Early to Late presents an inspired commission for Magnus Granberg and Jürg Frey, inviting each to compose for Ensemble Grizzana using the same brief: build a new work from Renaissance fragments. Granberg’s “How Vain Are All Our Frail Delights?” draws on William Byrd’s choral music, transforming melodic kernels into shimmering, spectral textures. Ensemble voices - celesta, glass harp, dulcimer, violin, winds - float through cycles of open-form improvisation and carefully weighted silence. The result is a thirty-minute landscape where phrases hover, overlap, and gently disintegrate, highlighting Granberg’s talent for friction, lyricism, and quiet unease.
Jürg Frey’s “Late Silence,” by contrast, orients itself toward Ockeghem’s “Déploration sur la mort de Binchois,” but refashions its material into harmonica, stones, low winds, and strings assembled in luminous restraint. Frey’s approach calls for tight co-ordination, each gesture intricately placed, overlaying melodic contours on grids of silence and gradual resonance. The ensemble keeps close attention to articulation, dynamics, and the subtle interplay between sound and void. The transparency of texture and gradual shifts evoke exquisite melancholy - music that moves not linearly, but through accumulating presence and reflective calm.
Heard together, the album contrasts compositional methods - Granberg’s freedom and improvisational haze against Frey’s precision and economy - while sharing a gentle mood, weighed with longing and poise. Ensemble Grizzana’s interpretation gives both works rare dimension, revealing not only echoes of distant Renaissance music but new ways to inhabit time, memory, and collective imagination. Early to Late stands as a testament to collaboration, tradition, and the transformative power of listening at the fragile edge of invention.
