ECM: New Releases – Autumn 2008

If each year of ECM releases can be said to possess its own internal climate, then 2008 may be remembered as a year of strength, though not strength in the crude sense of volume or muscular display. Here, strength begins in the ability to receive old forms and return them breathing and incandescent. The label’s Autumn 2008 sampler gathers some of its most powerful players insofar as they move with the strange authority of those who understand that tenderness can exert its own pressure. Gianluigi Trovesi’s Profumo di Violetta offers the most immediate proof. Set within the grand banda tradition of his native Italy, the album places him among wind and percussion forces that seem to rise from a village square and a metaphysical pageant at once. From the sub-suite “Il Mito,” drawn from Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, we are given five of six movements, re-sequenced into a private mythology in which Renaissance source material becomes less an object of homage than a living root system. Trovesi…