Jeroen van Veen THE BEST OF MINIMAL PIANO MUSIC

 

THE BEST OF MINIMAL PIANO MUSIC

 

Russian Renaissance RUSSIAN RENAISSANCE

                                                        RUSSIAN RENAISSANCE

Víkingur Ólafsson BACH REWORKS / PART 2

Possessing a rare combination of passionate musicality, explosive virtuosity and intellectual curiosity, pianist Víkingur Ólafsson has been heralded “Iceland’s Glenn Gould” by the New York Times (Anthony Tommasini, August 2017). Before lighting up the international scene in 2016, Ólafsson won all the major prizes in his native country, including four Musician of the Year prizes at the Icelandic Music Awards, and the Icelandic Optimism Prize.

In September 2018 Víkingur Ólafsson released his new album on Deutsche Grammophon, Johann Sebastian Bach, featuring an eclectic selection of the composer’s keyboard works. In an ingeniously woven tapestry of diverse original compositions as well as transcriptions from different eras, Ólafsson’s “inspired playing makes Bach more human than we’ve heard in a long time” (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2018). The Bach album follows on from the global success (“Breathtakingly brilliant pianist” (Gramophone) of the Philip Glass Etudes, Ólafsson’s debut recording for the label after signing as an exclusive recording artist in 2016.

RYUICHI SAKAMOTO BTTB [20th Anniversary Edition]

Sometime in the late 1990s, Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto was stuck in a Tokyo traffic jam. A melody had popped into his head while he was driving; during the standstill, he called home and sang it into his answering machine, he remembers. At the time, Japan was still in the grips of “The Lost Decade,” a period of economic downturn following the inflated tech optimism and conspicuous consumption of the 1980s. Y2K anxiety was gathering momentum. Amid the stress of busy city streets, the melody harbored a yearning for the reflective pleasures and possibilities of meandering. The little tune eventually grew into “Opus,” the opening track of Sakamoto’s mid-career solo piano album, BTTB.

BTTB, an acronym for “Back to the Basics,” has generally been remembered as homage: Sakamoto doing Satie, painting impressionistic scenes to speak to the subconscious. Memory, however, has a tendency to behave like water—one minute flooding the senses, the next smoothing away details. In BTTB’s case, the weirder, more prescient, and occasionally humorous moments have been washed from the public record. To be fair, the album’s form was fluid from the start. First released in Japan in November 1998 with 14 tracks, it was reissued just four months later with the addition of the somber “Snake Eyes” and a four-handed piano version of the 1979 song “Tong Poo,” from Sakamoto’s hugely influential Yellow Magic Orchestra. Subsequent European and U.S. versions did away with some experimental tracks to make room for more commercial offerings.

This new 20th-anniversary edition feels like Sakamoto’s director’s cut. With 18 tracks, it combines the 1999 Japanese release with two cuts from the 2000 stateside version: the ad-soundtrack-turned-hit-single “Energy Flow” and a beautifully looping closer called “Reversing.”

RYUICHI SAKAMOTO async

Ryuichi Sakamoto has announced a new studio album, async, out April 28 via Milan. It’s the Japanese composer’s first studio album since 2012’s Three, with Jaques Morelenbaum and Judy Kang, and his first solo album in 8 years. Sakamoto recorded and conceived of the album in New York, taking inspiration from “everyday objects, sculpture, and nature,” according to a press release. A world premiere listening event for the album (in 5.1 surround sound) will take place at Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, which runs from March 23-26. Sakamoto’s also set to perform on April 25 and 26 at Park Avenue Armory Veterans Room in New York. The new album follows his 2015 score for Alejandro González Iñárritu's film The Revenant (where he was assisted by the National's Bryce Dessner and German musician Alva Noto). It’s also his first studio album since his recovery from cancer in 2015.

Jarvis Cocker / Chilly Gonzales ROOM 29

Standing at the west end of Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard, the Chateau Marmont hotel has seen many a famous and infamous guest pass through its doors since it opened in 1929. A 2012 stay in one of its second-floor rooms inspired British lyricist and singer Jarvis Cocker to look into its history and led to this collaborative project with multi-faceted Canadian pianist and composer Chilly Gonzales. Room 29, a 21st-century song cycle, is set for release on Deutsche Grammophon on 17 March. Gonzales’ score and Cocker’s lyrics conjure up the lives of some of Room 29’s previous occupants, as well as shining a light on the glittering fantasy and often bleak reality of Hollywood.

“If you must get in trouble, do it at the Chateau Marmont,” noted Harry Cohn, founder of Columbia Pictures, in 1939. Jarvis Cocker was intrigued by the hotel’s links to the history of the film industry. He found the key to creativity in the fact that Room 29 contained a baby-grand piano. What if it could “sing” of the life stories and events it had witnessed? The idea also ignited Chilly Gonzales’s imagination, and both artists embarked on a three-year journey of artistic discovery, unearthing details about guests such as Jean Harlow, Mark Twain’s daughter Clara, and Los Angeles mobster Meyer Cohen, alias “Mickey the Haberdasher”. As well as dramatising some of those stories, their songs capture both the essential loneliness of the hotel room and the ways in which moving images have “moved” people in ways they don’t quite understand. Gonzales and Cocker have drawn on the 19th-century model of the song cycle for a structure capable of containing the broad sweep of emotions and states of mind elicited by the real and imaginary dramas of one unusual hotel suite. Room 29 emerges as metaphor for a place within each of us, home to our deepest desires and fantasies.

Since moving to Germany in the late 1990s, Chilly Gonzales has pursued a breathtaking range of musical projects, spanning everything from rap and experimental rock to hip hop and Satie-inspired minimalism. The classically trained pianist collaborated with the Kaiser Quartett on his last solo album, Chambers, attracting critical acclaim to its neo-Romantic reflections on chamber music in the age of pop. The Hamburg-based string quartet plays a prominent part in Room 29, providing a sonorous tonal complement to Gonzales’ piano writing and accompanying Jarvis Cocker’s vocals. Lead singer and primary lyricist of Pulp for over 30 years, on and off, Cocker has also released two solo albums, and developed a successful broadcasting career, presenting both Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service on BBC Radio 6 Music and BBC Radio 4’s Wireless Nights.

Room 29 was recorded in Paris following its “work-in-progress” premiere at Hamburg’s Kampnagel in January last year. The finished piece will return to Kampnagel for three performances (17-19 March) before touring to London’s Barbican Centre (23-25 March), the Berlin Volksbühne (28-30 March), Paris (April/July) and selected summer festivals. (Deutsche Grammophon)