Béla Bartók, Peter Maxwell Davies, Thomas Zehetmair, Ruth Killius

Manto and Madrigals is a recital of music for violin and viola by Thomas Zehetmair and Ruth Killius, partners in life and colleagues for many years in the Zehetmair Quartet. The programme moves between the twentieth century and the present, from Bartók's tiny early Duo of 1902 to pieces written for the couple in this century. At its centre are two works where the players are asked to use their voices as well as their bows: Giacinto Scelsi's Manto and Heinz Holliger's Drei Skizzen.

The album was recorded in May 2009 at the Radio Studio DRS in Zürich, with Manfred Eicher producing and Andreas Werner as engineer. It followed Zehetmair's much praised Paganini recording for ECM, made at St. Gerold. The booklet essay is by Paul Griffiths. Besides Scelsi, Holliger and Bartók, the duo plays Nikos Skalkottas, Peter Maxwell Davies, Bohuslav Martinů and two short pieces by Rainer Killius and Johannes Nied, both dedicated to the performers.

Holliger wrote Drei Skizzen in 2006 as an encore for the duo's many performances of Mozart's Sinfonia concertante, and he kept that work's scordatura. The first sketch, Pirouettes harmoniques, is built entirely from harmonics, and the second is a fast perpetuum mobile. The closing Cantique à six voix is a six-part chorale in which both string players also hum a line. Holliger took the idea from Scelsi's Manto of 1957, a three-part piece for a viola player who sings, and Killius performs it alone here. The Skalkottas Duo of 1938 is fierce and angular. Martinů's Three Madrigals of 1947, written for the siblings Joseph and Lillian Fuchs, bring the recital its most open and virtuosic writing.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer gave the disc an A and wrote that “one quickly learns to ignore dates and savor instead the fluidity of musical time.” In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Martin Wilkening noted how close and direct the two instruments sound, with no mystical halo of reverberation around them. Daniel Garrett of Compulsive Reader heard Nied's Zugabe as “a concluding tease, full of sharp back-and-forth movement.”

CD, ECM New Series 2150, released on 18 February 2011, with liner notes by Paul Griffiths in English and German.