Author: Tyran Grillo

Alessandro Sgobbio: Piano Music

| Tyran Grillo

Piano Music does not announce itself; it waits patiently to be known. Alessandro Sgobbio comes back to the piano alone as one returns to a long-held silence, without urgency and without proof. These pieces are open letters, written and left unsealed. Some emerged in the fleeting intensity of live performance, others during the suspended hours of the pandemic, when time softened and listening became a discipline.

Recorded on a Fazioli F278 grand piano and shaped with restraint under the masterful ear of engineer Stefano Amerio at Artesuono Studios, the album unfolds patiently. Each dedication becomes a point of convergence between composer, listener, and the absent presence for whom the music was first shaped. With eyes closed and hands in motion, the instrument opens into an interior terrain where memory and invention share the same breath.

What follows is best approached as a fragrance that reveals itself gradually, in layers.

Top Notes

The opening carries a gentle luminosity, brief yet warming, like light passing through thin fabric. A floral softness appears first, pale and translucent, recalling the powdery hush of orris rising from the keys. In “Fireflies” (dedicated to Sgobbio’s parents), memory turns instinctively toward childhood. It recalls the earliest grammar of love, the quiet assurance of being held. Gratitude lingers in the air, unspoken yet unmistakable, giving the ordinary a sacred hue through attention alone.

From within this tenderness, darker tones begin to surface. “Zolla” introduces earth, black currant, soil, and the trace of wind crossing ground shaped by seasons. Time presses forward calmly, neither threat nor promise. Smoke gathers at the edges, yet a steady sweetness remains, offering reassurance without denial. A pulse forms beneath the surface, measured and human, suggesting that, even amid uncertainty, something continues to endure.

As the illumination shifts, green notes take hold. In “Atma Mater” (an ode to his mentor, pianist Misha Alperin), vetiver rises with clarity and motion. The colors begin to explore themselves, lyrical and curious, occasionally abstract, yet guided by intention. Surprise appears without rupture. Joy emerges through the satisfaction of movement that understands its own direction.

Heart Notes

As brightness settles, warmth comes forward. The center of the album glows with a softened oud, sandy, sunlit, and humane. In “Ghaza,” sound behaves like heat absorbed and slowly released, enveloping the listener with a calm shaped by time. Beneath this warmth lies a sober recognition. Peace, once forged through history, has thinned. What remains is the quieter labor of shaping it again, not collectively or symbolically, but one heart at a time. A requiem, perhaps, without end.

Incense follows, curling gently through imagined spaces of prayer. “Racemi” shelters like a room that remembers having been filled. The air carries traces of devotion, hands once folded, grief briefly set down. Beyond the threshold, chaos waits, but here a pause takes form, a fragile interval where the self steadies. The piano narrows to a fine thread, each note close to disappearance, yet it holds. Like a candle flame that refuses to leave its wick, its vibrations persist. As the harmony slowly widens, unexpected turns reveal depth upon depth.

Smoke returns, heavier now. In “Third Ward (Elegy),” written for George Floyd, it is not the fire itself but what remains after that fills the space. Loss hangs unresolved. A repeated insistence takes shape, low and unwavering, echoing the will to survive. It continues until it cannot. The music bears witness without ornament, allowing absence to speak louder than sound. What it offers is not rage alone, but the ache of interruption, of a life cut short, leaving resonance where continuity should have been.

Base Notes

The final descent turns cool and elemental. Marine air rises, salt and seaweed carried inland by memory. In “Acqua Granda,” the piano sharpens into clearer gestures, rhythm breaking and reassembling like waves meeting resistance. Energy tumbles forward, restless and alive, as if movement itself were being relearned after stillness.

Earth follows water. “Feuilles” settles with the quiet authority of oakmoss. From a distance, its form appears balanced, almost architectural. Closer in, it reveals wider variation, textured by decay. Longing enters gently, but for the way the sun once touched it. Enough of the dawn filters through to suggest what remains possible, even as it recedes.

At last, the fragrance thins to its final trace. In “Third Ward (Coda),” musk opens its embrace, intimate, warm, and human. A voice seeks continuation. The scent clings to the skin, marking the space where a life might have unfolded, had it been allowed to do so.

