Featured Label, ECM's New Series at 40

To mark the fortieth birthday of ECM's New Series (much of which is included in our ongoing contemporary music sale!), our guest contributor Ben Hogwood selects some landmarks from the catalogue - including recordings of music by Arvo Pärt, Alfred Schnittke, Steve Reich and György Kurtág.

With the release of Tabula Rasa in 1984, ECM brought a new dimension to the musical world. This was the first album on the label’s New Series imprint, where label founder and producer Manfred Eicher introduced the world to the music of Arvo Pärt. In doing so he laid the first brick of a new home for notated, 'classical' music, designed to complement the improvised music ECM had largely produced until that point. Now, on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the New Series, its first album is reissued on gatefold vinyl, presenting the record in its original guise.

Tabula Rasa was a cell from which Eicher and ECM forged exciting links with living composers and imaginative artists, the New Series label expanding – like Pärt’s music – to include music of the more distant past. Many more collaborations would follow between Eicher and Pärt, two musical figures who have remained almost inseparable in the field of recorded music ever since. Their discography on ECM includes important sacred works such as Passio (Pärt’s marking of the Passion of St John), Litany, Lamentate and the Te Deum – along with the important world premiere in 2010 of his Symphony No. 4.

One of the most striking aspects of Tabula Rasa is the two versions of Fratres it contains – one a haunting meditation from the 12 Cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the other a dramatic account from violinist Gidon Kremer and pianist Keith Jarrett, stealing in to begin the album like a breath on the wind.

Here was a meeting of two of the most significant contributors in ECM’s history. As his substantial discography has taken shape Kremer has explored his love of Weinberg, notably ahead of the game when he completed a double album of the composer’s chamber symphonies with Kremerata Baltica in February 2014. By the time he completed a sequel with the ensemble three years later, Kremer could speak of how “No other composer has entered my own and Kremerata Baltica’s repertoire with such intensity, and the four chamber symphonies are the best evidence of this.”

He has subsequently recorded Weinberg’s solo violin sonatas for ECM, before more recently exploring the notion of ‘Jewishness’ with the Songs of Fate album. This is a typically inventive and deeply personal utterance made in the wake of multiple losses for his father’s family in the ghetto of Riga, Kremer “reminding us of tragic fates along the way and that we each have a “voice” that deserves to be heard and listened to.”

In addition to his many improvised recordings for ECM, Keith Jarrett has made some major contributions in notated music, from collections of preludes and fugues by J.S. Bach and Shostakovich and two volumes of piano concertos by Mozart to a more recent meeting of minds with the music of C.P.E. Bach. Here is evidence that Eicher really knows his artists, anticipating and encouraging their repertoire choices.

Arvo Pärt, meanwhile, proved a natural starting point for New Series to begin a comprehensive exploration of Estonian music, capturing the remarkable ability of this small country in making standout contributions to the classical canon. These include an album of music for strings from 2001 by ‘the father of modern Estonian classical music’, Heino Eller, overseen by conductor Tonu Kaljuste – another from Tabula Rasa to enjoy a long and fruitful relationship with the label. Eller was Arvo Pärt’s teacher, and his student writes of how, “Thanks to his training in St. Petersburg, with its centuries-old musical tradition, he was able to establish totally new standards in small Estonia, thereby laying the cornerstone for professionalism in music.” His subtle but stylish music is brought to life by Kaljuste on an elegant disc.

In 1996, Kaljuste was instrumental in bringing another Estonian composer to the fore, the Crystallisatio album being an introduction to the music of Sven-Erkki Tüür. A progressive rock musician, Tüür found himself transfixed at the world premiere of Tabula Rasa in Tallinn on 30 September 1977, since when he has found expression through a blend of Estonian ‘stillness and modality’ with ‘western European modernism’. Crystallisatio is led by a striking, single-movement Requiem for his good friend Peeter Lilje blending Gregorian chant with stretched harmonies and powerful note clusters from choir, piano and orchestra.

Since that album another seven ECM releases have focussed on Tüür’s music, with major recorded premieres for the Cello Concerto, Violin Concerto and his Third, Sixth and Seventh symphonies. Other Eastern European contemporaries of considerable note to appear on ECM are fellow-Estonian Veljo Tormis, with Kaljuste again at the helm with the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir on the striking Litany To Thunder album, and Georgian composer Giya Kancheli, whose Abii ne viderem release is a deeply moving trilogy, his Morning and Evening Prayers framing the title piece.

