Helena Tulve - Arboles lloran por lluvia (2014)

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.

Review by Richard Whitehouse, Gramophone Magazine

Six years ago, ECM's first disc of music by Estonian Helena Tulve was an impressive, largely instrumental introduction to a composer who seemed to have created her own very distinctive style after studies in Paris and as Erkki-Sven Tüur's only composition student. The latest collection, mostly vocal, reveals more intriguing facets of that personality, though once again there is nothing really substantial here. The longest work is the 14-minute Reyah Hadas 'ala (The Perfume of the Myrtle Rises), a setting of a mystical Yemeni text for two counter-tenors, vocal ensemble and early-music consort, in which the incantatory voices are superimposed on instrumental lines that bend, slide and proliferate. In Tulve's music the thinking always seems more vertical than horizontal; the predominant mood is introspective, almost meditational, the textures and harmonies beautifully imagined, the sense of pulse and forward momentum often elusive. Extinction des Choses Vues for orchestra does build to a massive climax, achieved through weight and intensity rather than movement; the effect is rather like Kaija Saariaho's music of the 1980s and 90s, and wonderfully achieved.

Review by Andrew Clements, The Guardian

RECORDING OF THE MONTH

Helena Tulve's music was known to me by just one short piece Traces (2001) so I welcomed the opportunity to hear more. Incidentally this turned out to be the second ECM disc entirely devoted to her music and I realised that I still have to listen to the earlier one.

Things being what they are, this CD provides a fair portrait in that these five pieces are clearly different in character while obviously from the same pen and mind. This says much for Helena Tulve's musical personality. All five were composed within a fairly short time-span from 2005 to 2008.

Reyah hadas'ala is a setting for voices and early music consort of a text by Shalom Shabazi - a Yemenite poet, rabbi and mystic in the 17th century. I derived this information from the often detailed though not always useful insert notes by Kristina Kõrver. Tulve is not the only Estonian composer to have composed for Ensemble Hortus Musicus. Among the others are Lepo Sumera, Erkki-Sven Tüür and Galina Grigorjeva whose Con misterio (2001) is particularly beautiful. The short text is repeated several times in different guises although Gregorian chant is a prominent characteristic of the music that definitely does not aim at imitating the oriental. The result is beautiful and quite moving and I have returned to this piece repeatedly.

The next work silences/larmes is a setting of five very short texts by Mother Immaculata Astré, the current Abbess of Le Pesquié in France. The musical setting for soprano, oboe, glasses and wind chimes (the latter played by the composer) neatly reflects the utter brevity of the texts. However, Tulve's imagination has it that these epigrammatic settings are packed with invention and suggest much in spite, or because, of their concision. The fourth of these haiku is whispered just at the verge of inaudibility - what the notes describe as “the quiet climax”. Emphasis is put on the purity of the sung lines and Arianna Savall's delivery is just marvellous, her voice sometimes suggesting some mysterious instrument – for example, the ondes Martenot. She deploys supple, wide-leaping melodic lines.

L'Equinoxe de l'âme for soprano, triple harp and string quartet is different again although it shares some features with silences/larmes, particularly so in the vocal part. The source is a text by a 12th century Sufi mystic but heard here in a French translation. The text is about the Simurgh, a mythical bird who feeds on fire and whose nest is on the borderline between the visible and invisible worlds. Savall who also plays the triple harp's part is again superb in this very fine work that also repays repeated hearings. It actually needs them because some parts of this setting are not as straightforward as one might think.

Arboles lloran por lluvia (“Trees cry for rain”) which gives this release its title is a setting for soprano, nyckelharpa and voices of a traditional poetic text of Sephardic Jews. Although the opening and the coda suggest drops of rain, the main body is a love song: “Trees cry for rain/and so the mountains for air./And so my eyes cry/for you, my beloved”. This beautiful setting is probably the most straightforward work in this release, which does not mean that it is easy to sing but the way it is done is immediately perceived for what it is: a deeply moving love-song. Now, I hear someone ask : what's a nyckelharpa? I had to check this myself and it turns out that it is a Scandinavian fiddle. This may be the only drawback concerning this beautiful work in that one is not likely to find a nyckelharpa player everywhere in the world. The part may probably be substituted by a viola which – to me at least – sounds more or less the same.

I have always been and still am taken aback by the variety of sources often quoted by contemporary composers when commenting on their music or their works. Helena Tulve mentions that the musical ideas of Extinction des choses vues are derived from a text by the Jesuit thinker Michel de Certeau. Well, maybe, maybe not. I am not quite sure how far this helps in getting any further insight into a splendid orchestral work whose structure is fairly clear. The music opens in complete ambiguity and progressively settles, then gains further momentum by adding layer upon layer until reaching an almost chaotic climax. This is followed by an eerie, static episode providing a completely inconclusive close: the extinction of things seen/heard? This is yet another very fine work that shows that Tulve has a fine ear for telling instrumental and orchestral gestures.