In the end, Piano Music binds itself to the body that carries it, altered by warmth and proximity. It mingles with memory, softens the boundary between presence and absence, and leaves behind not a melody to be recalled intact, but a sillage recognized later, unexpectedly, in the air. Some experiences ask only this, not to be remembered whole, but to return faintly, altered, and unmistakably human.

Meanderings: Our Hope Is Lost At Sea

| Tyran Grillo

Hope drifts differently when it is set loose from the shore. Our Hope Is Lost At Sea arrives as a slow immersion rather than a statement, the eighth message in a bottle under Dann Michael Torres’ long-running Meanderings moniker and his first release for El Muelle Records. Across 11 pieces, it listens inwardly.

Torres works with sound the way a painter experiments with pigments. Guitars are multiplied, retuned, prepared, and worn thin by repetition, their voices folded into live electronics, tape fragments, and environmental residue. What emerges is not melody in the traditional sense, but colors shaped into mourning, solemn patterns and melancholic phrases, reverberations that feel less composed than uncovered.

“Empty Words” opens as a photograph undeveloping in real time. Your ears struggle to hold on to the image, but it fades of its own volition, seemingly caught in the net of amnesia in which all of us were ensnared when the album was recorded in 2020. It is a slow drift into places of the mind where you can experience good or evil. Here, you realize that the line between blissful dissociation and fearful isolation is too fine for the naked eye to register, yet unmistakable when felt. Its effects resemble a dying root system beneath an otherwise healthy-looking tree, remaining hidden until it is too late to save the specimen from certain death. The buzzing guitars and electronic washes recall Tim Hecker at his most subdued, as well as the early work of Jon DeRosa. In this case, however, the mind of genesis resides in the skull of an artist whose fires are lit only to watch them subside into embers. This is where grief begins.

What follows narrows the focus further, built from the fragment of a dying breath, left behind as a forensic trace and replicated until it yields a distinct emotional signature.

The cumulative effect of this restraint becomes apparent when an acoustic guitar finally enters the frame. Its appearance feels almost shocking, its clarity too real to accept, too contagious to approach, and too fragile to touch. Only as the piece unfolds do you realize you have been staring at your reflection the entire time. This makes the title of “Merely Shadows”feel less like poetic language and more like a diagnosis of the human condition. Even after the eclipse passes, fragments of that darkness cling to your skin, take shelter behind your eyelids, and graft themselves into your self-regard.

“Tethered Hand of a Savior” offers an all-too-brief gesture toward comfort amid quiet degeneration. Its rocking motion lulls you briefly into its embrace. Each chord reflects the last, drifting away as a plantlike photosynthesis bleeds into the foreground, leaving only a bass line behind as evidence that it was ever there. In its wake stands the title track, where shadows of heroes and heroines flit past with unrequited promises of healing.

Later passages introduce oceanic distortions and distant voices that brush the outer edges of the mind, summoning visions of a childhood that may or may not be your own. “Years Of Decline Yield No Wisdom” emerges as a mantra, repeated not in speech but through the laborious persistence of survival itself. Elsewhere, a tundra’s nightmare is turned inside out until it reveals a song. When the acoustic guitar reappears, its lucidity remains unsettling.

“You’ve Simply Had Enough of Drowning” closes with a thinning of presence. Thus, Our Hope Is Lost At Sea leaves you with the sense that something essential has been exposed and then gently withdrawn, as though the music has revealed a private interior space and asked you to sit alone with the knowledge of it. There is no catharsis here, no moment where grief lifts or resolves itself into sunlight.

In this way, Torres’ work feels less like a document of loss and more like an artifact shaped by endurance. The sounds linger because they refuse to be hurried past. Each piece carries the weight of its own patience. When the record finally releases you, it does so without reassurance. What you are left holding is not hope restored, but hope altered, stripped of illusion, reduced to something smaller and more durable. It is the kind of hope that no longer expects rescue, only the possibility of staying afloat. In that sense, Our Hope Is Lost At Sea does not mourn what has been lost so much as it honors what continues, fragile and uncelebrated, drifting onward in open water.

Our Hope Is Lost At Sea is available from Bandcamp here.

