Kim Kashkashian

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.

The great viola player Kim Kashkashian has long been one of the most outstanding protagonists of modern composition and this bold and subtle account of solo music by the great Hungarian composers György Kurtág and György Ligeti is a landmark recording. Kurtág’s Signs, Games and Messages (1989- in progress) in its 19 aphoristic sections is as demanding as Ligeti’s Sonata for viola (1991-94), but Kashkashian surmounts the very different challenges of the works, and points towards the qualities that unite these composers. As ever, she gets to the heart of the music, and unravels its secrets.

In his liner note, Wolfgang Sandner comments: “For twenty years Kim Kashkashian has devoted herself to Kurtág’s complex oeuvre for the viola and developed a remarkable rapport for the relation between compositional fabric and sonic nuance. In the thoughtful dramaturgical sequence of this recording, and in Kashkashian’s scrupulous reading, these Kurtág pieces, and the six movements of Ligeti’s Viola Sonata that follows them, seem like the work of a single visionary artist – conveyed in hidden signs and coded messages.”

Amongst her many notable albums for ECM New Series, Kashkashian has recorded Kurtág’s Movement for viola and orchestra (4654202) and also his Nine Pieces for Solo Viola, the early Jelek for viola, op 5, and the chamber work Hommage à R.Sch. (4379572). This is the ninth disc on the label devoted in whole or in part to Kurtág’s music.

The thread on this disc is percussion. The whole set, which now extends over 25 years, reflects my compositional trajectory over that time, and provides a series of exceptional, indeed, for me, ideal performances. Christian Wolff

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.

Top musicians from ECM’s artist roster, pianist Till Fellner and viola player Kim Kashkashian among them, deliver both fiery and sensitive interpretations of new, mainly orchestral works by Thomas Larcher. It’s the third ECM disc exclusively devoted to the Austrian composer who juxtaposes tonal harmony and avant-garde compositional technique in most original ways.

Larcher’s recent pieces are marked by intense sonic imagination, great rhythmic energy and a virtuoso impact that makes for immediately rewarding listening. This recording features Böse Zellen and Still, respectively piano and viola concertos performed by Till Fellner and Kim Kashkashian with the Munich Chamber Orchestra conducted by Dennis Russell Davies. The disc is enhanced by his third string quartet Madhares which is played by the youthful French Quatuor Diotima in their ECM debut.

The creative output of Thomas Larcher (born in Innsbruck in 1963) - whom The Times recently called “a musical talent of unbounded sensitivity and distinction bound for 21st-century glory” - has been championed on ECM New Series since 2001. His earliest compositions date from childhood. After studying in Vienna he embarked on a successful career as a concert pianist with a particular focus on new music. Heinz Holliger, Dennis Russell Davies and Manfred Eicher were amongst the friends and colleagues who encouraged Larcher to pursue composition further. Following early forays into piano music – some of which he performed himself on the CD Naunz (2001, 4617182) – he moved on to larger items of chamber music (Ixxu; 2006, 4763156), which in turn have led, over the years, to orchestral music and concertante compositions. Last autumn Larcher’s piano piece “What becomes” attracted wide-spread attention when premiered by Leif Ove Andsnes.

An album like an intense journey, tied together by Kim Kashkashian’s outstanding musical personality, this is a perfect addition to her wide-ranging ECM discography, highlighting the most touching vocal qualities of the viola in intriguing works by Olivero, Steinberg and Mansurian.

Nostalgia and feelings of separation and suffering due to the political situations in Israel and Armenia form a common thread throughout Kim Kashkashian’s new CD. The compositions – melodious and complex – are by three important masters who incorporate tonality in their contemporary musical language. In particular, Betty Olivero’s Neharót is one of those unforgettable pieces with the potential to stick in listener’s minds and to become a radio hit.

With five pieces respectively based on traditional laments of the Near East, Armenian chant and Hasidic melody, the focus is on essentially vocal expressiveness. Israeli Betty Olivero started work on Neharót Neharót in response to the suffering and pain caused by the war in Lebanon in 2006. Her hypnotic lament for viola and chamber orchestra draws on allusions to Kurdish and north African songs, traditional oriental music and Monteverdi. The viola's singing abilities come even more to the fore in Tigran Mansurian's Three Arias - sung out the window facing Mount Ararat which articulate the Armenian people's longing for the holy mountain beyond the border. Rava Deravin by Israeli Eitan Steinberg is based on a melody for a poem by one of the greatest traditional kabbalists and was first conceived for voice and instrumental ensemble. According to the composer, Kashkashian "manages to cry the prayer from within the strings, to murmur the sacred text with no words".

David Starobin, called by Soundboard Magazine “arguably the most influential American classical guitarist of the twentieth century” is heard on a CD of his favorite recordings of twentieth century music. Consisting of solo, chamber and vocal works with guitar, “Favorite Tracks, Vol. 2” offers newly remastered performances of the Grammy-nominated guitar virtuoso's recordings made between 1976 and 1997.

Featured on this disc are three works by Elliott Carter, and three performances with Starobin's long time duo partner, the baritone, Patrick Mason.