György Kurtág, Keller Quartett

Cantante e tranquillo is a programme of slow movements and miniatures assembled by Manfred Eicher and András Keller, leader of the Hungarian Keller Quartett. It sets Beethoven, Bach, Ligeti, Kurtág, Schnittke and Knaifel side by side, drawing on recordings made between 1995 and 2012. The title is Beethoven's expression mark for the slow movement of his last quartet, Op. 135, which opens the disc and returns, in another take, at its close. Heard in sequence, pieces written centuries apart turn out to share a common, quiet manner of speech.

"Together we began reviewing the recordings we had made over the last twenty years," Eicher recalls. New sessions at Radiostudio DRS in Zürich in November 2012 produced the Beethoven movements from Op. 130 and Op. 135 and the Kurtág pieces, with Keller, Zsófia Környei, Zoltán Gál and Judit Szabó. The rest comes from earlier ECM work: Bach from Eichstätt in 1997, Kurtág's Officium breve from Vienna in 1995, Schnittke and Knaifel from Zürich in 2000, Ligeti from 2011. Alexei Lubimov is the pianist in the Schnittke. Peter Laenger engineered the recordings.

The Lento assai of Op. 135 is followed directly by the delicate last movement of Ligeti's Second Quartet, Allegro con delicatezza, marked "stets sehr mild". Two numbers from The Art of Fugue, Contrapunctus I and the unfinished Contrapunctus XIV, are heard in a quartet arrangement whose part-writing reads almost like an analysis. Between them come the Moderato pastorale from Schnittke's Piano Quintet and An Autumn Evening from Knaifel's In Air Clear and Unseen. Kurtág's epigrams, among them Aus der Ferne V and Ligatura Y, act as punctuation, and the Cavatina from Op. 130 arrives in the second half.

On Between Sound and Space, Tyran Grillo heard "not a compilation but a sculpted entity with shape and sentience". Kurt Gottschalk of I Care If You Listen (2015) was more doubtful about its mood, yet granted "how exquisitely it's played and programmed". In BBC Music Magazine, Martin Cotton pointed out that the disc is not simply soothing, since a whispering Ligeti follows the opening Beethoven.

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2324, first released on 27 March 2015, with a booklet essay by Wolfgang Sandner and notes by Manfred Eicher.