Reto

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.

“Salon music” became a thing in 19th-century Europe, dominated by piano works, for the obvious reason that the piano was the dominant piece of furniture in the salons of those wealthy and/or privileged enough to even have such a thing as a “salon”. But the violin wasn’t far behind as an instrument of choice–after the voice, at least in part because its tone and potential for sensuality and charm, along with impressive virtuosity and emotional expression (features important to and expected by those who attended these salon gatherings) was equal to the voice, and even greater in range and–in the hands and fingers of a capable player–in its ability to dazzle with technical feats.

All the music on this Naxos release by violinist Reto Kuppel and pianist Wolfgang Manz receives its world premiere here. Pauline Viardot (1821-1910) was known mostly as a singer and hardly at all as a composer, and the music of her son, Paul Viardot, was conservative even in his youth. This all might seem pretty obscure, but the truth of the matter is that the program has a good deal of freshness and charm. Start right in with the biggest surprise of all, the Violin Sonatina in A minor of Pauline, whom Liszt admired.

The basic idea of this album was to play in threes… Not to play 'something', but to experiment 'in threes' with sound worlds as different as those of Bartok, Poulenc and Schoenfield. With hisContrastes, composed in 1938 for Benny Goodman, Bartok broadened his penchant for traditional music and turned it into a more universal work, influenced by jazz. Poulenc was a child of the Paris of the Roaring Twenties, influenced as much by Stravinsky, Ravel and Satie as by cabaret songs and operetta. Paul Schoenfield, born in Detroit in 1947, also likes to combine styles. Each of the movements in his trio is based on an Eastern European Hasidic melody…not forgetting the breathtaking klezmer dances of Romanian Serban Nichifor.Almost ten years afterTake 2(Alpha211), Patricia Kopatchinskaja reunites with two great accomplices, clarinettist Reto Bieri and pianist Polina Leschenko, for a programme based around trios that celebrate the roots of these three musicians.

The highly gifted Swiss clarinettist Reto Bieri makes his ECM New Series debut with ‘Contrechant’, a brilliant recital for solo clarinet that looks at new developmental possibilities in the ‘language’ of the instrument in modern music. A wonderful panorama of contemporary music for clarinet by giants of new music – Elliott Carter (the grand old man of US music who celebrates his 103rd birthday in December), Heinz Holliger, Luciano Berio, Peter Eötvös and Salvatore Sciarrino plus an intriguing work by much discussed young Hungarian composer Gergely Vajda.

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.