Description
ECM New Series: Lachrymae — Hindemith / Britten / Penderecki / Kim Kashkashian, Stuttgarter Kammerorchester (Audio CD)
Brand new! Factory packaged! As pictured! Buy with confidence!
Product Details:
- Product Type: Audio CD
- Brand / Label: ECM New Series
- Catalog Number: 439 611-2 (ECM 1506)
- UPC / Barcode: 0028943961127
- Viola: Kim Kashkashian
- Conductor: Dennis Russell Davies
- Orchestra: Stuttgarter Kammerorchester
- Composers: Paul Hindemith, Benjamin Britten, Krzysztof Penderecki
- Producer: Manfred Eicher
- Release Year: 1993
- Genre: Classical
- Style: Contemporary / 20th-Century Chamber & Orchestral
Product Features
- Format: CD
- Discs: 1
- Total playing time: approx. 49:40
- Recording type: DDD
- Condition: Factory Sealed
Overview
Three 20th-century works for viola and orchestra, gathered around a single mood. The title comes from Britten's Lachrymae — itself built on a melody by the Elizabethan lutenist John Dowland, whose music was already steeped in the idea of tears, longing, and unresolved grief. It's a quietly perfect centre for this programme.
Kim Kashkashian is among the finest viola soloists of her generation, and this ECM New Series recording shows exactly why. The viola sits in a particular register — warmer than a violin, less weighty than a cello — and Kashkashian uses that ambiguity to full effect across all three works. Hindemith's Trauermusik opens the disc: nine minutes of austere, unsentimental mourning music written in a single day in 1936 for the death of King George V, performed here with exactly the restraint the piece demands.
Britten's Lachrymae Op. 48a — a set of reflections on Dowland's song "If My Complaints Could Passions Move" — is the emotional heart of the programme. Fifteen minutes of variations that circle the source melody without ever quite resolving it. Penderecki's Konzert für Viola und Kammerorchester closes the disc: 25 minutes of late-Romantic density from one of the most significant Polish composers of the 20th century, written in 1983 and revised in the 1990s.
Produced by Manfred Eicher and recorded in Stuttgart, the disc has the characteristic ECM New Series sound — transparent, precisely placed, a little cool in the best possible sense.
Interesting Facts
- Hindemith wrote Trauermusik on January 21, 1936 — the day King George V died — for a BBC broadcast scheduled for the following evening. It was composed, rehearsed, and performed in under 24 hours.
- Britten's Lachrymae was originally written for viola and piano in 1950; the orchestral version (Op. 48a) was arranged by Britten himself in 1976, just months before his death.
- The title Lachrymae — Latin for "tears" — comes directly from Dowland's famous set of pavans for lute, Lachrimae or Seven Tears (1604), one of the most influential instrumental collections of the Renaissance.
- Kim Kashkashian was born in Detroit to Armenian parents, studied at the Peabody Conservatory, and became closely associated with the ECM New Series label, recording extensively under Manfred Eicher's production.
- Krzysztof Penderecki (1933-2020) began his career as a radical avant-gardist — his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960) used entirely new notational systems — before gradually moving toward a more neo-Romantic language in his later works, of which this Viola Concerto is a prime example.
- The Stuttgarter Kammerorchester (Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra) is one of Germany's oldest and most respected chamber orchestras, founded in 1945 by Karl Münchinger.
Track Listing
- Paul Hindemith — Trauermusik — 9:01
- Benjamin Britten — Lachrymae Op. 48a (Reflections on a song of John Dowland) — 15:39
- Krzysztof Penderecki — Konzert für Viola und Kammerorchester — 25:00
Publishers
ECM Records, Munich (Postfach 600 331, 81203 München). Produced by Manfred Eicher. An ECM Production © 1993 ECM Records. Manufactured in Germany.
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