Description
Ann & Bill Harmsen: Executive Producers
Yarlung Records hits the trifecta–engaging unfamiliar music, committed performances and spectacular sound. Clarice Assad is a Brazilian-American composer/pianist, who moves effortlessly between classical, jazz, and popular idioms…. [This pressing includes Clarice’s] slashing, angular Clash for bandoneón and string quartet. Bryce Dessner’s quasi-minimalistic Circles is scored for the same forces, and Julien Labro, the album’s featured bandoneón virtuoso, contributes Meditation No. 1, an eight-minute reverie for this instrumental grouping as well. Kaija Saariaho’s Nocturne, for solo violin, fits the program’s aura of anxious melancholia. The Takács Quartet is approaching their semicentennial, and although only the cellist remains from the original ensemble, the group’s intensity and technical fluency is intact. Yarlung’s sonics are revelatory…. ”
—Andrew Quint, The Absolute Sound July/August 2024
This volume includes half of the repertoire on Yarlung’s recording Takacs Assad Labro, available in its entirety on CD, DSD and in various download and streaming options. The album earned a Latin GRAMMY® nomination and has delighted listeners and reviewers around the world. We hope you enjoy this 180 GRAM pressing mastered for you by Bernie Grundman.
My friend Clarice Assad called me out of the blue: “Bob,” Clarice said, “I have an idea….” I have learned that anytime Clarice has an idea, I’m interested. “I wrote a piece for Takács Quartet and bandoneón virtuoso Julien Labro. It’s a wild piece. The five of them have been performing it all over the world on tour, and I think you would like it. Actually, I know you would like it. Julien also wrote a companion piece, and the third work is by Bryce Dessner. I think you know Bryce; he lives in Paris. What a trio!” I responded that it sounded wonderful, and I knew that Music Accord had commissioned the quintets by Dessner and Assad. “I want you to record these three works. When can we do it?” Hence began one of Yarlung’s most adventurous (and I hope you will agree, successful) collaborations in the label’s twenty year history.
Bryce Dessner’s Circles for String Quartet and Bandoneón opens our album. Julien had actually met Bryce several years earlier from collaborating with Bryce and members of Eighth Blackbird on the movie score for The Two Popes. Julien knew Bryce was a successful American rock musician and guitarist based in Paris, but also recognized Dessner’s stature in the classical new music world. Bryce wrote Circles during his many months of Covid-19 lockdown in France. “This piece was an expression of the creative process slowly starting to turn again and come alive despite my isolation, each individual voice searching for a line and searching for one another and eventually creating a dance pattern together, weaving in and out of their evolving collective rhythm and individualist polyphony. This theme of the individual versus the collective voice is something I have been exploring a lot in my recent work.”
Julien’s Meditation No. 1 continues the trajectory initiated by Astor Piazzolla and Dino Saluzzi when they launched the bandoneón beyond its earlier role in Argentine folk music. As he prepared for our recording project, Julien told me he enjoyed thinking about the ECM bandoneón recordings released during the 1970s and 80s by Manfred Eicher.
Clarice’s Clash is the hardest to describe. Clarice has been increasingly interested in tensions within the social fabric of our society, especially as exacerbated by incendiary politicians, climate change, mass migration and refugee issues. Clash is not program music and does not tell a specific story or illuminate a specific argument. But it does embody social struggles as expressed by the string quartet and bandoneón as these five instruments explore states of discord. “I started writing Clash in 2020 and finished in 2021, a turbulent period for many of us, made more painful by our world-wide health crisis and its subsequent social distancing, the potential collapse of our economy, riots and political turmoil, all stressful occurrences.” Clarice experimented with rhythmic ideas she took from human speech, especially argumentative speech, and contrasts those with patterns evolving out of human conflict resolution. Challenging as the work may sound at first, its beauty emerges as the stronger and unifying force, giving us hope for the future. As with all the music in this album, this too was recorded in one take.
Harumi was justifiably apprehensive about recording Kaija Saariaho’s Nocturne in one take considering the harmonics, extended techniques and musical soundscape created by the composer. Nonetheless, I was not surprised that Harumi’s first take was indeed perfect. We recorded Nocturne again, just for safety, but it is that initial performance that you hear on this album. Saariaho wrote Nocturne in 1994 in preparation for her violin concerto Graal théâtre. She dedicated Nocturne to Witold Lutosławski.
This album honors the upcoming 50th Anniversary of the extraordinary Takács Quartet, formed in the mid 1970s at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest by Gabor Takács-Nagy, Károly Schranz, Gabor Ormai and András Fejér. András remains cellist to this day. He was one of the original music student founders of the quartet, which would become one of the highest-ranked and best-loved string quartets in history.
The Takács originally recorded for Hungaroton and later for Decca, for whom they released many recordings including award-winning interpretations of the Bartók and Beethoven String Quartets. The ensemble now records for Hyperion and has released an extraordinary discography including works by Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn, Schubert, Brahms, Coleridge-Taylor, Dvořák, Hough, Dutilleux and Ravel. This release is the Quartet’s first Yarlung album.
—Bob Attiyeh, producer
Ann & Bill Harmsen: Executive Producers
Recording Engineers: Bob Attiyeh and Arian Jansen
Mastering Engineers: Steve Hoffman, Arian Jansen and Bob Attiyeh
Vinyl Mastering: Bernie Grundman
AKG C24 Microphone: Ancona Audio
Yarlung Audio Microphone Preamplification: Elliot Midwood
SonoruS Audio ATR12 Analog Tape Recorder
Steinway Technician: Kathy Smith
Imagery for Album Cover: Amanda Tipton Photography
Graphic Layout: MikeDesign
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