Love Longing Loss: At Home with Charles Lloyd During a Year of the Plague – A Film by Dorothy Darr

| Tyran Grillo

Some films document events, while others listen for what lingers after events have passed. Love Longing Loss: At Home with Charles Lloyd During a Year of the Plague belongs to the latter category. It is less a chronicle of pandemic isolation than a meditation on presence, memory, and the unseen currents that move through a life devoted to sound. Dorothy Darr’s portrait of her husband does not attempt to explain Charles Lloyd. Instead, it abides with him, attentive to breath, gesture, silence, and the slow unfolding of thought.

The film opens where many of Lloyd’s musical journeys have always begun: by the ocean. Waves rise and fall with a patient inevitability, an ancient pulse that predates and outlasts any human song. Over this elemental rhythm, the plaintive voice of the tarogato enters, its grainy timbre sounding both archaic and intimate. It feels less like an introduction than a return. The sea is not scenery here but a spiritual coordinate, a reminder that music, like water, moves in cycles of departure and homecoming.

From this threshold, Darr brings us inside. Lloyd sits at the piano, working through “Sky Valley Doll,” testing harmonies, letting phrases hover before committing them to air. The camera drifts across a wall of photographs populated by friends, collaborators, and fellow travelers, many now gone. When Lloyd lifts the melody to the saxophone, the tune exhales. Space becomes part of the composition. It is a moment that encapsulates his lifelong approach to music, one shaped by a metaphysical relationship to sound.

Lloyd speaks sparingly, and when he does, his words feel weighed against silence. “It’s been painful and a blessing,” he says of the time in isolation. The sentence arrives without punctuation, and none is needed. Pain and grace are not opposites here but concurrent states, held in the same body. The film understands this economy of language. It does not rush to interpret but allows feeling to surface on its own terms, trusting that music often articulates what speech cannot.

Throughout the film, Lloyd reflects on the blues of his Mississippi Delta upbringing, describing it as an infusion of ancestral lines rather than a style to be mastered. The blues, for him, is a transmission. It carries the weight of history, the residue of suffering, and the stubborn persistence of joy. His studies with Phineas Newborn, his immersion in Bartók, and his revelatory encounters with Bach are recalled as recognitions of continuity. These musics speak to one another across time because they emerge from similar urgencies. They are responses to being alive under pressure.

This sense of inherited gravity deepens when the film turns toward America’s racial history. Archival images of violence and resistance pass across the screen while Lloyd and his band perform “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The juxtaposition is stark yet restrained. The music does not comment on the images so much as lay them bare. Lloyd has long understood that every song carries encoded histories, that trauma is not only remembered but inherited. Laments are passed down genetically, he suggests, even when their origins are obscured or denied. To play music honestly is to acknowledge these shadows without surrendering to them.

In one of the film’s most affecting sequences, Lloyd performs “Nanapesa, Ishtahullo-chito,” chanting and shaking maracas before taking up the bass flute. Elsewhere, “Nacheka’s Lament” on tarogato closes a circle begun at the water’s edge. These performances serve as acts of witnessing from someone who has often described himself as both composer and reporter, someone compelled to offer what he sees and hears without embellishment. Reporting, in this sense, is not journalism but testimony.

Darr’s visual approach mirrors this ethos. Shot on modest equipment over several months, the film resists polish in favor of proximity. The domestic setting is never romanticized. It is simply where life happens now. Light shifts across rooms. Instruments wait patiently. Silence accumulates. There is a humility in this gaze that aligns with Lloyd’s own understanding of creative practice. To contribute to the world is not only to raise one’s voice but to know when to step aside, when to leave room for something else to speak.

Placed within the arc of a larger career, the film feels like a distillation. From the groundbreaking work in the 1960s through decades of restless collaboration, spiritual inquiry, and stylistic openness, Lloyd has consistently pursued music as a means of communion. He has never treated genre as a boundary or tradition as a museum. Instead, he has approached sound as a living archive, one in which no music is ever truly lost once it has been made.

Love Longing Loss does not conclude with resolution. It offers no summation of a life, no closing statement on art in a time of crisis. What it leaves us with instead is a question that feels both ancient and urgent. If music is indeed the biographical record of all who came before, what responsibility do we bear as listeners and makers within that record? Lloyd speaks of swimming away with his stories and his ancestors, an image that suggests movement without escape, continuity without stasis. The film ends in that current, inviting us to consider how we, too, might learn to listen for what persists beneath the noise, and how we might honor the voices that sound through us even when we believe we are alone.

