The Most Beautiful Sounds Next to Silence

Thomas Larcher has a way of convincing you, like Morton Feldman, that every note is in its right place and should be nowhere else. A delicate touch and taut use of dramatic contrast flicker across his compositions, sending out shards of notes and icy silences.

The Innsbruck-born composer first came to attention as a pianist with his ECM disc of Schubert and Schoenberg Klavierstücke and has now extended his performance talent into his own compositions. The first of these was Naunz (ECM, 12/01). The latest offering by the Munich-based label places two string quartets - Ixxu and Cold Farmer - alongside works for cello and piano, and the song-cycle My illness is the medicine I need.

Ixxu is fierce and attacking with the Rosamunde Quartet at full throttle, as Larcher struggles by his own admission with obsessive speed and then deceptive peace. In writing this quartet, he says, he wanted to break free from his compositional style but found no way out. Single notes rise out of exhausted and feverish passages, momentarily recalling a spark of bell-like Arvo Pärt before retreating into jagged rhythms. Cold Farmer, by contrast, is more restrained and inward-looking.

My illness uses text from mental patients reproduced in fashion house Benetton's magazine Colors. Soprano Andrea Lauren Brown is deliberately detached and unemotional, serving as an anchor for fragmented piano, violin and cello interjections. “Eat and sleep. Eat and sleep. The monotony here kills you,” she sings.

Mumien for cello and piano is the gem on this CD. Larcher literally unwraps the piece with pounding prepared piano at the outset as cellist Thomas Demenga slices through the music's dense layers to reveal a fading heartbeat beneath the Egyptian mummy's bandages. This is meaty stuff, starkly outlined by ECM's characteristically crisp and clear recording.

(https://www.gramophone.co.uk)