Karaindrou: Concert in Athens – Kashkashian, Garbarek, Myrat

There is a particular hush that falls over an audience listening to music they suspect they already love, even if they’ve never quite heard it before. That was the sensation, I imagine, in the hall in Athens where this concert was recorded, and it is a sensation ECM has spent nearly two decades cultivating around the name Eleni Karaindrou. The label has done for her what it did for Arvo Pärt in the 1980s — turned a regional voice into a devotional cult, complete with candlelit album art and a kind of hush-money aesthetic that discourages you from asking too many hard questions.

I’m going to ask a few anyway.

Karaindrou trained in Athens and then Paris, studying with Yannis Papaioannou among others, absorbing the modernist grammar of the 1960s before turning her back on most of it. Her real education came from Theo Angelopoulos, for whose glacial, mist-bound films she has composed since Voyage to Cythera in 1984 — a partnership as fruitful in its way as Herrmann’s with Hitchcock, though the temperature is entirely different. Where Herrmann cuts, Karaindrou drifts. Where Herrmann builds terror out of ostinato, Karaindrou builds a kind of ache out of modal melody, oboe and viola singing long-breathed lines over string pads that rarely resolve so much as evaporate.

This new gathering, drawn substantially from her theater scores — Miller, Williams, Albee — plus older cues familiar to those who own Ulysses’ Gaze or the Music for Films anthology, plays like a career-spanning mixtape performed with the reverence of scripture. “Requiem for Willy Loman” opens the program, and there’s no mistaking the intent: this is American tragedy filtered through Greek melancholy, the harmonic language pentatonic-tinged, faintly Orthodox, occasionally brushing against the tango (listen for the accordion sneaking into “Tango of Love,” a lovely bit of color that almost — almost — breaks the spell of the enveloping strings).

Kim Kashkashian plays as if she has lived inside these phrases for years, which by now she has; her viola tone on “Adagio” is dark toffee, sustained with an almost frightening evenness of bow pressure, no vibrato wobble, no seams. Garbarek does what Garbarek does — that keening, near-vocal sax sound, equal parts Coltrane ballad and Nordic folk lament — and on “Adagio for Saxophone” he all but dissolves into the string texture, which some will find rapturous and others faintly indistinguishable from new-age wallpaper. Vangelis Christopoulos’s oboe carries much of the emotional weight elsewhere, reedy and plaintive, closer to Rampal’s silvery elegance than to any harder-edged conservatory tone.

The Camerata Orchestra under Alexandros Myrat plays with evident devotion, though the live release flattens dynamics somewhat — climaxes arrive with a kind of amplified sameness, the massed strings occasionally blurring into a single glowing mass rather than distinct desks of sound. Around the twenty-second mark of “Closed Roads” you can hear the ensemble’s unanimity fray very slightly, a tiny scuff on an otherwise polished floor.

Here’s my hesitation, and it isn’t new to me — I’ve had it with Karaindrou discs before. Eighteen tracks of consistent tempo, consistent mood, consistent harmonic palette (lots of D minor-ish gloom, lots of suspended fourths) begin to resemble one long piece with intermissions rather than eighteen separate expressions. It is gorgeous wallpaper. It is exquisitely sewn. But taken as a concert rather than as underscoring for Angelopoulos’s ravaged Balkan landscapes or Miller’s collapsing salesman, the music loses the visual anchor that gives it its purpose, the way a shadow needs an object to fall from.

And yet — I keep returning to “Laura’s Waltz,” with its slightly tipsy 3/4 lilt, or the aching close of “Farewell Theme,” and I feel the tug all over again. Karaindrou is not Pärt, not Górecki, not building a cathedral out of silence. She’s closer to Nino Rota, a superb melodist who understood that restraint, repeated with enough conviction, becomes its own kind of eloquence.

If you already own the Angelopoulos soundtracks, this will feel like familiar rooms rearranged. If you don’t, it’s as generous an introduction as ECM has yet produced — beautifully played, handsomely engineered despite the live-hall wash, and utterly sincere. Just don’t expect it to argue with you. It would rather just break your heart quietly and let you go home.