Jan Garbarek

Long-awaited third album from one of the most touching and magical sound combinations in music today: Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek with Britain’s premier vocal group, The Hilliard Ensemble. The first album, Officium, has sold nearly 1½ million copies, and it is still in the charts as one of the top 20 best-selling classical albums of the past decade, well after its 1994 release.

The spellbinding Officium album, with Garbarek’s saxophone as a free-ranging ‘fifth voice’ with the Ensemble, gave the first indications of their immense combined musical scope and emotional power. Mnemosyne (1999) expanded the repertoire beyond ‘early music’ to embrace works both ancient and modern. Now Officium novum finds the collective at the crossroads of East and West.

A central focus is music of Armenia based on the adaptations of Komitas Vardapet, drawing upon both medieval sacred music and the bardic tradition of the Caucasus. The Hilliards studied these pieces during visits to Armenia, and the music’s modes encourage some of Garbarek’s most impassioned playing. Also included are Arvo Pärt’s “Most Holy Mother of God” in an a cappella reading, Byzantine chant, two pieces by Jan Garbarek, including a new version of “We are the stars”, plus Perotin’s “Alleluia, Nativitas”.

A beautiful and exceptional live recording, Concert in Athens, is the tenth ECM release by Greek composer of music for stage and screen, Eleni Karaindrou. With Eleni herself on piano and the Camerata Friends of Music Orchestra, it incorporates moving performances by guests Kim Kashkashian and Jan Garbarek.

The US violist and the Norwegian saxophonist have each made important contributions to Karaindrou’s music in the past, Garbarek with his playing on the film-score for The Beekeeper (recorded on Music for Films, 8476092) and Kashkashian as the key musical protagonist of Ulysses’ Gaze (4491532). Themes from both those films are revisited on this album, amongst much that is new.

A primary emphasis is music written for theatre: the wide-reaching emotional scope of pieces for plays by Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee provides a wonderful context for bringing the guest musicians into contact with Eleni’s soloists, above all the brilliant oboist Vangelis Christopoulos. Recorded November 2010, with Manfred Eicher as producer, Concert in Athens gives perhaps the fullest picture of Eleni Karaindrou’s outstanding compositional creativity to date.

Since the film of ‘Sounds and Silence’ was first screened in 2009, ECM has been deluged with requests for a soundtrack album, so the label is making this available simultaneously. Where the film shows the process of music-making, ‘Sounds and Silence: Music for the Film’ includes the music in its completed/produced form. There are two exciting exceptions – tracks from Greek film composer Eleni Karaindrou and orchestra live in concert in Frankfurt with saxophonist Jan Garbarek and viola player Kim Kashkashian as guests – these pieces have not previously been available on CD.

‘Sounds and Silence: Music for the Film’ is effective both as “film music” and as a highly effective and desirable ECM anthology in its own right. It presents pieces by some of ECM’s best-loved artists, among them Arvo Pärt, Dino Saluzzi, Anouar Brahem, Marilyn Mazur, and Nik Bärtsch. There is music from Puccini’s Tosca gloriously transformed by Natale Arnoldi for Gianluigi Trovesi’s All’Opera: Profumo di violetta project, and by Giovanni G Kapsberger, performed by Norwegian lutenist Rolf Lislevand and his Nuove Musiches group. And Keith Jarrett plays Reading of Sacred Books by Georges I. Gurdjieff.