"Caris Mere" for soprano and viola
"Midday Prayers" for soprano, clarinet and chamberorchestra
"Night Prayers"
ECM New Series 1568 (449 198-2)
ECM New Series 1568 (449 198-2)
I waxed lyrical, or tried to, about Kancheli’s Morning Prayers and Evening Prayers in April 1995. But I can’t compete with Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich’s booklet-essay for ECM’s companion disc containing the other two Prayers in the cycle. He claims a post-avant-garde historical significance for Kancheli which some may find hyperbolic, and which surely reads more into the music than the composer himself intended. Yet the high-flown imagery is not inappropriate: “In such trackless terrain, history seems to be arrested and sedimented in remembered traces of lost beauty, bygone battles, shattered happiness, and spent suffering... Like the Eskimos whose life experience has led to some three dozen linguistic descriptions of the all-pervasive white of their environment, Kancheli’s mournful expressivity gleans untold variations and nuances from the ‘white’ of his tonal environment.” That’s all well said, and though I can’t share the author’s apparent conviction that Kancheli’s recent work has the expressive power and innovative boldness of his remarkable symphonies from the 1970s, the new disc will certainly appeal to those who have already caught the Kancheli ‘bug’.
Midday Prayers and Night Prayers complete the cycle somewhat cryptically entitled A Life without Christmas. They are meditations on snatches of biblical text, as is the solo viola piece Caris Mere (Georgian for “After the Wind”). Night Prayers was originally composed for string quartet (are the Kronos Quartet, to whom it was dedicated, getting round to a recording?), and to my ears the revised arrangement, superimposing soprano saxophone, doesn’t sound entirely convincing. This may come as a disappointment to those expecting Jan Garbarek to emulate his wonderful collaboration with the Hilliard Ensemble on “Officium”.
In Midday Prayers Kancheli’s familiar polarized extremes of near-hibernation and manic activity are faithfully captured by performers and engineers. So too, unfortunately, is a certain amount of traffic noise, which rather breaks the spell in passages of extreme hush. Kim Kashkashian plays her short solo piece to the manner born.
Not a top priority issue, then, but one which makes a valuable addition to the discography of a distinctive voice in contemporary music.
Gramophone, April 1997
This is a disc that needs time to make its presence felt: both literally, in that Midday Prayers begins with murky swathes of quiet before building to a leviathan climax, and in the way the slow, unwieldy, apparently formless expanses of each work need repeated listening in order to gain any sense of their wholeness.
Midday Prayers, featuring the dedicatee clarinettist Eduard Brunner, weaves wispy melismas over a floating tonality which, so the booklet note says, is ‘of exceptional dignity and (poisoned) beauty’. But dignity is just what the climactic points of blasting energy lack. These statements have the belligerent violence of Galina Ustvolskaya, without the confidence of her convictions.
Caris Mere (Georgian for ‘After the Wind’) forms the seven-minute vocal centrepiece in this melancholy triptych. It is meant to represent the ‘scorching’ of the human spirit by the glacial wind and is certainly a deeply spiritual meditation. But if ECM was hoping that this would become another hit of Officium or Angels of Light proportions, the work is possibly too diffuse, too introverted to arrest the Classic FM attention span. As in Kancheli’s Exil, the voice of soprano Maacha Deubner is recorded in too much of a pale wash to make an impact, and even Kim Kashkashian’s viola sound, characteristically gutsy, is somehow neutralised by this music.
Night Prayers has been ‘in process’ for three years, and now appears with shrill improvisations from Jan Garbarek. It is the most intricate of all the works, but, considering their varied instrumentation and scope, these pieces are remarkably undifferentiated. Could it be the extreme slowness of their unfolding which eventually reduces all to the aural equivalent of the flat, grey wastes depicted on the cover?
Helen Wallace
BBC Music Magazine