Messengers in a Dark Forest: Lucian Ban, John Surman, and Mat Maneri

| Tyran Grillo

Artists often draw their deepest language from the places that first shaped their ears. For Lucian Ban, Mat Maneri, and John Surman, those places lie far apart geographically, culturally, and temperamentally. Yet, they converge in a shared devotion to improvisation and to the long memory carried by folk and classical traditions. Each musician arrives bearing an inheritance that feels less chosen than received. Ban carries the resonance of Transylvanian soil and song, absorbed long before jazz became his working language. Maneri brings an intuitive fluency, shaped by lineage and lived immersion rather than mere instruction. Surman arrives from open landscapes and weathered distances, his voice shaped by wind and horizon, ancient in contour and unsettled in spirit. Together they move as messengers through a forest of inherited material, carrying signals rather than declarations.

That shared path leads to Béla Bartók, whose early 20th-century field recordings in Transylvania revealed a music at once elemental and inexhaustible. Bartók sought preservation through rescue and documentation, gathering what might otherwise vanish. Ban, Maneri, and Surman approach these songs differently. For them, the material functions as a living threshold rather than a dying art, per se. Carols, laments, love songs, and dances do not arrive as artifacts to be handled, but as presences to be encountered, forms capable of friction and renewal.

Rather than fixing these melodies in place, the trio leaves them deliberately open-ended. Transcriptions act as waymarkers rather than maps. Fragments stretch and breathe until new centers of gravity appear. Silences are openings. Roles circulate, dissolve, re-form. What emerges absorbs history without sealing it off, allowing the past to remain porous to the present. Beneath everything runs a current older than borders or schools, a knowledge carried in breath and gesture. Thus, these tunes shelter a human grain, worn smooth by use, whether shaped by peasant hands or bent through jazz.

On Cantica Profana, recorded across three European concerts between November 2022 and November 2023, that grain is fully awakened. The album unfolds like a passage through shadowed terrain, where individual pieces as clearings briefly illuminated. The appearances of “Violin Song I” and “Violin Song II” establish a language of restless intimacy. Their skittering surfaces mask a deep inward focus, as muted piano strings and fragmentary viola lines open space for Surman’s soprano saxophone to move with playful acuity. His voice does not lead so much as observe, circling the material with curiosity. Novelty carries little weight here. These playgrounds are built from old principles and long-held feelings, animated by the freedom with which they are entered.

As the forest deepens, the melodies turn toward absence. “First Return” introduces a somber presence, Surman’s keening soprano a solitary call carried through the night air. That impulse surfaces again in “Last Return,” where wandering itself becomes a form of knowledge. Everything moves in widening circles around silence, the stillness that precedes life and waits beyond it, following not paths marked on maps but traces left by lived experience.

“Dowry Song I,” the first of two such communal clearings along the way, introduces the bass clarinet, its rough fibers weaving textures of interlaced light. Beneath it, Ban’s piano establishes a gentle cadence, enlivening Maneri’s viola until it takes on a copper patina. The trio finds a rocking motion that feels ritualistic, generous, drawing out the melody’s embedded joy before releasing it toward a distant horizon. “Dowry Song II” returns to this space with greater density and color, the voices braided into a resilient weave where each strand strengthens the others.

Other pieces arrive as messages carried from deeper within the trees. “Up There” repeatedly opens with extended bass clarinet meditations, Surman circling the melody until it settles into focus. Around this, Ban and Maneri widen the terrain, giving the line ground and horizon. What follows is often a dance of striking acuity, allowing Maneri room to roam while preserving collective balance. “A Messenger Was Born” distills this sensibility into a quiet prayer and inward dirge for those yet to be lost, for figures glimpsed briefly and never fully named.

“Dark Forest” stands as both setting and invocation. It unfolds as a lush, dreamlike traversal of nocturnal paths, where beauty emerges slowly. Improvisatory spirals coexist with melodic clarity in this, the trio’s deepest attunement. Meanwhile, the title track begins with struck resonance, muted piano notes falling like measured footsteps, before yielding to Maneri’s fluid inflections.

“Evening in the Village” captures darkness as a settling rather than a conclusion. Starlight defines the space as much as shadow. Thoughts, anxieties, romances, and plans continue their quiet circulation. By the time of “Transylvanian Dance,” the accumulated energy breaks open. An anticipatory rhythm gives way to exuberant confluence, Surman’s soprano emerging as a vividly human presence.

