In “Après un Rêve” the upright piano isn’t the alternative resource when some particular venue (here the FGO Barbara, in Paris) doesn’t have a grand piano and can’t afford the rental of one: it has it’s own mechanical properties and capacities, making it a valuable performing instrument and not just a surrogate. Known for her very personnal views in what concerns the preparation of a piano, French composer and improviser Eve Risser started a solo program in 2017 dedicated to the “piano droit” and this is the very first documented release of that particular enterprise. With the bowels of the piano in front of her, it’s another kind of prepared piano, more rhythmic and also more composed («improvisation as inner composition», she says), we’re offered, openning the sound spectrum of this music to unsuspected possibilities. As always with Risser, the logics applied have “one hand on the heart, the other on the soul and a foot on the… party”. A party, we should add, made of delicate and intoxicating materials, almost Zen in its dreamlike developments, constantly in transition, mutating and gaining a life of its own, like a living organism. Simply beautiful…
credits
released September 20, 2019
Eve Risser - prepared upright piano, composition
All music by Eve Risser
Recorded live at FGO Barbara, Paris, the 16th of Feb 2018 by Lucie Bourély and Céline Grangey | Mixed and mastered by Boris Darley
Produced by Eve Risser and Compagnie RvR | Executive production by Pedro Costa for Trem Azul | Drawing by Eve Risser | Photo by Jeff Humbert | Design by Travassos
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Total mastery of patience, time, and drama create a constantly engaging journey that never gets tiresome or same-y: in fact the harder you listen the better it gets! Somehow Sorey et al. find a way to combine the deep listening and spontaneous interaction of the best jazz with the sense of every tone and sound being worth a universe of listening, which could be equally from Cage and Feldman or the accompaniment to an ancient ritual.
The recording/engineering is absolutely perfect as well. Giles