Chonguri is a programme of encores and short pieces by the Swiss cellist Thomas Demenga, built as a single sequence rather than a string of separate numbers. It runs from Bach through Webern to two pieces of Demenga's own, and from Georgia through Vienna to New York. Pauses and harmonic links between the twenty tracks are carefully placed, so music from four centuries reads as one arc.
Demenga plays with two partners. The pianist and composer Thomas Larcher accompanies most of the programme, and the accordionist Teodoro Anzellotti joins him for four Bach chorales that Demenga arranged for cello and accordion. The album was recorded in August 2004 at the Clara-Wieck-Auditorium in Sandhausen, near Heidelberg, with Teije van Geest as engineer and Manfred Eicher as executive producer. Demenga had recorded for ECM New Series since the 1980s, including a series that set Bach's cello suites beside modern works by Heinz Holliger, Sándor Veress and others.
The title piece, by the Georgian composer Sulkhan Tsintsadze, is a short pizzicato study imitating the chonguri, a four-stringed Georgian lute, and it ends on plucked harmonics. The Bach chorales, among them Das alte Jahr vergangen ist and Ich ruf' zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ, put the cello against the accordion's organ-like sustain. Their texts share themes of farewell, mortality and hope of redemption. After the second chorale, Gaspar Cassadó's Danse du diable vert picks up the tempo and brings in Larcher's piano. Elsewhere Fauré's Romance leads straight into Webern's terse Drei kleine Stücke, and Chopin's E flat Nocturne is followed by Liszt's La lugubre gondola. Demenga's Eine kleine Erregung (über Berg und Bach) reflects on Berg's Violin Concerto, and his two-minute New York Honk closes the disc.
The album was a Gramophone Editor's Choice, a Choc du mois in Le Monde de la Musique, and was listed by the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik. Rob Cowan wrote in Gramophone that the programme was "no mere string of encores". He ended his review with "I enjoyed it all hugely." For Joanne Talbot in The Strad, the varied collection was "refreshingly free from any hint of self-regarding indulgence".
CD edition, ECM New Series 1914, released in June 2006, with a booklet essay by Anselm Cybinski and a text by Demenga.
