Gideon Lewensohn, Alexander Lonquich, Auryn Quartett, Ora Rotem Nelken

Odradek was the ECM New Series debut of the Israeli composer Gideon Lewensohn, born in Jerusalem in 1954, and every piece on it is a premiere recording. Lewensohn writes music about music. His three works here are full of veiled references to composers he admires, from Gustav Mahler and Béla Bartók to György Kurtág and Giya Kancheli. He describes his own role as that of a commentator on culture, at times from a specifically Jewish perspective.

Lewensohn studied composition with André Hajdu in Tel Aviv, took a doctorate in conducting at the Peabody Conservatory and also worked with Sergiu Celibidache. He went on to teach composition at Bar-Ilan University. The Piano Quintet and the string quartet were recorded in February 2001 at Radio Studio DRS in Zürich by the Auryn Quartett and pianist Alexander Lonquich, with Manfred Eicher producing. The Postlude for piano (1992) appears twice, once from the Zürich sessions and once in a version by Ora Rotem Nelken, recorded at the Jerusalem Music Centre in July 1997.

The Piano Quintet is a suite of homages, to Kurtág, to Micah Lewensohn, to the Hilliard Ensemble and to George Rochberg. Its Scherzofinale or Greetings from Dimitry ends on a brief quotation from the Fifth Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich. The Odradek Quartet (1999) takes its name from Franz Kafka and is dedicated to Eicher. Its seventeen short sections carry titles such as reTALango, Sarabandoned and ScoTALissimo, and the music returns again and again to open strings and the gesture of tuning. Around them surface fragments of marches, salon music, waltzes and tangos, with allusions to Mahler, Bartók, Josef Tal and Robert Schumann. The quartet won first prize in the international competition of the Italian Academy of Arts and Letters.

In International Record Review, Christopher Ballantine heard "subtle, precisely crafted music of serious social and philosophical intent" and singled out the Auryn's playing of the quartet. Michael Oliver in BBC Music Magazine found Lewensohn "an agreeably rum customer" and praised the performances. Fono Forum made it a Star of the Month. The booklet includes an eight-page essay by the musicologist Raymond Monelle, whose name also appears in the title of one of the quartet's movements.

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1781, first released on 21 October 2002.