Post by Slinger on Oct 8, 2021 19:53:53 GMT
As nobody else seems to have "done" October I've just thrown this together in about 15 minutes. No clever (?) puns in the poll and the words are cobbled together from two different reviews. Enjoy.
As a youngster playing in hardcore/metal bands, Arnalds frequently visited his grandmother and was exposed to classical music in her home. “She would always make me listen to Chopin,” he writes in the liner notes, “if it had been my parents forcing classical music down my throat at that time in my life I probably would have puked on their face. But, I guess out of respect for my grandmother, I always listened with her and slowly it started to grow on me.” After his grandmother passed away the Chopin-shaped fragment of his heart was aching to be expressed.
All Chopin recordings sounded the same to him. With nearly all classical recordings focused on capturing a perfect performance and using technology to process that performance into something so polished it no longer feels authentic, Arnalds questioned why technology itself was never used as part of the interpretation. “Why can’t the microphones, the room – the sound – also be a performer? Why would all of these factors need to stay invisible? And why would a ‘good’ classical piano sound naturally have to be the silvery, brilliant concert grand sound that we have on classical recordings today [when] we know that pianos of the 19th century sounded so very different?” Armed with a pocketful of excellent questions and a mission to break the norm, he partnered with bare-foot pianist, Ott, and together they explored Reykjavik searching for old pianos, faded with mildew, and likely out of tune for The Chopin Project. The rationale was to shake up the standard of following Chopin’s sheet music to the nth degree. Thanks to the old and humming recording equipment the duo use, these echoing pianos sound rapturous. The Chopin Project refuses to sound like it was played in a music hall; instead, these songs seem to be floating in from somewhere completely alien.
Chopin’s often cold, but always beautiful, work is a perfect match for Arnalds. He’s made a career of massive and glacial music that invokes brutal winters without sunlight. Arnalds and Ott do occasionally succumb to Chopin’s influence, but they usually brush the sound with their own traits. Ott is a revelation throughout The Chopin Project, leading the sound as Arnalds paints the backgrounds with strings. Ott weaves Chopin’s pieces with respect and gratitude but adds distinct flashes of her own style. None are more striking, or sombre than “Nocturne in G Minor,” with Ott fluttering around the keys, but levelling it all with dark, muttering chords below. Ott and Arnalds seem to have recorded this nocturne in a bar on a dreary day. Children can be heard yelling, patrons mumbling and never-ceasing rain canvasses the background. With the piano shimmering in the front, the setting noise becomes ghostly, conjuring up a scene that passed hundreds of years ago. “Piano Sonata No.3 Largo” doesn’t even have a trace of Arnalds on it, instead, Ott deftly pulls at the structure, letting it sway and rise, fall and fade over 10 minutes of meditative bliss.
“Verses” is our introduction to the album. It was a new composition by Arnalds, and it borrows from Chopin’s “Piano Sonata No. 3 (Largo),” which immediately follows as track 2. It is intimate and sad with the trademark Arnalds atmosphere and makes you just want to stay inside journaling for hours and hours.
The entire album has that quality – it’s just one glorious, delicate piece after another. From the gentle shoosh-shoosh in “Reminiscence” (during which there’s a point where you can even hear a performer taking in breath) to the distant chatter and rainfall heard in “Nocturne in G Minor,” the recordings make the listener feel close to the piano – in the same room, even – and so very close to the music. Several tracks use Chopin as a jumping-off point, which turns the album as a whole into a dreamlike story arc you wish would never end.
What separates The Chopin Project from so many classical also-rans isn’t just its focus on originality, but how it carries the weight of the project, with both the figures of Arnalds’ grandmother and Chopin embedded into the very core of the album. Ott and Arnalds are smart, graceful and potent in tandem, and they’ve made a truly majestic work that performs alchemy on the best of today and the past. Somewhere, surely, Chopin is smiling.
To be filed alongside Max Richter's "Recomposed," perhaps?