Showing marked synergy, the lyrist Sokratis Sinopoulos and pianist Yann Keerim infuse folk music, including the six Romanian Folk Dances of Béla Bartók, with a dark and sometimes glacial kind of grandeur on their new album Topos, the first outing by the Greek musicians as a duo.
Amplified by their four sylvan original compositions, this sense of careful stone-turning imbued with a fathoms-deep or cosmic lustrousness extends even into some of the dances, as the wafting ‘In One Spot’ with its Middle Eastern melodies segues into the glimmering ‘Sash Dance’ and ‘Dance from Buscum’ with its yearning strings. Yet the ‘Romanian Polka’, which opens through the lyrist’s wiry pizzicato before turning into more of a hoedown, and the brilliant rubato passages of ‘Fast Dance’ are characterised by an altogether lighter tone, whose levity and sprightliness if anything only adds to the elegance.
Often sounding close to a violin, Sinopoulos is one of the foremost contemporary practitioners of the lyre and surfs confidently in that third stream between jazz and classical music. His chamber group the Sokratis Sinopoulos Quartet – where he and Keerim are joined by the double bassist Dimitris Tsekouras and drummer Dimitris Emmanouil – has released two prior albums on ECM Records, with Topos one of a trio of new efforts out this week on Manfred Eicher’s trusty independent.
Cellular Songs the thirteenth album by Meredith Monk for ECM New Series suggests something small and discrete. That might seem true enough as the record opens with one of two ‘click songs’ where plucked strings and the clip-clop of small percussions give way to a series of body pats and tongue clicks, before the three movements of ‘Cell Trio’ abound in a choral arrangement of bare phonemes.
Yet while each of these Cellular Songs carry their own patterns of internal logic, the album conceived as a whole tends to prove resolutely defiant, as Monk is joined variously by Ellen Fisher, Katie Geissinger, Joanna Lynn-Jacobs and Allison Sniffin, each utilising their voice and playing body percussion while Sniffin also adds strains on the violin and piano and John Hollenbeck accentuates their patter through a deft blend of vibraphone, percussion and crotales.
If the three movements of ‘Cell Trio’ – which overlap the voices of Monk, Geissinger and Sniffin – shift between limpid hijinks and cloistered hymnals, the experimental nature of these wordless missives stretches in more dramatic or high-spirited fashion into the fifth track ‘Dyads’, a reference to the musical combination of two notes or pitches although here the vocalists sound like they are singing in call-and-response fashion a contraction of the name ‘Don Quixote’. The vibes at the end of the piece then hint at future explorations as much as they tie the piece off.
‘Happy Woman’ meanwhile juxtaposes the titular phrase ‘I’m a happy woman’, sung with palpable relish by Monk, with many other characterisations and definitions from ‘a hungry woman’ to one who is ‘sassy’ or ‘shaking’, ‘grieving’ or ‘lucky’ and ‘angry’ or ‘honest’ presumably often at one and the same time. A few yodelays add to the pioneering spirit of the piece while Sniffin’s violin interludes briefly remind me of Arthur Russell’s defining paean ‘In the Light of a Miracle’.
If the track seems likely to herald more song structures this strangely and singularly meditative album instead flashes its independent streak. Whenever a message might seem to cohere or the web of voices begins to sound too companionly we get another ‘click song’ for instance. ‘Branching’ sounds like a rancher’s ritual, ‘Lullaby for Lise’ carries a haunted theatricality and ‘Generation Dance’ is lithely propulsive, those latter two pieces sung over Sniffin’s keys. But after building up a head of steam, the solo ‘Breathstream’ blows it all off as Monk gushes like a kettle or whistles and hisses like a flailing wind.
Beyond some of Monk’s own work the obvious popular touchstone for some of these passages on Cellular Songs is Björk’s vocal album Medúlla. ‘Dive’ involves an unsettling interplay of keys and chimes and while all of the songs besides the aforementioned ‘Happy Woman’ remain wordless, the enunciations of ‘Passing’ suggest a patter of ‘hi’ and ‘you’ portending some kind of outreach only for these phrases to be swallowed up by buzzing crescendos which ring in one’s inner ear, stray hoots and the piercing overtones of the climax.
Finally a quick search suggests lots of possible meanings for the word ‘nyem’ from Hmong to Igbo to Geordie. Mostly however the five vocalists sound like mewing cats as a few hushed passages, snoring sounds and indecipherable snatches of quiet conversation are interrupted by more incessant nyemming. Add in a few wailing cries and the purpose of ‘Nyem’ as Cellular Songs draws to a close seems to be as though deliberately shrill and annoying, the choir now beginning to murmur in a show of solidarity, not silent but not disclosing, communal and together in spirit yet somehow purse-lipped.
Cellular Songs premiered as a piece of music theatre at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in the Harvey Theater in March of 2018. The album was captured at Power Station recording studio in New York City in 2022 and 2024. Conceived as the second part of a trilogy following Monk’s ecologically-minded 2016 effort On Behalf of Nature, of these Cellular Songs the artist says:
As artists, we’re all contending with what to do at a time like this. I wanted to make a piece that can be experienced as an alternative possibility of human behaviour, where the values are cooperation, interdependence and kindness, as an antidote to the values that are being propagated right now.
Last but not least the celebrated Zehetmair Quartett return to ECM New Series after twelve years, following up on their acclaimed interpretations of Beethoven, Bruckner, Hartmann, Holliger, Schumann, Hindemith and Bartók by turning to Johannes Brahms and his first two pieces for string quartet, which were published together as Op. 51 in the fall of 1873.
After reportedly discarding and destroying twenty previous attempts at the form – which citing the Haydn Quartets of Mozart and the defining works of Beethoven he held in particularly high esteem – the composer spent four long summer months in the town of Tutzing on the banks of the Starnberger See. There he completed Op. 51 and his Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn.
Made up of the String Quartet No. 1 in C minor and String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, both pieces have four movements and a kind of pincer quality as their brisk and dramatic outer movements squeeze together a couple of more moderate scenes. Performing as always from memory, the Zehetmair Quartett offer an impassioned and intrepid take on the material, from the throbbing high line of the violins and curved arch of the cello which characterise the opening phrases of the very first movement to the spare romance.
This sense of drama and daring persists even where it pertains to something more loose and temperate, as in the third movement of the String Quartet in C minor (which asks just how to interpret Brahms and his elaborate tempo marking Allegretto molto moderato e comodo which means roughly ‘moderately fast but very moderate and comfortable’).
If the String Quartet in C minor can be terse its A minor counterpart is more effusive and lyrical, by turns lovesome and tumultuous, whimsical and rapt. It is also both yearning and trenchant as the Zehetmair Quartett bow gracefully through its middle movements, occasionally pushing the walking pace of the second buoyed by the cello while the third movement takes a darker and more searching tone, as if through a forest thicket before the violins gambol in the light. Portrayed with real boldness and vigour by the ensemble, the String Quartet No. 2 in A minor closes with a movement which Brahms modelled on a czárdás, a type of traditional Hungarian folk dance.
Sadly this is the last recording of the Zehetmair Quartett with the cellist Christian Elliott who passed away in April, with the group – helmed by the violinist Thomas Zehetmair and violist Ruth Killius while violinist Kuba Jakowicz is another longstanding member – saying ‘It was a joy to work with him on the ever-changing character of the voices, to sense the meaning of every phrase and bring it to life. The void he leaves behind is painful – Christian, we miss you’.
