Odradek Quartet / Piano Quintet / Postludes for Piano

"What we get here is subtle, precisely crafted music of serious social and philosophical intent, shown to best advantage in the remarkable "Ondradek Quartet" (1999) - thanks to a fine performance by the Auryn Quartet. Written in 17 short movements with suggestive titles, this music seems to arise from the damage and devastation of the twentieth century. Its constant return to open strings and a connotation of "tuning" gives it a sense of the need for a beginning, but its pervasive reality is the fragmented remnants of older rhetorics - phantasmagoric marches, surreal salon music, elusive waltzes, ruptured tangos and unsettling allusions to Mahler, Bartók, Tal and Schumann. Wrought fundamentally from the idioms of other music, other composers, the music of the "Ondradek Quartet" - its name is from Kafka - lives outside its own skin: elsewhere. Its most powerful statement seems to be the impossibility of any longer making a statement that coincides with itself. In this condition of radical brokennness, what is, isn't. ... In making provision in the booklet for an intelligent eight-page essay on the pieces (by Raymond Monelle), plus a further two pages on the composer, ECM has served the music well. And upheld a standard too readily compromised nowadays."
Christopher Ballantine, International Record Review

Whomever is in love with the last endeavors of contemporary music should not miss listening to three compositions (with a repetition) by Gideon Lewensohn that ECM has gathered in an album entitled Odradek. ... He entitled "Odradek" - certainly by making a reference to Chassidic tradition - a group of seventeen segments for string quartet (in this case, the Auryn Quartett), where we sense the concretization of an instable flux of sound strongly marked by emotion. From a syntactic and grammatical standpoint, Loewensohn is definitely not one of the grandchildren of Darmstadt, and he does not have a set of behavioral rules to comply to: his musical language is born from its inner self, and is not based on pre-existing rules. In this he is on the same line of a lot of the music being written today, a music of pure creative adventure whose promoting genius is to be found in the pages of a Mahler, of a Shostakovich, rather than in the rigorous dryness of a Webern. ... What struck me ... is a passionate density of expressiveness, an idea of music as projection of those areas of inarticulateness that existence only gently touches upon, and that music instead knows how to translate into its own wondrous "ricercari".
Enzo Siciliano, Il Venerdì di Repubblica

"The music's manner is often haunting, eloquent, the dedicated performers recorded with appropriate warmth. The booklet notes by Raymond Monelle will make you think, too, acknowledging Lewensohn's elusiveness, and helping to explain the ways in which this music fascinates."
Arnold Whittall, Gramophone

The ECM New Series debut of Israeli composer Gideon Lewensohn, "Odradek" is comprised entirely of premiere recordings. Lewensohn is increasingly recognised as one of the freshest voices in contemporary music and the title piece from this album, the "Odradek Quartet" won First Prize in the International Competition of the Italian Academy of Arts and Letters. Lewensohn's music defies easy categorisation. It is by turns, playful, serious, ironic, caustic, beautiful. The composer defines his own role as that of a commentator on culture - sometimes from a specifically Jewish perspective - and the range of musical-historical references in the work is vast. In his compositions, Lewnsohn pays tribute to Kurtág, Kancheli, Lutoslawski, Shostakovich, Bartók, Mahler, Rochberg, the Hilliard Ensemble, ragtime composer Scott Joplin and many others.