The Session
The recordings were made in 1977 at Teldec Studio, Berlin, with Kremer leading the charge. Alfred Schnittke, who would become one of the great Soviet-era composers in his own right, wrote the cadenza for the Tabula Rasa concerto — a remarkable act of generosity between two men navigating the same constrained cultural moment. Tatjana Grindenko plays second violin. Keith Jarrett, of all people, plays the prepared piano, the strings dampened with objects to produce that muted, slightly metallic pluck that sounds like it's coming from the next room and also from directly inside your sternum.
ECM engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug recorded it. Kongshaug spent decades learning how to capture silence — not the absence of sound, but the presence of quiet, the difference being that one is empty and the other is alive. His work here is almost invisible, which means it's perfect.
What the Equipment Reveals
The prepared piano is the thing. On a compressed stream through laptop speakers, it sounds like a harpsichord with a cold. On a proper system with clean amplification and a speaker that can actually stop when it's told to — a woofer with real control, not just boom — you feel the decay of each note in your chest cavity. The sound blooms, holds, and then withdraws, and the withdrawal is as musical as the attack.
This is precisely why Manfred Eicher was so insistent about the ECM aesthetic. The label's unofficial motto — "the most beautiful sound next to silence" — gets quoted so often it's become wallpaper. But sit with this record and the phrase reassembles its meaning. Eicher wasn't being precious. He was making an engineering argument: if you don't give the silence room to exist, you lose half the music.
Spiegel im Spiegel closes the record, just violin and piano moving in the simplest possible terms, Kremer and Jarrett barely breathing above the staff. It lasts twelve minutes and feels like five. Then it ends and you sit there for a moment before you remember how to move.
The blank slate, it turns out, was never blank at all.