The standalone vinyl The Athenaeum Concert, recorded in June 2024 at the Romanian Athenaeum in Bucharest, extends this language with an even deeper patience. Where Cantica Profana often reads like a gathering of poems or stories, this companion album unfolds more like a life remembered in long form. “Evening in the Village (Bitter Love)” opens with a mournful viola that sounds like an extinct instrument briefly summoned back into breath. Wrinkled yet supple, it enters bearing generational weight. As dampened piano footsteps join and the bass clarinet emerges, the music takes on the temperament of weather itself, fog and time moving across the land, before slowly turning toward dance.

The present version of “Dowry Song” leaps immediately into motion, raining promises with the force of embodied love. The bass clarinet grounds itself, inviting participation, while the viola lifts free, buoyed by Ban’s steady, turning pianism. “Up There” again traces a river’s course, winding through brush under historical pressure, moving from insistence to reverie across its span. “Violin Song” builds gradually from quiet stirrings until Surman’s soprano takes flight, migrating toward warmth. Joy radiates through the exchange, though darkness lingers beneath, a reminder that wonder and struggle remain entwined.

Taken together, the two albums read as studies in ethical listening, in how sound is allowed to appear rather than be summoned by force. Their connection lies partly in shared source material, but more decisively in the trio’s instinct to remain inside unfolding time. Duration becomes a form of care. Attention turns toward relationship, toward the ways voices breathe around one another, and toward the responsibility carried by each choice. Folk material is treated as lived terrain, entered with awareness of what has already passed through it and what may yet arrive. From this stance emerges a vision of tradition shaped by patience and watchfulness, where meaning rises slowly from sustained uncertainty.

Maneri is often described as a microtonal improviser, yet the music pursued here feels macrotonal in spirit, resisting borders and divisions in favor of a broader resonance. Ban serves as both anchor and instigator, shaping time without enclosing it, anchoring the ensemble while inviting risk. Surman contributes a voice that feels elemental rather than ornamental, his reeds acting as carriers of weather and message, passing freely through the ensemble like breath through leaves. And so, the distance between Bartók’s Edison phonograph and now collapses into a single resonant gesture, fulfilling his quiet prophecy from 1921, that future musicians might uncover truths the original collectors could not yet hear.

Both albums are available from Sunnyside Records.

Martin Davids/David Yearsley: In the Cabinet of Wonders

| Tyran Grillo

The organ is a colossus, the violin a slender voice. By sheer mass and volume, they seem destined never to agree. One threatens to drown the air in thunder, the other to disappear beneath it. And yet, in 17th-century Hamburg, they discovered a shared breath. High in the gallery of St. Catherine’s church, they spoke not as rivals but as companions, drawing crowds who came to hear scale converse with fragility. What could have been a contest was a study in equilibrium, like a skeleton learning, haltingly, how to stand upright.

It was in this bustling hub that Heinrich Scheidemann (c. 1595-1663) and Johann Schop (c. 1590–1667) met across air and string. Their sounds descended like thought itself, Scheidemann’s pipes carrying the gravity of heaven, Schop’s bow and strings tracing the precarious outline of the human voice. What emerged was more than music. It was a convergence of opposites: cleric and townsman, traveler and citizen, the enduring and the fleeting. In that reverberant space, the city heard itself briefly whole, briefly hushed, before motion returned and the pulse of everyday life resumed.

Under Scheidemann’s quick, laughing hands, sound sprang outward, ricocheting through stone and space with wit and momentum. The organ became less a monument than a body with many lungs, capable of sudden whispers as well as exuberant exhalations. Alongside this abundance, Schop’s violin did not retreat. It danced. Its lines flashed with surprise, then slipped without warning into shadow, like muscles tightening and releasing beneath the skin. Between them unfolded a living exchange, in which the church itself became a resonant demonstration that opposites, when truly listening, can cohere into a single organism.

This album invites the listener into a corporeal experience, one that breathes, sweats, remembers, and occasionally stumbles forward in exhilaration. The music of Schop and Scheidemann, as reimagined by 21st-century analogues Martin Davids and David Yearsley, circulates like blood through civic arteries, passing between church lofts, dance floors, and private chambers, rarely holding one posture for long. What binds the recording is neither style nor chronology, but a shared faith in music as something handled, inhabited, and exchanged socially. Sound is treated as anatomy rather than abstraction. What we hear are the bones of it all, flexing, testing their reach, discovering what they can bear.

