Michael Jarrell – Paysages avec figures absentes – Nachlese IV, Nachlese Vb (Liederzyklus)
Michael Jarrell
Paysages avec figures absentes – Nachlese IV / Nachlese Vb brings together two works that reveal Michael Jarrell's long-standing practice of musical rethinking. Rather than returning to earlier material, each Nachlese opens a new path through it, allowing familiar ideas to unfold in different instrumental, vocal and temporal constellations.
Contrechamps | Speckled-Toshe, 2025, SPT24-C3
Transparent-white marbled vinyl LP, EAN7640149285505
For more than three decades, Michael Jarrell has developed his music as an evolving network of interrelated works. Ideas are neither abandoned nor repeated; they are revisited, transformed and redirected, each new piece opening another trajectory through material that continues to generate unforeseen possibilities. Within this practice, the Nachlese cycle occupies a particular place. Borrowing Goethe’s term for a “re-reading” or “reconsideration,” these works return to earlier compositions not to refine them, but to reveal other paths they already contained.
Paysages avec figures absentes – Nachlese IV and Nachlese Vb exemplify this way of thinking. Although one centres on the violin and the other on the voice, both explore how musical ideas change when heard from another perspective. Rather than producing variants, Jarrell allows the material to branch, acquiring new colours, new temporalities and new relationships between soloist and ensemble.
Listening to these works is less an experience of thematic development than of continuous transformation. Musical gestures return altered, resonances linger beyond their immediate context, and the distinction between foreground and background remains fluid. The music unfolds through subtle shifts of perspective, inviting a mode of listening attentive to change rather than resolution.
Issued as part of the Contrechamps | Speckled-Toshe series, this publication presents two works that illuminate Jarrell’s compositional practice from complementary viewpoints. The LP offers not simply a recording of performances, but an editorial constellation in which different branches of a single musical imagination can be heard in dialogue.
Paysages avec figures absentes – Nachlese IV
Pour violon et ensemble
(Side A, 00:18:57)
Nachlese Vb (Liederzyklus)
Pour soprano et ensemble
(Side B, 00:19:30)
Michael Jarrell – composition
Emilio Pomàrico – conductor
Ensemble Contrechamps – performance
Maximilian Haft – solo violin
Yeree Suh – soprano
Susanne Peters – flute
Valentine Collet – oboe, English horn
Megumi Tabuchi – clarinet
Azra Ramic – bass clarinet
Pierre Fatus – bassoon, contrabassoon
Charles Pierron – horn
Julien Wurtz – trumpet
Vincent Bourgeois – trombone
Serge Bonvalot – tuba
Thierry Debons, Sébastien Cordier – percussion
Antoine Françoise – piano, celesta
Anne Bassand – harp
Madoka Sakitsu-Lapeyre, Jesús Manuel Larez León – violins
Vincent Hepp, Anne-Laure Dottrens – violas
Martina Brodbeck, Francisca Santos, Luis Parente – cellos
Jonathan Haskell – double bass
Michael Jarrell, David Poissonnier – artistic direction
David Poissonnier – sound recording and mixing
Damien Pousset – accompanying text
Alan Bogana – artwork
Frédéric Alstadt, Mont Analogue – mastering and lacquer cut
Elisa Charles, Simon Aeschimann, Laurent Schmid – production
Austrovinyl – vinyl pressing
Recorded live on 1 October 2023 at Victoria Hall in Geneva.
The cover images are stills from Alan Bogana’s video installation Crystal Fire (2015). They were selected for their relation to the role of light and darkness in both compositions.
The LP brings together Paysages avec figures absentes – Nachlese IV (2009), for violin and ensemble, and Nachlese Vb (Liederzyklus) (2012), for soprano and ensemble.
Michael Jarrell
Michael Jarrell is a Swiss composer based between Geneva and Vienna. He studied composition with Éric Gaudibert in Geneva and Klaus Huber in Freiburg. His work encompasses solo and chamber music, orchestral compositions, concertos and music theatre, often exploring processes of memory, transformation and the return of musical material. Jarrell has taught composition at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna and at the Haute école de musique de Genève.
Emilio Pomàrico
Emilio Pomàrico is an Italian-Argentinian conductor and composer born in Buenos Aires. His work is closely associated with contemporary music, both as an interpreter and through his own compositions. He has conducted numerous orchestras and specialised ensembles, collaborating extensively with composers on the development and performance of new works. His repertoire also extends to major works of the twentieth century and the classical orchestral tradition.
Maximilian Haft
Maximilian Haft is a Belgian-American violinist, composer and researcher based in Switzerland. His work centres on contemporary music, experimental performance and collaborative forms of composition. He has been violin soloist with Ensemble Contrechamps since 2015 and is a founding member of Ensemble Proton Bern. Alongside performing and premiering new works, he develops projects that engage with transcription, technology and the material history of recorded sound.
Yeree Suh
Yeree Suh is a South Korean soprano whose repertoire ranges from Baroque music to works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She studied in Seoul, Berlin, Leipzig and at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. Particularly active in contemporary music, she has worked with leading orchestras, ensembles and conductors in performances that place precise vocal control and close attention to text at the centre of her practice.
Contrechamps | Speckled-Toshe is a collaborative series developed by Speckled-Toshe and the Ensemble Contrechamps. The editions present newly commissioned or recent works by contemporary composers, reconstructed as autonomous vinyl publications. Rather than documenting concerts, each release is conceived as an editorial project in which sound, text and visual material form a new constellation.