Complete Works For Violin & Piano

Christian Wolff
Complete Works for Violin and Piano
Mode 126

From the 1950s to now, much of Christian Wolff’s delicate and undemonstrative music has been fashioned as opportunities for variable interaction between the performers, who must make choices that affect their musical relationship as well as shape the composition itself. In the notes to this release he suggests that the Duo For Violinist and Pianist (1961) becomes a conversation, as each instrumentalist follows their own chart of possible events that ultimately influence, but cannot totally control, one another. That the two versions played by The Sabat/Clarke Duo (nearly six and more than 17 minutes long, respectively) share the same mood and character – sparse, vivid remarks in a tense environment – confirms the composer’s presence amid the unpredictable proceedings. In the more expansive, more thoroughly notated Pebbles (1999), the instruments converse in whispers and forthright statements, at times interrupting and continuing the other’s point, and occasionally agreeing to sing together. Their material, from simple diatonic fragments of unrecognizable folk songs to small, jagged chromatic comments, may be biting or poignant but it’s the commitment of the performers that counts.
— Art Lange, The Wire, December 2003

Christian Wolff
Complete Works for Violin and Piano
Mode 126

Mode’s Christian Wolff edition has now reached Volume 5, though Complete Works for Violin and Piano sounds rather grand considering there are, in fact, only two of them: 1961’s “Duo for Violinist and Pianist” and 1999’s “Pebbles”. This latter was written for Marc Sabat and Stephen Clarke (who perform it here), and is for the most part fully notated and precisely coordinated, though the musicians are periodically required to proceed independently, and the duration of pauses is often left to the performers’ discretion. There’s a certain austerity to its two-part counterpoint and, from time to time, a rather old-fashioned motoric chugging to its rhythmic regularity, but it sustains its 35-minute duration without flagging. Curiously, the earlier “Duo” – heard here in two extremely different versions, one seventeen minutes long, the other less than six – sounds more abstract, more “modern”, as it were: while “Pebbles” makes no use of so-called extended techniques, the surface of the 1961 piece is peppered with odd abrasive scrapes, unconventional bowing effects and occasional leaps into the bowels of the piano. As my ancient vinyl recording of the work performed by its original dedicatees Kenjo Kobayashi and David Tudor is showing its age rather badly, I’m delighted to see this fine new CD out and about.
— Dan Warburton, www.paristransatlantic.com/,
     October 2003