencia transcendiendo', Alaoui lets the voice soar to spine-tingling effect. A lively instrumental coda with Hassel's stratospheric trumpet hovering over insistent percussion, brings the album to an end.

Wagner - Overtures and Orchestral Excerpts from Götterdämmerung

I am falling behind with the blog. Anyway, last Thursday we went to another live concert, the third after the Wagner Parsifal and the Mahler Seventh recently. This time we had the privilege to listen to the Budapest Festival Orchestra conducted by their trusted chief Ivan Fischer. We were lucky with the Hungarian presidency of the EU. The orchestra was only on a short European tour.

It was the third time I saw them live. First time was in the Brugge Concertgebouw with a Mahler Sixth and Bartok Music. Then, a few years ago, there was a genuinely memorable concert with a first Act of Wagner's Walküre. And so this time there was another full Wagner programme, consisting of the Siegried Idyll, the Tannhäuser Overture and Bacchanale, the Meistersinger Overture, Siegfried's Rhine Journey and Funeral March, and the final scene from Götterdämmerung. We were seated again in the 'logezetels' so that we had a very good view of the orchestra on the scene and Fischer conducting.

It was another truly stunning performance. Already from the very first bars into the Siegried Idyll it was clear we were going to experience something special.  Through a phenomenal control over dynamics and tonal shadings Fischer and his musicians created a diaphanous and evanescent cloud of music. Lines were most lovingly shaped. It was as if the music was dreamt rather than actually played. An amazing feat.

With the Tannhaüser Overture we moved into a more energetic mode. Here it struck me how this wonderful, 100-man strong orchestra exhibited a most wonderful poise and restfulness when seated on the podium. There is not a hint of strain emanating from this collective. And the same applies to Fischer himself, who appeared supremely confident but in the most natural and self-effacing manner. Quite impressive! And how different from our experience at the Mahler Seventh performance. One third into the Overture and Bacchanale I was thinking that a little more excitement might have been welcome. But I underestimated Fischer's uncanny handling of the long, long crescendo forming the piece's backbone. In the Bacchanale the roof went really of the Bozar's Henri Le Boeuf hall.

The rest of the evening was a veritable feast which I witnessed misty-eyed and awestruck: a rousing Meistersinger Overture (echoes of the Mahler Seventh's Finale!), a wild and darkly romantic Funeral March, and a complex layered Götterdämmerung final scene (with Petra Lang as Brunnhilde). These are moments when I experience this level of music making as the pinnacle of civilisation, as the most perfect expression of a millennia long process of cultural accumulation and refinement. Elitist rubbish, maybe, but so be it.

What is so special then about the Budapest Festival Orchestra? As I said, there is unparallelled musicianship, with jawdropping perfection of execution (actually I was happy the lead trumpet had a tiny slip of tongue: at least they were human!). There is filigree precision, amazing clarity of layered voices, freshness and vivacity. The sound of the orchestra is rather lean and 'objective'. There's no fat, no ingratiating gloss, no oversaturated colours. It's like looking at an 8x10 contact print. And the music flows with unforced naturalness. What we hear also makes compelling musical sense! There is no doubt that Ivan Fischer and his BFO are one of the best orchestras around. Their modesty and lack of star appeal make them all the more adorable and admirable. Fischer has taken up a job in Berlin (Konzerthaus Orchestra, taking over from Lothar Zagrosek) but this will not compromise his work with his own orchestra. Let's hope we can look forward to a lot more of this fantastic partnership.

Mahler - Symphony nr. 7

Mahler cast a magic spell over me with his Seventh! In fact, I'm not alone. Ever since we went to that concert last Thursday at Bozar, Ann and I have had this music obsessively pounding in our heads. And if there is a momentary lull, we hum or whistle a theme to one another and we're hooked again for a few hours or days, who knows!  But it doesn't wear me out. To the contrary, the music stays fresh and alive.

Today I listened to Gielen's version in full and it is a wonderful rendering indeed. Very special. It seems as if Gielen has found a way to let this complicated and fractured musical process unfold in some sort of hyperdimensional space. Whilst most of his colleagues either get bogged down in the symphony's labyrinthine structures (Sinopoli), or happily dismiss the complexities in a rollercoaster ride (Solti; the live version we heard) or - sometimes very capably - illuminate predominantly one of this work's hidden strata (say, Scherchen, the expressionist; or Abbado, the romantic), Gielen conjures a particularly multifarious 'musicscape'.

There is no 'story' here. This is absolute music indeed, in all its glittering splendour and baffling intricacy. Gielen plays on significant variety in tempo, a very lean orchestral sound, analytic clarity in the work's rhizomatic voices and painstaking attention to minute shifts in expressive registers. His approach doesn't strike me as particularly 'modernist'. It's more-dimensional than that. Gielen weaves a rich tapestry of different layers here. There is the explicit historicism that pervades this whole symphony (the references to Strauss waltzes, the baroque figurations, the serenade character of the Nachtmusiken, the rondo template of the finale). Then Mahler doubles up this historicism in his backward glance to the Wunderhorn years, not only in the brooding references to the first movement of the Third but also in the authentically Bohemian sounding first Nachtmusik, transporting us back to the First Symphony, in the manner of Callot indeed! But then these wistful or ironic figurations are counterbalanced by a radical expressionism, expertly suggested by Gielen in a truly 'schattenhaft' scherzo that, paradoxically, in its lightness of touch prophesies the abstract, shattered but still monumental visions of expressionist painters such as Feininger or Jawlensky. Richard Strauss compartmentalised psychedelic rage and regretful nostalgia in two consecutive works, his Elektra (1908) and Rosenkavalier (1910), respectively. Mahler simply brings those two worlds together within the confines of the same work. The second Nachtmusik is a serenade, a 'Ständchen' with some genuinely warmhearted lyricism, crisscrossed with nightmarish overtones. A 'Siegfried Idyll' running amok! The finale, often so depressingly overblown and disjointed, really comes to life here. More than once I wondered what I was listening to, so disorientingly fleeting are the perspectives offered. It's kaleidoscopic and coherent at the same time: a most satisfying and genuinely symphonic end to this unsettling work.


All this is a most unsatisfactory rendering of what is in effect a most intricate musical process. I'm experiencing it as absolute music but I have to resort to hapless similes to reveal something of that experience. When I listen I am not resorting to narratives to keep track of the unfolding process, but it's an almost holographic experience that appeals to an inner eye for structure and space, and an inner sense for shifts in texture. It's like experiencing a medium of fantastically differentiated viscosities, like feeling the swoosh of a trapdoor suddenly opening under your feet, the dizzyness of constantly shifting perspectives. It involves horizontality and verticality, sequentiality and mirroring, stasis and dynamism, body and mind. That's what a Mahler Seventh in the right hands can do.