Heinz Holliger
Lieder Ohne Worte

It's like standing in front of a steep wall with few handholds. And having to climb it. That's the impression this music gives me. Challenging music, which requires repeated listening and dedication. You approach it with a certain fear, because it commands respect like a monument or an abyss. Music that at times unsettles and obsesses you. An expression of discomfort and nostalgia for which you can't find a name. The kind that grabs you for no reason, and that for no reason also passes, but leaves you with a shiver, a vertigo, like a nightmare from which you wake up with a start in a night where you find yourself alone coming to terms with something that went wrong in life.

Heinz Holliger is not only one of the greatest oboists on the international classical scene but also one of the most refined contemporary composers. A student of Pierre Boulez and Sándor Veress, the great Swiss oboe virtuoso has long been a composer of rarefied, unsettling, crystalline, and ethereal music. And in this album, significantly titled "Canti senza parole", there is a collection of his most refined and evocative chamber music. A painful and deep musical environment, like a Munch painting, with the musical colors of the violin, the piano, the harp.

The first piece, "Frühlingslied", bears little of the "Spring Song" to which the title refers. The violin and the piano converse like two lovers at the end of a wrong story, where only the languor of carnality still makes sense and words are no longer needed. The violin intones sensually voluptuous phrases, while the piano remains cold and icy like an embrace that no longer warms but mercilessly suffocates. To the pain and incommunicability, "Intermezzo I" and "Intermezzo II" give way, two gems of unsettling beauty, two pearls of just over a minute, set as keystones in a musical cascade overflowing with anxiety and emotion. "Lieder ohne Worte II" ends with "Berceuse matinale", a kind of unsettling funeral lullaby, where the sense of distance and detachment are palpable, where absence is vivid and wounds in its not being there. An empty space that cannot be filled, something that implodes inside you. And the violin and the piano that collapse in "pianissimo" sinking you into whirlpools of silence.

An absolutely unsettling piece is "Trema", presented here in the version for solo violin. Focused on trembling (existential before physical) and corporeality, rich with harsh and acute sonorities like a fly trapped, lost in a claustrophobic and neurotic atmosphere. A musical fresco of a world devastated by war and a lack of love, a fresco where the paint melts into unsettling and senseless shapes, where the sound becomes liquid and the melody floats above like a raft adrift. A kind of "Guernica" for solo violin. Where perhaps the only enemy is ourselves.
But the true masterpiece of the album is "Elis: Drei Nachtstücke für Klavier", for solo piano. More than "night pieces", these three pieces are feverish and Nordic. They evoke icy and mountainous atmospheres, unsettling woods inhabited by ambiguous presences, where we find ourselves like Hansel and Gretel without knowing the way, nor how to find it again.

Like standing in front of a steep wall with few handholds, this album. But if one has the courage to face it, this wall, and climb it, we will discover glimpses, inner landscapes, breathtaking in their beauty and truth. To be left breathless. And above all, speechless. Like these songs.