PASTORALE
As a provocation to generic orthodoxy, this latest offering from Manfred Eicher’s steadfastly esoteric ECM stable carries itself with a quietly disturbing – and disrupting – stealth. Couched in cultivated interplay between Stefano Battaglia’s piano and the percussion and electronics of Michele Rabbia, Pastorale may invite a glancing description of being deftly refined, but it more pertinently serves as an eloquent illustration of how diffuse musical genres have become over the last quarter-century,
Breaking through stylistic assumptions and barriers with almost osmotic ease, Pastorale has largely been garnering attention from jazz critics, but this fourth collaborative offering on disc from the Italian duo makes equal claim for consideration by the classical music fraternity. It also gently clamours for attention from those for whom ambient music embraces both the pure theoretical arguments of Morton Feldman at one end of the spectrum, Brian Eno at the other, and the more elasticated offerings of contemporary dance music-oriented exponents such as Aphex Twin, Autechre and Boards of Canada in between.
And, for that matter, Satie, the evocatively rippling, undulatingly imagistic fingerprints of whose Trois Gymnopedies are to be found throughout Battaglia’s evanescent contributions to the 11 part-scored, part-improvised tracks on offer here. The opening track, Antiphona Libera, a ghostly homage to the theologian and writer Enzio Bianchi, is built on steely echoes of Satie couched within a pulsing electronic penumbra that sets the agenda for what follows while casting its own liquescent spell.
The ascetic and the liturgical are central to Pastorale in what amounts to an extended meditation on (and manipulation of) sonorities, tonality and timbres. What catches the ear most is the looking-glass relationship of the two soloists; Rabbia’s precisely positioned percussion and underplayed and other-worldly electronics providing often startling melodic underpinning to Battaglia’s percussively-accented piano. No less striking is the finely attuned intimacy between the two, one that manifests itself in a discretely emotional gloss on elusively abstract constructs.
Battaglia and Rabbia’s decade-long partnership – evidence of which can be found on two earlier ECM releases: 2005’s Raccolto and Re: Pasolini from 2007 – has been distinguished by a willingness to plumb subterranean literary, psychological and mystical complexities to unearth lightly spun but tightly woven textures. The title track is a gossamer-fragile commentary on the first of Rilke’s 12 Sonnets to Orpheus; luminous gongs, silvery electronic slivers and resonant piano punctuations loosely coalescing into felt poetry.
The exotic, near-10-minute-long Tanztheater (a suite of improvised dances created in memory of the choreographer Pina Bausch) bristles with all the pointed, peristaltic spontaneity of a Gamelan orchestra and has a bewitching beauty of its own. The sultry Sundance in Balkh (an ancient Persian city that was once the centre of Zoroastrianism) and meditative Cantar del Alma, with its hypnotically languid Stan Getz-like accents, incorporate folk idioms from the Mediterranean and Arab-Andalusian regions with effortless aplomb.
Listened to on headphones, Manfred Eicher’s impeccably poised recording sounds three-dimensional and sculptural, cusping rather than framing music that begins to evaporate even as it is brought into being.
