Kissine: Between Two Waves — Kremer, Kremerata Baltica

Water is a treacherous metaphor for music, because music actually moves in time and water — at least the way most composers use it as an image — tends to just sit there being suggestive. Victor Kissine, bless him, understands the difference. He is not writing tone paintings of the Baltic. He is writing about the way memory pools and drains and pools again, and he happens to have grown up in a city where the canals do the same thing.

St. Petersburg is in his bones, evidently, and in his notes he talks about that seaweed tang in the air, the way the place seems to manufacture elegy the way other cities manufacture traffic jams. You believe him within about forty seconds of the concerto’s opening bars. Tremolando strings, a haze of trills, the piano entering not as a hero but as something more like a buoy — bobbing, present, oddly passive. Andrius Zlabys plays this music the way you’d want a good chamber performer to play it: without ego, alert to the fact that his job is often simply to be a point of stillness against which the string writing can churn. Kremerata Baltica under Roman Kofman gives that churn real physical presence — you can hear individual desks of strings peeling off into microtonal shimmer, bow hair audibly working, before the ensemble knits back together.

This is, let’s be honest, an inversion of everything the piano concerto usually promises. No octaves flung at the rafters, no cadenza fireworks. Kissine seems almost suspicious of virtuosity as spectacle. And yet about halfway through Between Two Waves the harmonic language darkens — starts to lurk, notes creeping into registers that feel less like water and more like undertow — and here the writing gets genuinely unsettling, before the opening material returns like a memory you can’t quite place the second time around. Is it the same music? Nearly. Not quite. That ambiguity is the whole point, and it is beautifully sustained.

The Duo, subtitled after Mandelstam, asks a lot of two players and twenty-four minutes. I confess I approached it warily — viola and cello alone, sustained that long, can feel like a diet of gruel, however nutritious. It doesn’t, here. Daniil Grishin and Giedre Dirvanauskaite open with a dry, toneless rasp of bow across wood that Kissine associates with breath rather than water — the poem is about sea wind, not sea — though frankly the line between the two elements blurs almost immediately, the way it always does in Kissine’s imagination. The playing is extraordinarily disciplined. Extended techniques are deployed sparingly, which is exactly right; overused, they become a mannerism, a tic, and Kissine — to his credit — never lets the exotic surface effects substitute for actual architecture. Trills swell and recede like tidal pull. There is no development in the Beethovenian sense, no arrival, no triumphant resolution. You are simply suspended in something luminous and slightly menacing, the musical equivalent of fog off Kronstadt.

Then there’s the Barcarola, and here the disc’s real coup arrives: Gidon Kremer, seventy now (he was pushing sixty when this was recorded), playing with a tone that has grown leaner and more astringent over the decades but has lost none of its intelligence. Kremer has been Kissine’s champion for years — the Schubert String Quartet in G major orchestration, the Zerkalo release — and you sense here the trust between composer and violinist that only comes from long collaboration. Andrei Pushkarev’s percussion adds color without ever tipping into exoticism; this is not Respighi-esque tone-painting, it’s something more astringent, more Nordic-Slavic in its restraint. Twenty-two minutes pass and you’re honestly not sure where they went, which I mean as praise, not complaint.

Comparisons are thin on the ground — Kissine remains a name known mostly to Kremer’s circle and ECM’s faithful, not yet part of the standard rotation the way, say, Silvestrov has become. That may change. It should. This is music of real personality, indebted certainly to the hushed high-Romantic melancholy of late Shostakovich and to the spectral minimalism that runs through so much post-Soviet composition, but not reducible to either. ECM’s engineering, as usual, gives everything room to breathe — the resonance is generous without smearing detail, and in the Duo especially you can hear the grain of the wood, the exact moment bow meets string.

Not everything here will convert the skeptical. Those who want music to go somewhere, decisively, may find seventy minutes of shimmer and recession trying. But for listeners willing to surrender to Kissine’s logic — which is not really musical logic at all, but the logic of tide tables and half-remembered dreams — this disc rewards patience amply. A quietly essential release, and as fine an introduction to this composer as currently exists.