Johannes Brahms, Gérard Pesson, Salvatore Sciarrino, Reto Bieri, Meta4

Quasi Morendo places Brahms's late Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op. 115, between two modern pieces that deal with sound on the edge of disappearing. Swiss clarinettist Reto Bieri opens alone with Salvatore Sciarrino's Let Me Die Before I Wake, and the Finnish string quartet Meta4 joins him for the Brahms and for Gérard Pesson's Nebenstück. The title, "almost dying", names the thread: a programme about fading, memory and the last breath of a tone.

It is Bieri's third ECM New Series release, after the solo album Contrechant (2011) and Galina Ustvolskaya's Trio with Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Markus Hinterhäuser. For Meta4 it was a first album on the label. The quartet here is Antti Tikkanen and Minna Pensola (violins), Atte Kilpeläinen (viola) and Tomas Djupsjöbacka (cello). The session took place at the RSI studio in Zürich, with Peter Laenger as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer. Roman Brotbeck wrote the booklet essay, which describes the Sciarrino and the Pesson as prologue and epilogue to the quintet.

Sciarrino wrote Let Me Die Before I Wake in 1982 for the clarinettist Ciro Scarponi, and Bieri had already recorded it on Contrechant. Its ten minutes are built from harmonics, multiphonics and tremolos, so that a single clarinet seems to carry a high, whistling chorale over a dark, broken counterline. The Brahms quintet of 1891 followed his friendship with the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld, at a time when he had meant to stop composing. Bieri and Meta4 play it with restraint and closely blended tone, and the long Adagio becomes the still centre of the disc. Pesson's Nebenstück (1998) arranges Brahms's Ballade, Op. 10 No. 4, then filters it, leaving fragments that sound as if heard through a wall.

In BBC Music Magazine, Oliver Condy wrote that Bieri's "control and expressivity in Sciarrino's haunting solo" is astonishing, and called him a soulful communicator in the Brahms. Dominy Clements of MusicWeb International (2019) found the closing Con moto "as involving and moving as you could ask for". Tal Agam of The Classic Review placed the performance among the best recordings of the quintet in years.

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2557, first released on 10 May 2019.