The Most Beautiful Sounds Next to Silence

Estonia continues to produce a wealth of composers out of all proportion to its size and population, and Helena Tulve (b1972) is clearly one with whom to reckon. Four of the works on this ‘portrait’ disc are vocal, yet this hardly signifies uniformity of expression – hence the sheer timbral allure drawn from an early music consort with the setting of a Yemenite Jewish text in Reyah hadas ’ala (‘The Perfume of the Myrtle Rises’), or expressive acuity conjured from the metaphysical riddles of silences/larmes. A Sufi mystical text is the basis for L’équinoxe de l’âme and here the often melismatic soprano line is confronted by the grating textures of a string quartet. Contrast again with Arboles lloran por lluvia (‘Trees Cry for Rain’), whose Sephardic Jewish text of unrequited longing summons a suitably ecstatic response from the intertwining voices – thrown into relief by the distinctive sound of a nyckelharpa and the hieratic vocal consort.

Extinction des choses vues might seem out of place but both in its conception and realisation follows on naturally from the above. In its evoking the ‘extinction of things seen’, it looks to the earlier orchestral music of Kaija Saariaho in its dense textures that take on greater harmonic focus prior to a morendo ending on the most poetic of dissonances. The orchestra do it justice under Olari Elts, with the remaining works no less finely realised; good to hear the unmistakable voice of Arianna Savall in a context which differs only in relative terms. The recordings are unmistakably ECM in their distanced yet atmospheric ambience, while the booklet-note is informative if a little too fanciful in tone.

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