John Casken, Béla Bartók, Ludwig van Beethoven, Thomas Zehetmair, Ruth Killius, Royal Northern Sinfonia

This live album documents the concert with which Thomas Zehetmair closed his years as Music Director of the Royal Northern Sinfonia in June 2014. ECM describes it as "a résumé and a departure": a programme that sets a new double concerto by John Casken beside Béla Bartók's Viola Concerto and Ludwig van Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. It reflects what Zehetmair was known for in Gateshead, new music brought into the repertoire next to fresh readings of the classics.

Zehetmair plays violin and conducts, and the viola soloist is Ruth Killius, his wife and long-time duo partner. Casken's That Subtle Knot, written in 2012-13, was co-commissioned by the two soloists and Sage Gateshead, and this is its first recording. The concert was recorded at The Sage Gateshead by engineer Hannelore Guittet, with Manfred Eicher as executive producer. Giselher Schubert wrote the liner notes, translated into English by J. Bradford Robinson.

That Subtle Knot takes its title from John Donne's poem The Ecstasy, about two lovers on a riverbank. Its two movements, calm and floating, last almost half an hour, and the viola opens alone "as if recalling an old folk song" before the violin joins. The two solo lines then wind around each other over long pedal points. Bartók left his Viola Concerto unfinished at his death in 1945, and it is heard in the edition by Tibor Serly. Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 closes the evening with what Schubert calls its "juggernaut propulsive thrust".

Martin Cotton gave the album five stars in BBC Music Magazine. He found Casken's mostly slow, meditative score rising to passionate climaxes, and noted that the Beethoven "starts at a terrific lick, and is incredibly exciting". In The Strad, Peter Quantrill wrote that Killius "shapes the long first movement with a folksy familiarity and a warm, speaking tone". He also heard the conversational intimacy of the double concerto carried over into the Bartók, and described the Fifth as electrifying and rhythmically radical, with no audience audible on the recording.

CD edition, ECM New Series 2595, first released in February 2023, nearly nine years after the concert.