I have listened repeatedly to this superb release for the expressive strength of the music, the excellent performances apparently all in the composer's presence and the very fine recording of the kind one has come to expect from ECM. The often detailed insert notes deserve to be mentioned too although – as is often the case with this label – they tend to be a bit too high flown while omitting basic information that the average music-lover would like to have: composition dates and information on some unusual instruments that may be at play in the music.

Make no mistake: this is one of the finest discs to have come my way recently.

Review by Hubert Culot, MusicWeb-international.com

Arboles lloran por lluvia (Trees Cry for Rain) is ECM’s second album dedicated to the music of Estonian composer Helena Tulve, whose Lijnen sailed the label’s waters in 2008. This European-only release proves that sometimes the greatest treasures are worth seeking. If you care at all about contemporary music, you’ll want to obtain this one at all costs. Not only because Tulve’s compositional voice is more assured than ever, but also because that voice contains so many others, whose constitutions now step forward like memories by lure of hypnosis.

Each of the five compositions featured on this program takes root in a text or theme that predates us even as it feels instantaneously born. Reyah hadas ’ala (The Perfume of the Myrtle Rises), for instance, may be scored for voices and early music consort, but its churning intimacy is fresh as fallen snow. The poem from which the piece gets its name is by Shalom Shabazi, a mystical Yemenite of the 17th century, who describes being awoken at midnight by an angelic vision. The performances of countertenors Charles Barbier and Taniel Kirikal, along with Vox Clamantis and Ensemble Hortus Musicus, make this scene—which would seem to demand much of its interpreters—feel as organic as breathing. Just as the poem allows us to imagine a light obscured by branches in the frayed edges of half-sleep, so too does Tulve’s setting thereof reveal by obfuscation. The text is its enzyme, but finishes as an alchemical transformation—or transfiguration, if you will—from word into flesh. The voices and strings intensify, becoming denser, but keep returning to an underlying pause. Cells of plainchant move in arcs so that we might better understand the straighter lines they frame. The oboe-like bombard is powerful to hear in this context, crying like a single beam of language that can only be understood through meditation. Images fade as quickly as they appear, as if inhaling light.

silences/larmes (silences/tears) nestles a handful of shorter poems by Mother Immaculata Astre, Abbess of Le Pesquié (a Benedictine nunnery in the south of France). Soprano Arianna Savall, oboist Riivo Kallasmaa, and Tulve herself (playing glasses and wind chimes) make for a crystalline skeleton to animate these verses, each a burst of pollen. There is a cautious, faunal quality to the emergence of voice and oboe, although the atmosphere is far from bucolic. After the performers recede into whispers (at which point they describe the brush of a night moth’s wings), the resurgent song becomes almost unsettling, for it emphasizes the messy biology that enables even the most basic sound to be produced.

L’Équinoxe de l’âme (The Equinox of the Soul) features Savall on voice and triple harp, joined by the NYYD String Quartet. Here the text is by 12th-century Sufi mystic Shabab al-Din Suhrawardi, and sung in a French translation from the Persian by Henry Corbin. It is dappled with parables from the Safir-i-Simurgh (The Calling of the Simurgh), and from them protrude spidery legs of awakening. As harp notes fall among seeds from laden branches, Savall navigates the text as if it were a gesture of divine scope. Suhrawardi’s messages are urgently cryptic, their answers revealed in the omnipresence of things. If, in each of these compositions, performers seem to be bonded by deeply microbial connections, in this context they are of the same body.

The album’s title composition is performed by Vox Clamantis, backing Savall and Kirikal as vocal soloists and Marco Ambrosini on the nyckelharpa. This time, Tulve turns her attention to a traditional Ladino (Sephardic) poem, for which the nyckelharpa’s muted pizzicati are an evocative treasure. Amid these raindrops, voices sing broken syllabus before more visions, now earthly, take focus. The Kirikal-Savall helix betrays the nervousness of wings, of leaves trembling beneath the weight of water, of the anticipation of physical union. Tonal changes add restorative brushstrokes to a decaying landscape, leaving Ambrosini in the hush of a sigh.

Although the final piece of the program, Extinction des choses vues (The Extinction of the Things Seen), features no vocalists, it is still rooted in a text: Jesuit thinker Michel de Certeau’s Extase blanche (White Ecstasy). Like Tulve’s later output, it traces a threshold between worlds. One can hear the influence of her illustrious teacher, Erkki-Sven Tüür. clearest in its fractal respiration and percussive skin, and in the distinctly threnody-like quality of this piece. Its mouth is a spiral, and the tongue that rests within is a nebula.

Arboles lloran por lluvia confirms in Tulve a voice and temperament comparable to Kaija Saariaho in that it looks beyond the label of “spectral” into a face, as of certain paintings, that is always staring back at you no matter where in the room you stand. If this music were a window, it would mourn the loss of light, drunk to the last drop by the leaves beyond its brow. It is perhaps in this spirit that the album bears dedication to Montserrat Figueras. The mother of Savall, her spirit is palpable in the recording, nodding and smiling throughout. Tulve thus attends to the ghosts between words and weaves them into a husk of dreams. Within them, she composes a world of movement without form.

Just as the trees cry for rain, so does the rain cry for trees.

Review by Tyran Grillo, ECMreviews.com

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