Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich’s booklet-essay may strike some as pretentious: ‘The whisper of a folk-song fragment. It returns again and again. Fades away. Re-emerges. “Melody.“ Destructible. Indestructible. Chamber-musical, spare, fragile over long stretches. A solitary violin sings and refrains from singing.‘
Yet such is the suggestive power of Kancheli’s music, it virtually compels such responses. Music of lamentation has long been his preoccupation, and this Lament, inscribed to the memory of Luigi Nono, has all the familiar Kanchelian moods: damaged soulfulness, peremptory outbursts and transfigured sadness, invoked aphoristically yet stretched to a hypnotic unbroken 42-minute span. Initial dots of sound on the solo violin grow into painfully sweet bursts of melody, suggesting a context only the composer himself knows and which the listener has to grope towards. Meanwhile anon-vibrato singer intones prayerful fragments (‘Venite domine’, if I’m not mistaken). Kremer’s violin becomes an eloquent voice; Maacha Deubner’s soprano becomes a celestial instrument.
Just as you sense the need for new ideas, the orchestra’s sculpted orchestral chords gain a pulverizing force, and before long all hell breaks loose. The slight residual rawness of the Tbilisi brass is a treasurable authentic feature here, and the entire score is conducted faithfully by the man who knows Kancheli’s music better than any musician alive.
Eventually the text of Hans Sahl’s poem, Strophen (Verses) , reveals the underlying substance. No apologies for quoting it in full (my translation) : I am walking slowly out of the world/into a landscape beyond all distance,/and what I was, and am, and remain/goes with me, patiently and unhurried,/to an as yet untrodden land./I am walking slowly out of time/into a future beyond the stars,/and what I was, and am, and will ever remain/ goes with me, patiently and unhurried,/as though I had never been, or hardly.
I’m not sure why those simple words touch me so deeply, but I am grateful for them and for the music which clothes them so hauntingly. As usual from ECM, recording quality is first-rate.'