Konstantia Gourzi, Lorenda Ramou, Ensemble Coriolis

Music for piano and string quartet was the ECM New Series debut of Konstantia Gourzi, a composer born in Athens and based in Munich. She often conducts her own music in concert. The album gathers eight concise works written between 1993 and 2010: solo piano pieces, two string quartets and two short pieces for piano quintet. It is a compact portrait of a composer whose roots are Greek and whose training, in the words of the liner notes, was in "European constructivism".

The pianist is Lorenda Ramou, who plays all the piano works, and the quartets are taken by the Ensemble Coriolis, with Klaus-Peter Werani on viola and Hanno Simons on cello. The recording was made in July 2012 at the Himmelfahrtskirche in Munich-Sendling, with Stephan Schellmann as engineer and Manfred Eicher producing. In the booklet Ingrid Allwardt asks what "wordless airs, echoes of past ages" run through the present tense of Gourzi's instrumental songs. Several pieces carry dedications, to Lachenmann, Kurtág, Raue, Abbado, Barenboim and Rexroth.

The oldest work is noch fürcht' ich (1993), seven miniatures that were Gourzi's first music for piano alone. Eine kleine Geschichte (2005) opens the disc, telling its brief story slowly. The second quartet, P-ILION, neun fragmente einer ewigkeit (2007), moves through nine short movements in about ten minutes. Rushing wind and chirping crickets fill the middle sections, and a solo cello leads the nocturnal close. The first quartet, Israel (2004), begins and ends in near stillness, while folk-like contours colour its faster music. The two Vibrato pieces bring Ramou and the quartet together over a shared ostinato.

In The Arts Desk, Graham Rickson praised the economy of Gourzi's writing and said Ramou's was "some of the softest, subtlest playing you'll hear". Richard Whitehouse in Gramophone found that the performances "suggest a close familiarity not just with the works in question but with Gourzi's approach overall". Writing on Between Sound and Space in 2020, Tyran Grillo singled out the eclectic Aiolos Wind (2010), with its echoes of jazz and folklore. Gourzi later returned to ECM New Series with Anájikon.

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2309, first released on 10 October 2014, with a booklet essay by Ingrid Allwardt in German and English.