Review

There is a very real sense in which, never mind any rhetoric to the contrary, the Romantic era never ended. Nowhere is that more apparent than on this new offering from Elsewhere. Of course, the situation is slightly more complicated, but elongate the opening bars of Mahler’s fifth symphony’s Adagietto, the music just before the melody enters, to get an idea of Continuité, fragilité, résonance’s sonic weightlessness. Jürg Frey’s music often dwells in anti-gravitational areas, whether he’s working with instruments, field recordings, or some combination of electronic and acoustic sounds, but this 51-minute palimpsest for strings and saxophones, both in quartet, adds a layer of repetitively skewed Romanticism to the normal convergences, divergences, and their attendant silences, all realized with requisite grace and power by Quatuor Bozzini and the Konus Quartett.

It’s difficult to gauge which is more delectably serene, the music or the performance. A degree of interdependence is obvious. Certainly, both the participants’ familiarity with Frey’s work and his presence at the 2022 recording sessions elicit spellbinding results, but the composition’s malleability affords opportunity for expansion and restraint of many varieties. It could be that Mahler’s appearance in the wings results from the textural variance at play throughout. The pointillistic opening, with its pizzicati and interregistral fluctuations, offers no hint of the thirds in sustain at 1:19, soon to evaporate into single pitches even though the pizzicato gesture remains. The opening music is in fact repeated at 0:55, a temporal disjuncture indicative of the immersions to come. As for sustain, it recurs in various iterations as the amoebic music proceeds. Listen to the vast harmonic vista at 3:04, another third at 5:32 or to the especially long elastic thirds beginning at 14:43 to hear the stasis in astonishing flux. At 42:22, the formerly lush sonics are reduced to a single repeated pitch then changes to a bit of string monody before fanning back out into multivalent sonority. However, at least in the first sustains, the pizzicato remains as both a reminiscence and an implication. Sustain is complemented by extremes of sonority and silence, as with the swells occurring after the half-way point and the silences at 26:54 or a more extended pause at 40:16.

As is so often the case, the constituent parts comprise a much larger and certainly more redolent whole. The recording and production are superb, as is the case with every Elsewhere release, and they function in such a way that the performance brims with detail and with raw power in all the right places. Beyond that, each instrument blends with every other to create the lush interweaving of tone and timbre necessary for the various disassemblages and reconstructions to become an audible part of the narrative. It’s that narrative that makes this and Elsewhere’s other Frey releases so successful. Strings and saxophones often blur to the point of indistinguishability but also separate when the moment of emphasis is right. The beauty of this rendering demonstrates just how far we’ve come from the brutality and understandable but regrettably myopic micromanagement heard in so many “new music” recordings of the 1950s and 1960s. As the music has expanded in terms of temporal scope and historical reference, its performance is finessed in equal measure. It is difficult to imagine the composer’s versatility being better served, both in the present work’s sinewy structures and in general by the always estimable Elsewhere label. If this release entices, the Elsewhere and Erstwhile catalogs offer an excellent overview of a unique and ever-evolving compositional voice.