Schop’s Intrada à 5 from Erster Theil newer Paduanen opens the album by wrapping the senses in gauze. The interwoven voices refuse hierarchy, relying instead on mutual dependence. Each line anticipates the others’ weight and direction, like ribs designed both to protect and expand. This is consort music already aware of its future disassembly and reconfiguration, carrying that latent plasticity within it. The partnership feels so complete that separation seems almost injurious. From the outset, beauty is not the goal but the consequence. Expression rests on marrow and sinew, and imagination requires a listener willing to inhabit the charged space between intention and realization.

Much of the album’s gravitational pull lies within the orbit of ’t Uitnemend Kabinet of 1646, where Schop’s violin resurrects itself as heir and provocateur. His reworking of Alessandro Striggio’s Nasce la pena mia unfolds like a slow-motion game of double dutch, the ropes of austerity and playfulness turning with deliberate care, demanding full coordination to avoid collapse.

The Lachrime Pavaen after John Dowland presses further inward. The soul twists into a Möbius strip of emotional transference, sorrow folding endlessly back upon itself without settling. Chromatic figures reach deep into the gut to retrieve a half-digested grief and hold it up for inspection. Yet nothing here feels morbid; instead, it suggests that emotion without physicality would simply cave in, that even pain needs a skull in which to resonate.

Scheidemann answers this inwardness with motion and propulsion. His Galliarda ex D sets fire beneath the feet, insisting on the intelligence of movement. Rarely do both touch the ground at once. The sound remains perpetually mid-step, angled toward what follows. Dance here is a matter of orientation, a way of thinking forward with the entire frame. That energy carries seamlessly into the Canzon in G, whose relaxed atmosphere allows light and shadow to exchange places with quiet charm, the organ responsive rather than domineering.

At several moments, the album reveals its improvisatory foundations. The performers’ Intonatiofunctions as connective tissue, recalling a time when much of this repertoire lived between the notes, sustained by trust, familiarity, and shared risk. This ethos extends into Scheidemann’s setting of Christ lag in Todesbanden. Told in two verses, the first establishes the firm outline of a torso, while the second pencils in the extremities.

The relationship between instruments grows aerodynamic in Scheidemann’s intabulation of Giovanni Bassani’s Dic nobis Maria. The cadence is measured yet generous, giving the violin space to breathe while the organ subtly lifts and supports. Imagined as wind and wing, the pairing becomes a lesson in controlled flight, with ornamentation serving as lift. This play of disguise reaches its height in the Englische Mascarada, where the organ steps forward alone. It imitates viols, recorders, and cornetts, its movements almost tactile. The backdrop assumes the foreground, and scale itself learns to play, shedding weight without surrendering substance.

Schop’s sine titulo from ’t Uitnemend Kabinet may be the album’s quietest act of defiance. Tone, transition, and spirit nourish one another organically, as if the piece were activating its own nervous system mid-flight. The violin’s occasional double stops flare like shooting stars across an otherwise stable sky, fleeting, unnecessary, and wholly persuasive.

As the program draws toward its close, its communal heart comes fully into view. Schop’s Præludium, the first work ever published for solo violin, clears the air with intent, a measured breath before speaking plainly. What follows, an improvisatory fantasy on his chorale tune Werde munter, mein Gemüte, unfolds as a conversation restored. The organ answers phrase by phrase, until the violin can no longer remain apart and joins the coda. Harmonies shimmer. What emerges is gratitude, rooted in shared labor. The album concludes with the Pavaen de Spanje, whose stark colors and abrupt shifts return us to orbit.

By its end, the recording has quietly redrawn the boundaries of historical performance. This is no reconstruction, but a living metabolism, a system dependent on circulation, exchange, and constant adjustment. The music does not ask to be preserved so much as inhabited. It leaves the listener with the sense of having moved through a body rather than examined an object, of having felt joints flex, lungs fill, and organs hum in sympathetic response. The final sounds do not conclude so much as release, sending us back into the world more aware of our own inner architecture, and perhaps more willing to trust it when it makes overtures to leap.

In the Cabinet of Wonders is available from False Azure Records here.

