Nik Bärtsch' Ronin - Llyria

A somewhat less demanding interlude. I listened to Nik Bärtsch' latest and newly acquired CD - Llyria -  in the background, in order to get a feel for the new production. I don't think I like it quite as much as their previous two ECM recordings, Holon and Stoa.

Nik Bärtsch' Ronin is a Swiss band that produces an idiosyncratic mix of jazz, funk and minimalist music. The line up is as follows: Bärtsch himself on piano, Björn Meyer on bass, Andi Puppato on a mix of percussion, Sha on alto saxophone and bass clarinet, and Kaspar Rast on the drums.

Both their previous CDs have been at times in heavy rotation in the house. I have been really captivated by their very distinctive mix of coolheaded Swiss precision and control, improvisatory flair and volcanic drive. The best tracks are those where the band really gets into the groove, spinning long, rhythmically flexible meandering lines (à la Reich), that teasingly keep gyrating around an elusive climax. As in Reich the music is never static, never just a fix for trance junkies. But there is constant movement, instrumental details constantly flashing up, minute variations traversing the musical texture. The real star of the band for me is drummer Kaspar Reich who in a spectacular way embodies that combination of awesome precision, remarkable self-restraint and spine-tingling rhythmic drive (altogether rather Bartokian features!).

If I have a gripe about Holon and Stoa it is that there is not enough trance rather than too much. Tracks (all of which are titled as abstract 'Modules') last typically less than 10 minutes, never more than 15 minutes. This is the kind of music, it seems, that would benefit from longer tracks allowing the band to explore the material in more diversified ways, building in more and longer waves of rhythmic contraction and expansion. So I was disappointed to see that Modules on Llyria are all between 7 and 9 minutes. It's a different record from the other two too in the sense that it is more lyrical (as the title maybe suggests; on the other hand it also may refer to a recently discovered luminescent underwater creature). They are beautiful, mellow tracks, superbly played and very well recorded. A marvelous disc to chill out. But it's not quite why I'm listening to a Bärtsch gig. We are very well catered for this kind of very tasteful, polite and soothing music elsewhere in the ECM catalogue. What I want to hear on a Bärtsch disc are epic battles wherein violent energy is sublimated into masterful asceticism.

Llyria is different but it's also more of the same. Bärtsch shifts to another register but doesn't change his formula. And I'm afraid that it starts to sound a little formulaic. There is a fair amount of mythography going on around Bärtsch' Ronin. The master himself feeds these stories with his musings about Zen, martial arts, flocks of birds and schools of fish moving like giant clouds of organic matter. Then there's the band's curious discipline of playing a Monday evening concert in their same Zürich club every weeks, for years on end (they have over 300 performances behind them by now). All this is intriguing. But I wonder how long you can keep this up without it becoming a pose. We look keenly forward to Nik Bärtsch Ronin's next production, in about two years time.

R. Strauss - Scenes from Elektra

On Monday I returned to that Reiner disc I dug up last week and relistened to the scenes from Elektra. Really compelling stuff that makes want to audition this opera more completely. Inge Borkh is, of course, legendary in this role. I also have her DGG recording made under Karl Böhm with the Staatskapelle Dresden. Despite its expressionistic antics the work struck me as more Wagnerian than ever. The Recognition Scene, with sonorous Wagner tuben playing an important role in its darkly hued sound world, reminds me of Walküre Act I (in fact Elektra contains what may be the most difficult tuba parts in existence). To be revisited soon, I hope.

Bartok - Wooden Prince, Scriabin - Poème de l'Extase

Still working on that Wooden Prince. I went to HVC to pick up the Järvi/Philharmonia version on Chandos. Järvi is a musical omnivore who has more than 400 recordings under his belt. Late Romantic, sprawling, colourful scores such as the Wooden Prince are core Järvi territory. Predictably his reading is less refined than the Boulez but he has that swashbuckling approach to the music that keeps one easily involved. Possibly his experience with the Russian repertoire is of assistance here too as the Scriabinesque overtones are becoming ever more obvious the more one listens to this work. Technically the Chandos is hardly better than the Boulez/DGG. A resonant and rather brightly lit recording typical of the early Chandos years.

Yesterday I listened to the whole ballet and today I picked out the fourth and longest dance only. Over 15 minutes long it is a full-fledged symphonic poem in itself. Quite breathtaking too with this no holds barred, feverish yearning that animates the whole orchestra. By the way, focusing on just one of the dances has the advantage that one can forget about the larger context. I find the ballet's nonsensical plot highly distracting when listening to the music. I am not interested at all in princes, princesses and fairies. I just want to listen to music. I have the same experience in Strauss' tone poems where the trivia underpinning his Sinfonia Domestica and Heldenleben keep intruding during auditions.

