"Land of the Colour of Sorrow (Trauerfarbenes Land)" for large orchestra
"A La Duduki" for for brass quintet and orchestra
ECM New Series 1646 (457 850 2)
ECM New Series 1646 (457 850 2)
The music of Soviet Georgia-born composer Giya Kancheli is at once patriotic and pessimistic, and those two traits add up to an elegiac sadness. Profoundly affected by conditions in his homeland, the composer has been living in self-imposed exile in Western Europe for several years. Kancheli has been absent from Georgia, but Georgia has not been absent from Kancheli; almost every major work of his can be heard as a response, direct or indirect, to the adverse economic and sociopolitical conditions that persist in the former Soviet republic.
... à la Duduki (1995) and Trauerfarbenes Land (1994) both are "major works," and are no exceptions to the above rule. The title of the former work alludes, I believe (ECM's notes are less than clear about this), to a wind instrument played especially by the rural Georgian peoples. Kancheli has filled this 19-minute tone poem with biting color and, typically for him, dramatic dynamic contrasts. Melodically, it owes more to Asia than to Europe, although its opulent melancholy is very Russian.
Trauerfarbenes Land can be translated as "Land that Wears Mourning," or "Country the Color of Sorrow." Over 37 minutes long, it too is characterized by long stretches of slow, spare, and hushed material punctuated by tense outbursts from the full orchestra. The intensity of this music is almost unbearable. It speaks of unrecoverable losses and unforgettable memories, of ephemerality, and of the unforgiving persistence of our pasts. This is one of Kancheli's largest and most moving canvases, and to hear it is to know what it is to be politically disenfranchised.
The latter work is dedicated to Dennis Russell Davies, who leads it and . . . à la Duduki on this new ECM recording. Davies, who conducted several prior Kancheli releases on ECM, is unstinting in realizing the music's contrasts and intensity, and the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra throws itself into Kancheli's sound-world. Joseph Schütz is the excellent sound engineer. The only reservation I have is about Wolfgang Sandner's essay, which, in spite of its erudition, says too little about the works and their composer.
Raymond Tuttle
Classical Net, 1999
... a la Duduki (a ‘duduki’ is a Georgian folk-reed instrument) opens to a striking neo-baroque toccata, outspoken music, bright and bold with a soft bed of string tone lying in its wake. Woodwinds file next in line, then more quiet strings, followed by another loud strike – shorter this time and sparer, too. A little later, we hear echoes of a waltz, then various fragmented solos – horn, violin and of course Kancheli’s beloved piano. A huge, brass-dominated climax erupts at around 7'10" (on track 1), but doesn’t hold out for long. The closing pages are dominated by lyrical – and telling – use of muted brass. By my reckoning, ... a la Duduki should prove the ideal introduction to Kancheli’s current style. And while a momentary encounter might suggest familiar territories revisited (vast terrains sparsely but dramatically populated), the musical material is more immediately striking, the scoring more texturally variegated, and the time sequences – even the rhetorical uses of silence – somehow quite different from those in Kancheli’s other recent work. Furthermore, echoes of modern jazz frequently fall within earshot.
Trauerfarbenes Land (‘Country the Colour of Mourning’) employs a large orchestra and is different again (though both scores employ big drums to impressive effect), being nearly twice as long as ... a la Duduki and darker in tone. The opening has solo piano and fortissimo trombones hammer what sounds like a recollection of Carl Ruggles before six significant quavers (which turn up again later, in different hues and keys) mark a dramatic dynamic contrast. Time and again Kancheli’s penchant for ‘cliff-hanger’ climaxes bring us to the edge of a towering aural precipice – from 14'33" (track 2), for example, and, most majestically, at 21'10''. Solace, albeit brief and deceptively simple, arrives at 32'16'', and the work marks its exit via a series of quiet trills. This is the music of personal displacement: desolate, spacious, occasionally cryptic, and with sudden pangs of sweetened nostalgia that flutter across the canvas like torn diary jottings tossed by the wind.
Writing of Trauerfarbenes Land, annotator Wolfgang Sandner alternates sections of musical analysis with selected extracts from Camus’s The Stranger. The concept is interesting, though I am not entirely sure whether it levels with Kancheli’s own ideas. More to the point, Dennis Russell Davies and producer Manfred Eicher conjure between them a precision-tooled sound picture where every grade of nuance is meticulously reported. Performance standards are unusually high throughout, so much so that I could not imagine either work being better played. An exceptional release, featuring some extraordinarily powerful music.
Gramophone, January 1999
From the sombre cover photography to the existentialist booklet notes explaining Georgian composer Giya Kancheli’s longing for home, much about this disc sets out to evoke an atmosphere of seriousness and gloom, no doubt to prepare the listener for the substantial emotional impact of the main work on the disc, Trauerfarbenes Land (‘Land that Wears Mourning’). The piece bears all the usual Kancheli hallmarks – extremes of dynamic and texture, simple diatonicism contrasted with harsh dissonance, a meditative slowness – but it wields a weighty emotional punch, paradoxically through the music’s ruthless, almost mindless adherence to strict rules and its severely limited material, all of which is presented in the work’s opening bars.
...à la Duduki, for brass quintet and orchestra, is a somewhat lighter affair, using oriental-sounding melismas in a final, visionary meditation which is cut short abruptly by the return of the work’s opening shriek.
Yet this is curiously fragile music: question it for a second and the edifices Kancheli constructs crumble before your eyes. Belief is everything. And strangely, the well-nigh immaculate and wonderfully committed performances from the Vienna RSO under Dennis Russell Davies, and ECM’s rich, warm recorded sound only serve to make us question the whole way we approach this serious-minded, monumental music.
David Kettle
BBC Music Magazine