2014 release **

"Beethoven’s fifth symphony begins with that now-iconic but aphoristic “short-short-short-long” musical motive about which so much has beenwritten and said, a radical statement for string melody without harmonic accompaniment.  On his 2008 composition “Song 2,” for bass flute, Wandelweiser composer Anastassis Philippakopoulos essentializes the very concept of a similarly constructed four-note phrase, presenting each gesture in isolation, long silences allowing for listener recontextualization.  Each motive becomes a brief statement of intent that is simultaneously bold and sweet, two characteristics that could also describe this second Wandelweiser disc of solo pieces by the Greek composer. In every case, it is as if the statement has become paramount, stripped down to its essence. Much of the Wandelweiser group’s output deals with silence, but few make use of it in quite this way.  Here, silence is a place in which to regroup after a declamation has occurred, or perhaps a statement has been made that is both beginning and ending.  Listen to the four-note figure that begins at 3:05; it conjures shades of the previously mentioned Beethoven but, even more directly, the third movement of Shostakovich’s fifth, a nod to the past in multilayered allusion.  However, the waters run deeper than even these summations. The short notes of Philippakopoulos’ motives are unequal, gradually lengthening as one note proceeds to the next. Each new pitch introduced is like an invocation and a reckoning, an additive process in continual and nearly circular renewal.  Katrin Zenze plays both this and the sixth piece in the Song series with absolute sympathy and clarity. The four piano pieces, composed between 2005 and 2008, sound like nothing I’ve heard in the Wandelweiser catalog.  While the first is a post-Messiaenic series of cataclysmic utterances that set the entire keyboard vibrating, the second, much of it barely a perfumed whisper, contains something that sounds strikingly like a decoration, possibly a trill or mordent! In the wrong hands, it might simply appear out of place, but in this music, performed with stunning sensitivity by the composer, the repeated figure is simply beautiful and wistfully retrospective in a timeless sort of way. That little figure is stretched later in the piece, its implications changed but still recognizable. Philippakopoulos is a composer to watch.  Even these fairly brief compositions present a voice of remarkable originality, a voice aware of history and of its circumvention.  The recordings do his work full justice, both in terms of performance and sound quality."