It's typical for the Wooden Prince in Bartok's output that one keeps looking for influences. That temptation does not exist in Bluebeard and the Mandarin which are so overwhelmingly and idiosyncratically Bartok. In case of the Prince, Stravinsky, Strauss, mature Liszt and early Schoenberg readily come to mind. But listening to that fourth dance suggested a connection with Scriabin. And whilst the latter may have gone a little further in exploring the boundaries of tonality, a back-to-back audition of his Poème de l'Extase (Mehta/LAPO, Decca) easily reveals the consonance of both works' musical substance.

R. Strauss - Elektra & Salome Scenes

I was a little puzzled yesterday after listening to that Wooden Prince. Reading all those accolades for the quality of the technical recording and contrasting that with my own experience, I started to doubt my own observations. Maybe I was being overcritical? Then I listened to the recording through my headphones and, indeed, liked it better than the audition on the speakers.

I decided then to do a little comparison between two recordings with the same orchestra (Chicago Symphony Orchestra) at the same recording venue (Orchestra Hall) but realised almost 40 years apart. Boulez' Wooden Prince, taped in December 1991 and Fritz Reiner's recording of Strauss scenes from Elektra and Salome, one of the first stereophonic recordings made by RCA Victor made in 1954. Of course, the chromatic, expressionistic Strauss is at the heart of Bartok's formative musical universe. One of his piano students reminisced that

... some lessons where devoted entirely to hearing him play by memory from Richard Strauss' Salome and Zarathustra - music forbidden at that time at the Academy as devilish and corrupting! - whilst I followed it closely with a pocketscore he always carried around in his portfolio.

Just a few measures into Salome's Dance of the Seven Veils I knew I wasn't wrong in my assessment of the DGG recording. There's so much more liveliness in the Reiner tape! One hears it particularly in the strings which really shine in an unforced, natural sort of way. There's a suppleness, a wealth of microdetail in the orchestral fabric that is totally lacking in the digital recording which sounds cramped and artificial. I did the test with Ann who has not a particularly sensitive ear for audio subtleties. But she also noticed immediately that the Boulez sounded more muffled and veiled, "as if it is played under a cloth".

It's one of my favourite rants but I'm really very annoyed by developments in modern recording techniques. What is sold to us as high resolution technology or Super Audio is, in fact, a hoax. We have learned nothing since the 1950s. To the contrary we're drifting further away from good practice all the time. And when you put on a good LP it becomes all too obvious what we have lost. Nobody seems to notice or to mind. I was happy, though, to see some likeminded critics writing in Fanfare, commenting on dull and lifeless SACD productions and comparing them unfavourably with analogue recordings from the late 50s. There a few lucky exceptions, particularly on smaller labels, with ECM leading the way in producing a natural, unforced, richly layered sound with a pleasing sense of space. This is not only about sound fetishism. The nature of recorded sound does in my opinion significantly influence our ability as listeners to connect to the unfolding musical process.

As to the Strauss-Bartok connection: it seems to me both composers at that stage of their creative development were looking for ways to expand the vocabulary of tonality without lapsing into chromatic immobilism. Elektra and Salome rely heavily on tonality as a structuring, expressive element (certain characters associated to particular keys etc.). The same applies to Bartok's stage works. He once requested a theater director that in the programme notes for a forthcoming 'double bill' performance of his opera and ballet the following should be noted:

You should not overemphasize the folkloristic elements of my music;
You should stress that in these stage works, as in my other original compositions, I never employ folk melodies;
That my music is tonal throughout;
That it has nothing in common with 'objective' and 'impersonal' tendencies (therefore, it is not properly 'modern' at all!).

Bartok - The Wooden Prince

We move on with Bartok's stage works. Kodaly thought that Bluebeard and the Prince ought to be played back-to-back to experience their full impact:

... the constructive energy of the music (of Duke Bluebeard's Castle) becomes even more evident if we hear the Wooden Prince immediately afterwards. The playful, mobile Allegro of the ballet serves to balance the desolate Adagio of the opera. The two works fit together like two movements of a huge symphony.