Also appearing on Tabula Rasa, playing the prepared piano part, was Russian composer Alfred Schnittke – one of several important contemporaries to feature on New Series. Another, Steve Reich, oversaw the first available recording of his Music for 18 Musicians in 1978, having been recommended to ECM by Polydor. With its CD release on New Series, this seminal recording accurately described by the Houston Chronicle as “a highly complex, richly detailed composition that is sumptuous to hear” has remained a leader in the digital catalogue, presenting an interpretation that brings out the dance qualities of Reich’s music more explicitly than later accounts.

ECM has gone for quality rather than quantity with the American minimalists, with the only appearance of Philip Glass on Christopher Bowers-Broadbent’s Trivium album of 1992. Here the British organist complements the music of Pärt and Maxwell Davies with dazzling accounts of Glass’s Dance IV and the conclusion of Satyagraha.

‘Minimal’ is a word that can also be applied to the extraordinary music of György Kurtág – which once heard is never forgotten. The Hungarian composer, now 98, began his relationship with ECM in the mid-1990s, his first full album being Musik für Streichinstrumente with the Keller Quartett. Jürg Stenzl’s booklet note captures the essence of Kurtág – “the language of music. It may be compared to a story, perhaps, or to an anecdote, or to a scene or a ‘commedia’.” ECM would go on to release the composer’s complete works for ensemble and choir, his Kafka-Fragmente for soprano and violin and – most movingly – his Játékok (Games) for two pianos. A collection of children’s pieces and Bach transcriptions recorded with wife Márta, these are the height of musical intimacy, a true marriage in sound.

A landmark album in the ECM New Series odyssey was the 1994 album Officium, one of the biggest classical CD sellers of the decade. Here was a fascinating marriage of old and new, as the Hilliard Ensemble – on home turf, singing music by Morales, Perotin and Machaut – were embellished by wondrous improvisations from the saxophone of Jan Garbarek, an ECM regular since the 1970s. Enhanced by the acoustic of St Gerold monastery in Austria, his improvisations left a lasting imprint, intense yet also incredibly soothing. It was a blueprint the team followed successfully with two sequels, Mnemosyne (1999) and Officium Novum (2010).

Aside of their work with Garbarek, the Hilliard Ensemble have made important contributions to New Series, either on finely crafted albums of early music (Gesualdo, Machaut and Perotin) or in specially commissioned new pieces – inevitably including the music of Arvo Pärt. Other artists finding a natural home on the Munich label include viola player Kim Kashkashian, with advocacy for the music of Hindemith, Berio and Eleni Karaindrou, along with a major recording of Kancheli’s landmark piece Vom Winde beweint. Oboist and conductor Heinz Holliger has also visited regularly, his qualities as a composer fully realised through Thomas Zehetmair’s recording of the Violin Concerto and the self-conducted ‘dream opera’ Lunea. More recently the Danish String Quartet have cemented a long-term ECM alliance with their Prism series, each instalment programmed with a string quartet by Beethoven as its starting point.

Beethoven provided the impetus for a fruitful relationship with Sir András Schiff, who has recorded for ECM New Series since the late 1990s. Schiff built a landmark cycle of the 32 piano sonatas, receiving glowing reviews for his characteristically frank and insightful readings, then collaborating with fellow Hungarian Miklós Perényi on an outstanding account of the complete works for piano and cello. One notable feature of ECM New Series is its capacity for surprise and individuality, shown on the first Schiff album, a collection of music for two pianos with Peter Serkin. The two play music by Mozart, Reger and Busoni – the last two not composers you would associate with Schiff, but who offer, on closer inspection, a logical meeting of musical minds.

How to sum up? This piece offers just a snapshot of what ECM have achieved with New Series, a remarkable success story grown from small but distinctive musical relationships fostered over time. We can confidently wish happy birthday to an essential line in both modern and Western music, exquisitely dressed in ECM’s distinctive artwork – each densely shaded scene complementing and contemplating the music within. We await the next years and decades with great anticipation, eager to see where this pioneering label takes us next.

Browse the complete ECM New Series catalogue.

Six of the Best from the ECM New Series