Elusive Affinity is the third ECM New Series recital by Russian pianist Anna Gourari, after Canto oscuro (2012) and Visions fugitives (2014). It sets three late twentieth-century suites by Schnittke, Shchedrin and Rihm among miniatures by Kancheli and Pärt. Two of Bach's keyboard arrangements of Italian concerto slow movements open and close the programme. The pieces were chosen less for a common style than for hidden kinships, links between music, poetry, theatre, film and friendship.
Gourari recorded the album alone at the piano in January 2018 at the Historischer Reitstadel in Neumarkt. Manfred Eicher produced it and Stephan Schellmann was the engineer. The booklet essay is by Paul Griffiths, who writes that Gourari makes "these Bach slow movements, too, ours". The cover uses a 1972 photograph taken in Martinique by André Kertész.
After the Largo from Bach's Concerto BWV 975, after Vivaldi, come Alfred Schnittke's Five Aphorisms (1990), dark fragments prompted by the poetry of his friend Joseph Brodsky. Rodion Shchedrin's Diary, seven pieces from 2002, is dedicated to Gourari and reflects the life of a pianist and composer. Wolfgang Rihm's Zwiesprache (1999) is a set of five tombeaux, each headed with a name: Alfred Schlee, Paul Sacher, Heinrich Klotz, Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht and Hermann Wiesler. Between the cycles sit Arvo Pärt's Variationen zur Gesundung von Arinuschka (1977), early tintinnabuli written for his young daughter's recovery, and two Giya Kancheli themes. One comes from Robert Sturua's staging of Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, the other from Sergei Bodrov's 2002 film Bear's Kiss. The Adagio from BWV 974, after Alessandro Marcello, ends the disc.
Reviewing it in Gramophone, Richard Whitehouse found Gourari "a lucid guide to this music" and felt that the Bach movements frame the recital with real pathos. Dominy Clements of MusicWeb International heard "a carefully constructed and thought-provoking programme that guides you from beauty through the darkness of mortality and back into light." Andrew Eales made it Recording of the Month on Pianodao, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung heard in it melancholy dream images of slowness.
This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2612, released on 24 May 2019, with liner notes by Paul Griffiths.