I really don't buy that assessment. Bluebeard is powerful enough to stand on its own as a quiet, mysterious monolith. And although the Prince's Prelude starts in the same C major that suffuses the central episode in Bluebeard, I find these works to project a very different musical ambience. In contrast to the opera's magnificent coherence of plot, atmosphere and musical structure, the Wooden Prince has always struck me as somewhat shapeless. Today's audition seemed to confirm that impression. It's in a way a more conventional piece grafted on a meandering, fairy tale-like narrative. One is reminded of the great Tchaikovsky ballets and, of course, Stravinsky's Firebird and Petrouchka. I suppose that the music of the complete ballet is to a certain extent tied to the stage action, which is why certain episodes come across as rhapsodic.

That being said, there is no doubt that this is a great score, impregnated with a deep, almost Tristan-like yearning. Another way of looking at the piece, rather than as a balletic sequence of tableaux, is as a giant symphonic poem elaborated as a set of variations on a single theme. Schoenberg's Pelleas und Melisande or, better still, Liszt's Faust Symphony come to mind. The Verzerrungstechnique that Liszt deploys in the latter maybe comes close to the way Bartok projects his material into the grotesque and even demonic.

One reason why the Prince fails to make a bigger impact on me is the recording. I have been listening to Boulez' digital rendering on CD, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It won two Grammy Awards (one for best orchestral recording in 1993 and one for best orchestral performance in 1994) and was enthusiastically praised by Gramophone critics as well. The technical quality of the recording has been universally applauded. I honestly can't fully endorse that enthusiasm. Interpretation-wise there is indeed a lot to be admired. But I find the digital sound to be rather airless, with an annoying kind of sheen enveloping the instrumental voices, somewhat veiling inner detail. Tuttis are sounding compact and slightly saturated too. And although the music often sounds very loud, the recording does not strike me as terribly dynamic. In short, it is a typical run-of-the-mill, early 1990s digital product. Compared to what some labels produce today (ECM, Harmonia Mundi) it sounds positively bland. And let's not mention what the RCA engineers accomplished in Orchestra Hall at Fritz Reiner's time.

So I'm definitely interested to look a little further afield to find a more engaging alternative to the Boulez recording.

Bartok - Bluebeard's Castle

This has always been one my favourite Bartok pieces and it's surely destined to remain that way. It's a hypnotic piece that derives its quite unique atmosphere from a very distinctive and typically Bartokian set of features. Many of Bartok's later works have a lapidary quality, a deceptive plainness that for an uninitiated listener easily masks the intricacy of their construction. Despite the lushness of the symphonic tapestry that pervades Bluebeard, that lapidary quality is very much in evidence in this early work too. One act, one hour of music, one (metaphorical) place, two protagonists which carry the proceedings in equal measure. The work starts in medias res and ends equally abruptly. The plot revolves around a single issue - negotiating the tension between inside and outside, between sun and moon, light and darkness, male and female - which is taken up in 7 variations. This basic tension is reflected in the piece's musical architecture, where a wealth of musical material is stitched together by a single, persistent 'blood' leitmotiv (a minor second). Bluebeard's short declamatory sentences and the evident fact that the whole piece is actually an uninterrupted hour-long Lento contrast with the glittering sophistication of the orchestration, the richness of the lyricism and the sinuousness of the instrumental voices (the strings and clarinet in particular). Finally, the work is strictly tonal, stretched as an arc between the F# passages at the beginning and ending of the work and a C major scene (tonally the greatest possible distance from F#) placed in the centre of the work. As a listener we sense the clever simplicity of this architecture in the hypnotic power of the music. It is almost beyond belief that Bartok composed this so very rewarding work at such an early stage of his career, at a point where he had no experience at all, beyond folk song arrangements, in writing for voices.

I have only a single version of this work in my collection with which I am perfectly happy: a 1979 DGG recording with Wolfgang Sawallisch at the helm of the Bayerisches Staatsorchester, with an impressive Julia Varady and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in the key roles. Meanwhile it has disappeared from the catalogue.

Comment - ECMreview.com

Talking about ECM: a while ago a received a kind mail which read as follows:

My name is Tyran Grillo. I currently run an ECM Records blog entitled "between sound and space" which you may view here:

http://ecmreviews.com

I recently came across your beautifully composed review of Schnittke's Ninth Symphony on Amazon and was wondering if you would mind my adding it, and any other ECM reviews you might have, to my "Guest Reviews" page. Feel free to take a look at my blog and let me know what you think.

I was happy to oblige with the request and the ECM reviews that I originally posted on Amazon.com now have been added to the bottom of the 'guest reviews' section.

The blog is really an interesting resource for ECM afficionados. Tyran's aim is eventually to review every single ECM disc (there are over a 1000) and to provide an open forum for all things ECM.