Acoustic Reverb by Guilherme Rodrigues

released October 28, 2022

Acoustic Reverb
Guilherme Rodrigues

58 Compositions for Cello
Sound Investigation Process


REVIEWS

The Rodrigues family and I seem to share a distant personal connection. The father, violist Ernesto, was among the first people to alert me to the fruits of his labor on the ever-magnificent Creative Sources imprint. His talented cellist son Guilherme, besides collaborating with illustrious comrades already at the age of 15 or so, launched his webpage in the early 2000s with a somewhat naive introduction scribbled by a still-young Massimo Ricci. Twenty years later, with more experience and more sophisticated improvisational and compositional skills, Guilherme Rodrigues exhibits a significant advancement in his own musical development. I’ll go right to the point: this CD is superb, one of the few in recent months that were revisited time and again in this writer’s house.

The album’s title is quite straightforward, and easily understood since the inaugural listen. Except for a single episode captured within a historical boat, the recordings took place inside ten different churches, whose spaces facilitated the natural extension of the cello’s voice, enriching it with an air that is indeed sacred, but of a “clean” sacredness, unsoiled by religious or faux-otherworldly implications. Although the audio quality would make ECM’s Manfred Eicher jealous, it fortunately lacks the German label’s trademark coldness that sometimes shields the sonorities from revealing their throbbing hearts. There is no feeling of excessive fragmentation or lack of structural consistency despite the program consisting of 58 tracks (!), many of them fleetingly concise. On the contrary, what is heard is, in all actuality, suggestive of a full-fledged suite for solo cello.

When the soul of an instrumentalist is tuned to a concept of whole vibration – meaning both inner and outer – they are able to extract from the instrument, with firm yet sensitive touch, all the myriad nuances that define it. This is exactly how it sounds as one’s ears get used to Rodrigues’ acumen, always in line with the expressive signal’s deepest connotation, not overly virtuous, eventually capable of transmitting to the listener a sense of sober solemnity that is hard to find nowadays. Whatever you hear in Acoustic Reverb will comprehensively satisfy your psychosomatic nature, whether it be combinations of singing partials, melody fragments flavored with Bachian canon, minimalist cues, rattling drones bathed in glissando, or string and wood noises that nearly let you smell the cello itself. It is music that puts the audience in a calm mental state, entirely open to consistent evidence of evolution. A reminder to get back on track and resume paying attention to the pitch’s oscillating core, the diaphanous halo around it, the resonating silence currently not included in the lingo of the dominant auditory mediocrity. Thankfully, Guilherme Rodrigues has never been a part of that ridiculous anthropomorphic microcosm.

- Massimo Ricci, touchingextremes

There are things that are inevitable. Here comes Guilherme with an absolutelly seminal and breakthrough solo album, recorded between May and October in Berlin, 2022, in various Berliner Kirchen: Passionskirche,Magdalenenkirche, Christuskirche, Herz-Jesu-Kirche, Evangelische Stephanus-Kirchegemeinde, St, ChristophorusKirche, Ms Heimatland, Zwinglikirche, Sophienkirche,Zionskirche, and Marthakirche.
Guilherme presents 58 shortminiatures for cello that sound truly amazingly with the acoustics of the churches. This music contains essentially everything, from the ancient to the contemporary. First associations are with ancient music from Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644-1704), George Philipp Telemann (1681-1767), and, of course, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), whose solo violin music is so majestically interpreted by Maja Homburger. Indeed, there are moments in Guilherme's work reminding me of Maja's music, especially of her incredible attempts to combine baroque with free improvisation. Second, Guilherme's music reminds me of XXth century avantgarde from Anton Webern (1883-1945), the master of miniature form, through John Cage (1912-1992) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) to Helmut Lechenmann (b.1935) or Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988). Thirt, this is a free improvised music of the highest quality, and the recording of free improvisation for cello solo are not so frequent. My favorite, close enough, is "Trinity" for viola solo by Mat Maneri, a kind of paradigmatic album released in 2001 by ECM, based more on the American free jazz and free improvisation tradition, as well as Joe Maneri's micro-tonal ideas.
Guilherme's "Acoustic Reverb" is of equal superb quality. For me a Masterpiece of XXIst Century music!!!

- Maciej Lewenstein

Guilherme Rodrigues sounds the spaces of eleven churches across fifty-eight vignettes in nearly as many minutes on Acoustic Reverb. 

Herringbone bowings and dulcet pizzicato surround silences spacious enough to hear sounds’ delay, decay, and interplay within and with the architecture. A keen ear could parse damping, room size, and other parameters but even generally the characters of each space convey themselves in the differences felt in their reverberations. The space seems to color the cardinal sounding though, even with a wheelhouse of technique, unsystematic sounding makes it hard to examine particulars of the space and location within the space. Regardless, the rich reverb of every room ripples to realize the fluid that fills its container and what is a cup but for its contents."

- Keith Prosk

Ce n’est pas le premier album solo du violoncelliste portuguais Guilherme Rodrigues. Acoustic Reverb,tout un programme, fait suite à Cascata (chroniqué dans ces lignes) et se compose de 58 (oui, cinquante huit) miniatures enregistrées dans onze églises de Berlin : Passionskirche, Magdalenenkirche, Christuskirche, Herz-Jesu-Kirche, Evangelische Stephanus-Kirchegemeinde, St Christophorus Kirche, Ms Heimatland, Zwinglikirche, Sophienkirche, Zionskirche and Marthakirche. Chaque morceau porte le nom de la Kirche où elle a été enregistrée et est numérotée en chiffres romains jusque LVIII. Il s’agit d’un beau travail sur la qualité du son, de son grain particulier dans l’espace réverbérant de l’Église avec ses dalles de pierre ou de marbre et ses voûtes. Une multiplicité de formes, une qualité de silence et les résonnances particulières qui ronronnent lorsque les notes graves sont frottées par – dessus la touche ou vrillent l’acoustique lorsque l’archet frotte tout près du chevalet. La manière et la pratique de Guilherme Rodrigues sillonnent plusieurs domaines musicaux : minimaliste, expérimental, classique, improvisé; ou elles évoquent le polyphonique, le médiéval, le chant naturel ou ce que vos références suggéreront. Disons qu’il s’agit du violoncelle universel et d’un tour de force. En effet, concevoir instantanément autant de pièces réussies, dont la forme est concentrée dans une durée brève entre une et deux minutes, dans un laps de temps relativement court (Mai 2022) est la marque d’un grand talent et d’une belle inspiration. On peut s’hasarder à citer Telemann, Bach, Webern, Scelsi, Xenakis et les créations de Sigfried Palm il y a un demi-siècle, mais aussi, pourquoi pas, le chant des baleines ou Terry Riley. Le chant de l’âme en tout cas. J’aime ces staccatos flûtés, ces fragments de mélodie qui s’élancent le long d’une colonne, ces graves vibrants et ces aigus crissant maîtrisés comme un chant d’oiseau. Voilà de quoi écouter en profondeur, réécouter et piocher au hasard des 58 plages de l'album. Un bijou aux très nombreuses facettes qui révèlent leurs secrets au goutte à goutte. Bravo !

- Jean-Michel van Schowbourg