Nils Mönkemeyer, William Youn, Lucerne Academy Orchestra, Minguet Quartett

Anájikon gathers chamber and orchestral music from the past decade by Konstantia Gourzi, the Athens-born composer and conductor who lives and teaches in Munich. It is her second ECM album after Music for piano and string quartet (ECM New Series 2309). The three works on the disc show how, in her music, elements of different traditions merge and East and West enter into a dialogue.

Gourzi conducts her own orchestral piece, and she describes composing and conducting as “an inseparable relationship”. Ny-él was commissioned by the Lucerne Festival and is heard in a concert performance by the Lucerne Academy Orchestra from August 2016. The two chamber works were recorded in March 2018, according to the booklet credits at the University of Performing Arts in Munich. Nils Mönkemeyer (viola) and William Youn (piano) play Hommage à Mozart, and the Minguet Quartett plays the title work. Manfred Eicher produced the album, and Paul Griffiths wrote the liner notes.

Hommage à Mozart, op. 56, three dialogues written in 2014 for Mönkemeyer and Youn, refers to Mozart without quoting him. The viola carries long singing lines over repeated figures in the piano. Ny-él, Two Angels in the White Garden, op. 65, is dedicated to the memory of Claudio Abbado and Pierre Boulez. Its four short movements, from Eviction and Exodus to The White Garden, move between dissonant, energetic passages and softer colours. The String Quartet No. 3, Anájikon, The Angel in the Blue Garden, op. 61, dates from 2015 and was inspired by Alexander Polzin's bronze sculpture Angel I. Its three parts are The Blue Rose, The Blue Bird and The Blue Moon, the last divided into a bright side and a dark side.

German critics responded to the album's range. In Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Yvonne Petitpierre praised the engaging sound of the recording and the finely nerved performances, in which different musical traditions meet. In Fono Forum, Johannes Schmitz wrote that the Minguet Quartett sings out the dense themes of the quartet's three movements wonderfully. Writing for PAN M 360, Frédéric Cardin heard the music as close to “a soundtrack of a film by Theo Angelopoulos”.

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2545, first released in April 2021.