Gurdjieff/de Hartmann Piano Works – Alain Kremski

There is a particular quiet that falls over a listening room when the music refuses to perform for you. No climaxes to speak of. No arguments won or lost. Just tone, repeated, and left alone. That is the strange gift — and the strange challenge — of the Gurdjieff/de Hartmann piano works, two more volumes of which have now arrived from Alain Kremski and Auvidis, a pianist who has by this point spent something like two decades living inside this material the way a monk lives inside a single Psalm.

Some background, for those who came late to this peculiar corner of the repertoire. Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff was not, by trade, a composer at all — he was a mystic, a teacher, an assembler of dances and “movements” meant to instruct the body as much as the ear. Thomas de Hartmann, trained properly at the Moscow Conservatory and briefly a colleague of Kandinsky’s circle in Munich, took Gurdjieff’s hummed and whistled melodies — fragments recalled from decades of wandering through the Caucasus, Central Asia, the monasteries of Tibet and the dervish lodges of the Near East — and gave them harmonic clothing. The results, some four hundred short pieces in all, occupy a strange no-man’s-land between folk transcription, devotional exercise, and salon miniature. Kremski’s ten-volume traversal, of which this pair represents two further installments, may be the closest thing this music has to a canonical reading. I am not sure anyone else would have the patience for it.

The engineering deserves mention before anything else, because it shapes everything that follows. The piano is close — very close, almost uncomfortably so, the felt of the hammers practically audible before the pitch registers. Auvidis have made no attempt at concert-hall bloom. You hear pedal changes, the faint mechanical thunk of the action, Kremski’s breath occasionally catching before a phrase. It’s an interpretive decision as much as a technical one: this music was never meant for the Musikverein. It belongs in a small room, with low light, and Kremski and his engineers understood that instinctively.

What strikes me most, disc after disc, is how little rhetoric these pieces contain. A “Mouvement” will state a four-bar idea and simply repeat it, harmonized a little differently each time, until it has said what it needs to say — no development in the Beethovenian sense, no working-out. Mouvement no. 11 has the hush of private prayer; Kremski holds back the pedal until the very last chord, and the silence afterward feels earned rather than merely observed. Elsewhere the music turns unexpectedly Mozartian — Exercice No. 4 has a limpid, four-square poise that would not embarrass a slow movement from one of the piano sonatas, though its harmonic vocabulary is far plainer. Exercice No. 15, by contrast, scurries along with a nervous energy that recalls Prokofiev’s toccata manner, though shorn of that composer’s steel.

The exoticism here, such as it is, never curdles into the kind of scented pastiche that infected so much Orientalist salon music of the early twentieth century — the Ketèlbey school, all incense and postcard minarets, music we now hear (rightly) as a kind of ethnic minstrelsy dressed up in modal scales and gong effects. Nor does it aspire to the sophisticated alchemy of Roussel’s Padmâvatî, or Koechlin’s Les Heures persanes, or Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salomé, where the exotic material is absorbed into a fully worked-out modernist or impressionist language. Hartmann’s harmonizations are far more modest — closer to folklore transcription than to symphonic imagination. Musiques pour les mouvements nos. 13 and 19 sound uncannily like sketches Alan Hovhaness might have made for one of his courtly ceremonial dances, decades before Hovhaness got around to writing them himself; the kinship is not coincidental, since both composers were drawn to the same well of Armenian and Central Asian melody, monophonic, unhurried, faintly modal.

Volume ten brings the most immediately affecting material. There’s a genuinely Rachmaninovian catch in the syncopation of Asian Songs no. 40, and more of it still in Asian Songs and Rhythms no. 11 — that particular melancholy lean on a weak beat that Rachmaninoff got from Russian church chant in the first place, so perhaps the resemblance runs deeper than mere influence. “Tibetan Melody” unfolds as a kind of sweetened gavotte, courtly and untroubled. “Greek Round” has an angularity that put me in mind of Holst’s solo piano writing, with a dash of Stravinsky’s puppet-rhythms from Petrushka thrown in for good measure. The halting, stumbling tread of “Greek Song” recalls nothing so much as Percy Grainger’s “Gumsuckers’ March” — that same deliberate rusticity, refusing to smooth its own limp. And there’s an actual catch in the throat, an appoggiatura placed exactly where a singer would sob, in “Armenian Song.” Nothing here postures. Nothing overstays.

Whether this amounts to satisfying listening across ten full discs is a fair question, and I won’t pretend the answer is obvious. Taken in twenty-minute doses, this music has a monastic clarity that I find genuinely moving. Taken end to end