Eto Bieri And Meta4*, Johannes Brahms Gérard Pesson Salvatore Sciarrino – Quasi Morendo

Reto Bieri’s solo album Contrechant, released in 2011, was widely praised for the Swiss clarinettist’s beauty of tone and his uncommon expressiveness with extended instrumental techniques. Quasi Morendo begins with a new exploration of one of the pieces featured on Contrechant, Salvatore Sciarrino’s Let Me Die Before I Wake (1982), with its “whisper-quiet sound world of harmonics, multiphonics and tremolandos” (The Guardian). Bieri is then joined by Finnish string quartet Meta4 for a profound interpretation of Johannes Brahms’s Quintet op 115 (1891). Inspired by Brahms’s friendship with clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld the quintet sounds freer, and more idyllic, than the composer’s earlier chamber music, yet is one of his most meticulously constructed works. The album closes with Gérard Pesson’s Nebenstück (1998), a ghostly re-arrangement of Brahms’s Ballade, Op. 10 No. 4.

Reto Bieri was born in Zug, Switzerland, and grew up under the influence of Swiss folk music, before going on to study at New York’s Juilliard School. Besides the standard repertoire for his own instrument, he is especially interested in contemporary music and cooperation with contemporary composers forms an important part of his work: almost all of the pieces heard here were developed in collaboration with the composers.

Attracted by the borderline experiences and solitary forms of a gradually darkening Renaissance, these compositions by Salvatore Sciarrino revolve around three figures from the 16th century, all of whom lost control in the field of tension between feverish living and spiritual demise, between brightness and damnation, inspired, driven and obsessed. The famous poet Torquato Tasso describes in three authentic letters (Lettere poetici) his tormenting visions of goblins and phantoms. This is all reflected in Sciarrino's intense, whispering, whirring music, in which silence is as significant as the birth of sound, "Almost naked, sober," remarks the composer, "and that is an important element when one is listening to music. Only in this way can it bore its way into the flesh." (Carlo Sini)