Lin and Klucevsek Play Kancheli’s “Songbook”

courtesy of Naxos of America

The Georgian composer Giya Kancheli was one of the many composers I first encountered thanks to Manfred Eichler and the albums he produced for ECM Records. Those that chose to visit this composer’s Wikipedia page will see that he was prodigiously productive, primarily in orchestral music but also in chamber music and several approaches to vocal music. However, those categories are preceded by an extensive “Filmography” section. For two decades of his life, he served as Music Director of the Rustaveli Theatre in Tbilisi; and this led to his writing music for dozens of films, as well as stagings of plays. When I wrote about him for Examiner.com in 2011, I observed that most of those films “remain unknown outside the Russian-speaking world;” and things do not seem to have changed very much since then.

However, in 2009 he published Simple Music for Piano: 33 Miniatures for Piano. As the title suggests, these are brief “sketches” that Kancheli “harvested” from all the incidental music he had composed. Eicher decided to celebrate Kancheli’s 75th birthday (which was on August 10, 2010) with a recording of selections from that 2009 publication. Rather than restrict the album to solo piano performances, Eicher chose to follow the advice of Kancheli’s son, Sandro, and feature the Argentine bandoneon master Dino Saluzzi. Shortly thereafter the planning extended to include violinist Gidon Kremer and Andrei Pushkarev, who had performed on vibraphone with the Kremerata Baltica.

The resulting album, Themes from the Songbook, consisted of only nineteen selections from Simple Music. This coming Friday Steinway & Sons will release a recording of the entire collection. The pianist is Jenny Lin, but she is joined by accordionist Guy Klucevsek. Each of them presents a solo account of a generous number of the compositions, and they also perform as a duo on many of the tracks. As usual, Amazon.com has created a Web page for pre-orders.

There is a certain degree of satisfaction that comes from a beginning-to-end traversal of Kancheli’s 33 miniatures. The music was certainly not originally created for that purpose. On the other hand, those that decide to follow the track listing, which identifies the plays and films for which the music was written, may be either puzzled or amused over the question of how the music relates to the narrative. At the same time, I am willing to give Kancheli the benefit of the doubt with regard to how these 33 pieces have been ordered. Mind you, I suspect that Saluzzi, Kremer, and Pushkarev also gave considerable thought as to how the excerpts they selected should be ordered; but, on the new Simple Music album, I assume that Lin and Klucevsek chose to honor the composer’s own ordering (even if not all of the selections were performed as piano solos).

Those that recall my rants against responding to COVID-19 with soothing blandness should take note that there is nothing bland about Kancheli’s music. There is always some undercurrent of wit in each of these miniatures. The music may have been intended to be “incidental;” but Kancheli always seemed to know how to make a listener sit up and take notice, even when the music may be providing a transition from one scene to another. When it comes to enduring pandemic conditions, this is decidedly my kind of quietude!