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Out of a void of enveloping silence emerge--during the first several minutes of
Lament--ultrafaint wisps from the solo violin, the bow barely seeming to make contact with the instrument. Such is the indelibly potent beginning to
Giya Kancheli's poem of lamentation for his friend the Italian avant-garde composer Luigi Nono. These spare fragments, the merest shards of music, gain slight coloration from isolated tones within the orchestra and then from a soprano voice as the immensity of grief seeks a way of articulation before eventually coalescing into simple but detached phrases of infinite sadness, only to fragment yet again. Kancheli here adds to the long tradition of musical mourning with an utterly original vision that--to borrow Yeats's phrase--manages to penetrate into "the deep heart's core." Himself a long-time exile, Kancheli slowly and patiently sets an oracularly resonant text by the poet Hans Sahl. (Together with Paul Celan, Sahl inspired the Georgian composer's marvelous work
Exil). Indeed, the delicate textures of his music--its vehement outbursts of full-lunged brass all the more shocking in their contrast--perfectly mirror this poetry of memory and loss. As in his recordings of the like-minded
Arvo Pärt, violinist Gidon Kremer is again on a perfect wavelength with Kancheli's mystical--and resolutely unsentimental--simplicity. He summons amazing varieties of pianissimo, a mesmerizing descant on soprano Maacha Deubner's otherworldly purity of phrasing. Though only 42 minutes, the disc doesn't feel unduly "short," given
Lament's emotional resonance. It's hard to imagine anything that could follow its final moments, the violin rocking between two notes in a kind of transcendental lullaby. ECM's production is, as usual, rich and full. The booklet has an intriguing essay on the composer and a suite of black-and-white photos.
--Thomas May
