Harrison Birtwistle, Lisa Batiashvili, Adrian Brendel, Till Fellner, Amy Freston, Roderick Williams

This album gathers chamber music and songs by Harrison Birtwistle, written between 1998 and 2011, and appeared as the English composer approached his 80th birthday in 2014. It was his first album for ECM. Listeners who know him for his dizzying orchestral explosions will find a quieter, more inward side. The programme holds two cycles of tiny songs for soprano and cello, a piano trio and a Rilke cycle for baritone, cello and piano.

The core is a trio of soloists, the Austrian pianist Till Fellner, the Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili and the English cellist Adrian Brendel, heard together and in pairs. They are joined by the soprano Amy Freston and the baritone Roderick Williams. The recording was made in the Herkulessaal of the Munich Residenz and produced by Manfred Eicher, with Markus Heiland as Tonmeister. Bayan Northcott wrote the booklet note.

Settings of the American Objectivist poet Lorine Niedecker frame the programme, three from 1998 at the start and nine from 2000 at the end. Northcott writes that, as in Webern, "the few words and notes on the page can seem to imply whole worlds of thought and feeling". The Trio, premiered in 2011, is a single movement of about sixteen minutes. Its strings move in close two-part counterpoint while the piano follows a path of its own. Bogenstrich began in 2006 as a short piece for Alfred Brendel, first played by his son Adrian with Fellner. Birtwistle later expanded it into a cycle, with two settings of Rilke's Liebes-Lied framing three pieces for cello and piano, one of them a song without words.

Andrew Clements in The Guardian called the Niedecker songs "perhaps the most Webern-like of all Birtwistle's works", noting how Freston and Brendel catch their spareness. In Gramophone Stephen Plaistow praised Williams in Bogenstrich and found the instrumentalists "in a class any composer would die for". Geoffrey Molyneux, reviewing the disc for MusicWeb International in August 2014, called it an excellent addition to the Birtwistle discography and singled out the recorded balance.

CD edition of ECM New Series 2253, first released on 4 April 2014.