This disc offers an absorbing tour around the musical world of Heinz Holliger, with first recordings of major works written for him by Elliott Carter and pieces by one of his teachers, Sandor Veress, as well as a substantial composition of his own.
Holliger’s Quintet (1989) is characteristic of his more recent work in that, while intensely expressionistic, it avoids the kind of complexity that never gives the music time to establish a particular mood or texture. Beginning as if the intention is to deconstruct the normal sounds of the instruments, it develops into a sustained lament of enormous expressive power before fragmenting, and although the ending has nothing of conventional closure about it, is is far from arbitrary or irrational.
In this performance, rather clinically recorded but highly atmospheric none the less, the players achieve prodigies of collective co-ordination as well as of individual virtuosity. Such is its impact, then, that the rest of the music on the disc is in danger of being upstaged. That this does not (quite) happen is a tribute to the strong musical personalities of both Veress and Carter.
The early Veress Sonatine wears its neat neo-classical garb with considerable style, and the music has a pointed economy less consistently in evidence in the much later Diptych, though this too is well worth its disc time. Carter’s Quintet (1991) is one of his most demanding later pieces, and despite a remarkably well-shaped and eloquent account of its ebulliently intertwining lines the effect is more of a single, infinitely expanded but rather static view of the genre than of a well-varied musical drama moving purposefully through time. There is more explicit use of contrast and dramatic confrontation in the Trilogy for oboe and harp (1992), where Carter’s liking for setting cavernously resonant harmony against richly proliferating melodic writing is more appropriately accommodated. These performances are in every sense definitive, the recordings pungently immediate.'