Heinz Holliger, Anton Kernjak

Éventail is a recital of French music for oboe written between 1892 and 1968, chosen and annotated by the Swiss oboist and composer Heinz Holliger. Its thread is the wordless song, and several pieces come from the collection of Vocalises-Études. Holliger writes that "the closeness of the oboe to the human voice" gave him the idea of opening this "richly coloured fan". Ravel, Debussy, Saint-Saëns, Milhaud, Koechlin, Jolivet, Messiaen and Casadesus are all here, several of them composers Holliger knew in person.

The pianist is Anton Kernjak, who had already worked with Holliger on the 2014 ECM album Aschenmusik. The French harpist Alice Belugou joins for one piece. The recording was made in October 2021 at the Radiostudio in Zürich, a co-production of ECM and Radio SRF 2 Kultur, with Andreas Werner as Tonmeister. Holliger plays oboe and oboe d'amore, and he wrote the booklet notes himself.

Three larger works anchor the programme. Saint-Saëns's Sonata Op. 166 of 1921, one of his last pieces, quotes his own song Le rossignol, which also appears on the disc. Jolivet's Controversia for oboe and harp (1968) was written for Heinz and Ursula Holliger, and remains the most modern score here. The record ends with the rarely heard 1936 sonata by Robert Casadesus, which Holliger received in an autograph copy from his teacher Émile Cassagnaud. Messiaen's Vocalise-Étude of 1935 is a piece Holliger once played for the composer himself. Around these come other miniatures, among them Debussy's flute solo Syrinx and Koechlin's Le repos de Tityre, both on oboe d'amore, and Ravel's Kaddisch.

In BBC Music Magazine (2023), Christopher Dingle gave the album five stars and wrote that "Heinz Holliger continues to amaze", praising the "finely judged pianism" of Kernjak. Zachary Woolfe in The New York Times described the 84-year-old's tone as "less sweet and bright than it is mysterious and sinuous, amber-colored". For James Manheim at AllMusic it was "a rigorous but quite affecting album of chamber music in the great French tradition".

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2694, released on 22 September 2023, with liner notes by Heinz Holliger.