For Two is the most reduced setting Michael Mantler has given to his long-standing idea of music that is partly written out and partly improvised. Eighteen short duets, most of them under three minutes, pair a classical pianist who plays only what is notated with a jazz guitarist who interprets and improvises freely. The piano carries the composer's essentially orchestral thinking, and the guitar answers it from outside the score.
Born in Vienna in 1943, Mantler led a large orchestra with Carla Bley in New York in the 1960s and started the WATT label in 1973. He has recorded for ECM since returning to Europe in 1991. His guitarist here is Bjarne Roupé, already one of the soloists on Mantler's Concertos (2008). The pianist is Per Salo, a Juilliard graduate, pianist and organist of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra since 1989, and dedicatee of Per Nørgård's Concerto in due Tempi. The two did not record together. Salo taped his parts in June 2010 at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, and Roupé added his guitars at home in Copenhagen that August. Mantler edited and produced the album, and Gérard de Haro and Nicolas Baillard mixed and mastered it at La Buissonne in the autumn.
The pieces are numbered rather than named, and each sets up a different relation between the two instruments. Duet One is jagged and brief, while Duet Two mixes dense chord voicings with single, pointillist notes. In Duet Eight, as Tyran Grillo observed on his ECM Reviews site, Roupé draws an almost vocal line over repeated figures in the piano. Duet Six, at four and a half minutes the longest of the set, edges towards the blues. Duet Seven and Duet Fifteen contain the rare moments where guitar and piano move in unison.
Kenny Mathieson wrote in The Scotsman that "Mantler is always capable of creating intriguing melodies and even more intriguing ways of treating them". He found the communication between the two players, across their different disciplines and approaches, "often fascinating". The German magazine Concerto heard miniatures in which Mantler prescribes mutual listening, a slow and exploratory walk between the notes, where written and found tones claim equal places.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2139, first released on 10 June 2011.
