The independent record label ECM – Edition of Contemporary Music – was founded by producer Manfred Eicher in Munich in 1969, and to date has issued more than 1500 albums spanning many idioms. Emphasising improvisation from the outset, ECM established its reputation with standard-setting recordings by Keith Jarrett, Paul Bley, Jan Garbarek, Chick Corea, Gary Burton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and many more and began to include contemporary composition – including Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and Meredith Monk Dolmen Music – in its programme in the late 1970s and early 80s.
To introduce Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa a sister label, ECM New Series, was launched in 1984. The New Series has since become a broad platform for a spectrum of composed music from the pre-baroque era to the present day. The label continues to issue premiere recordings of Pärt’s works, and a number of these reappear in Manfred Eicher’s Pärt-sequence Musica Selecta, issued on the composer’s 80th birthday on September 11, 2015. Other contemporary composers regularly featured in the New Series include György Kurtág, Valentin Silvestrov, Tigran Mansurian, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Heinz Holliger, Heiner Goebbels, Alexander Knaifel, Helena Tulve and Giya Kancheli, whose newest album Chiaroscuro (released October 2015) brings together violinists Gidon Kremer and Patricia Kopatchinskaja for the first time, to powerful effect.
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The independent record label ECM – Edition of Contemporary Music – was founded by producer Manfred Eicher in Munich in 1969, and to date has issued more than 1500 albums spanning many idioms. Emphasising improvisation from the outset, ECM established its reputation with standard-setting recordings by Keith Jarrett, Paul Bley, Jan Garbarek, Chick Corea, Gary Burton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and many more and began to include contemporary composition – including Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and Meredith Monk Dolmen Music – in its programme in the late 1970s and early 80s.
To introduce Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa a sister label, ECM New Series, was launched in 1984. The New Series has since become a broad platform for a spectrum of composed music from the pre-baroque era to the present day. The label continues to issue premiere recordings of Pärt’s works, and a number of these reappear in Manfred Eicher’s Pärt-sequence Musica Selecta, issued on the composer’s 80th birthday on September 11, 2015. Other contemporary composers regularly featured in the New Series include György Kurtág, Valentin Silvestrov, Tigran Mansurian, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Heinz Holliger, Heiner Goebbels, Alexander Knaifel, Helena Tulve and Giya Kancheli, whose newest album Chiaroscuro (released October 2015) brings together violinists Gidon Kremer and Patricia Kopatchinskaja for the first time, to powerful effect.
New music, improvised or notated, builds upon the strengths of earlier models, and the concept of modern music informed by older music resonates through the improvised and composed projects heard on ECM. Amongst current and recent releases Tigran Hamasyan’s Luys I Luso stands out, a highly imaginative recasting of Armenian sacred music for choir and improvising pianist. Meanwhile, fellow Armenian Levon Eskenian arranges the compositions of Komitas for the folk instrumentation of the Gurdjieff Ensemble, with a blend of sonorities that can seem both archaic and experimental.
For Liaisons: Re-Imagining Sondheim, Anthony De Mare commissioned 36 composers, from Steve Reich to Wynton Marsalis, to reconsider a music-theatre song by Stephen Sondheim as a piece for solo piano. On Gesualdo Brett Dean and Erkki-Sven Tüür reflect on the agonized life and music of the Prince of Venosa, in a programme which also includes Gesualdo transcriptions by Tüür and conductor Toñu Kaljuste. In parallel activities, György Kurtág dovetails his radiant Bach transcriptions into the cheerful games and homages of his Jatékok collection for piano and four hands on In Memoriam Haydée, and Heinz Holliger layers the enigmatic music of Guillaume de Machaut with his own subtle variants for three violas and the four singers of the Hilliard Ensemble.
The Hilliards realized one of the most potent blendings of old and new in their Officium collaboration with improvising saxophonist Jan Garbarek, a combination which also packed churches and concert halls for 20 years. In 2015 former Hilliard tenor John Potter introduced his Amores Pasados project with Trio Mediaeval soprano Anna Maria Friman and lutenists Ariel Abramovich and Jacob Heringman, singing music of John Paul Jones, Sting and Tony Banks, alongside lute songs of the 16th, 17th and early 20th centuries, to “bridge the gap between art song and pop song.”
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