David Yearsley: Handel’s Organ Banquet

| Tyran Grillo

Every good meal begins with a premise, and this one opens in the kitchen rather than the chapel. The cover caricature sets the tone before a single note is heard: George Frideric Handel rendered as a hog, snout forward, hunched over the organ in mid-18th-century satire. It is a reminder that iconography and appetite have always shared a table. Organist and scholar David Yearsley accepts the joke with a grin and sharpens it into art, giving Handel not only hands but feet with which to prepare. Since Handel himself rarely bothered with pedals in his scores, save for the Organ Concerto in B-flat Major, opus 7, no. 1 (HWV 306), Yearsley’s approach feels less like historical correction than culinary invention, an act of inspired seasoning rather than academic garnish.

This recording is not about dutifully reheating the classics. It is about tasting them anew, discovering how familiar flavors bloom when exposed to different heat, different hands, different feet. Yearsley plays Handel as one might approach a well-loved recipe, respecting the ingredients while daring to improvise at the stove, if not—at the risk of a poor analogy—allowing a rat to pull some hair under the toque.

We start with a clever pairing: Sinfony from Messiah (HWV 56) combined with the Fugue from Suite in E Minor (HWV 429). The unmistakable opening arrives like a dish you have known since childhood, instantly recognizable, deeply comforting. Yet Yearsley plates it with unexpected accompaniments, adding decorations of improvisational whimsy and alert, in-the-moment thinking. The transition into the fugue is seamless and generous, the musical equivalent of warm bread passed across the table. There is solace here, and a sense of being gently welcomed back for seconds.

As with rosy steps, the morn (from Theodora, HWV 68) follows, a radiant oratorio aria that unfolds theatrically on a stage of its own making. Its inner pulse is sensual and full of promise. The music breathes with unanswered questions and lush excitement, each phrase suggesting that the best bite may still be ahead.

At the center of the table sits the Passacaille in G (HWV 399), the giblet bag of the Trio Sonata in G Major. On the organ (no pun intended?), it acquires a lively delicacy, sumptuous yet never heavy. The lines spiral and turn, dancing themselves toward oblivion with an umami that belies their craft. Time seems to loosen its grip here, as though the dish refuses to cool.

Lord, to Thee, each night and day (another Theodora morsel) returns us to the world of aria, moving with grace through fluid key changes that feel both inevitable and surprising. The progression is palpable in its mouthfeel, each modulation a subtle shift in seasoning. When the turn toward the end arrives, it does so quietly, gloriously, a kind of musical retribution that needs no raised voice to make its point.

The communal platter arrives with O praise the Lord with one consent (opening chorus of Chandos Anthem no. 9, HWV 254). Verdant colors and resplendent textures ply the ear, expanding William Croft’s 1708 St. Anne hymn tune into something plush and enveloping. The result is sonic velour, draping the dining surface in lavishness, even if the organist’s feet are working overtime to keep its stitches from fraying.

With Lascia ch’io pianga (from Rinaldo, HWV 7), Handel’s most famous lament from his first London opera of 1711, the organ sings without words. Its vocal qualities survive the transfer intact, barely eroded. Vegetal stops add depth, enhancing the meaty base without overpowering the line. It is a reminder that sorrow, like flavor, often deepens with slow attention.

The heartier courses follow. The Trio Sonata in F, op. 5, no. 6 (HWV 401) sheds its ensemble skin to become a solo affair, compressed into a single instrument yet expanded by the breadth of Yearsley’s imagination. The central Allegro dazzles with its tessellated structure, each piece fitting snugly against the next, while the subsequent Adagio melts everything down into a rich, savory gravy that coats every note. Close behind comes the Concerto in G minor/G major, op. 4, no. 1 (HWV 289), another full-course meal in a full-course meal of full-course meals. Highlights abound, from the delightful second-movement Allegro to the concluding Andante, a light-footed wonder that dances around the table, refusing to sit still.

For dessert, Yearsley offers his adaptation of the “Amen” from Messiah, recast as a Fuga in D. It culminates in a pedal cadenza that is itself a four-part fugue played only with the feet. The effect is brilliantly virtuosic and deeply satisfying, as organic as farmers market ingredients transformed by a confident cook who trusts the produce and his palate.

A bonus track serves as the final flourish: A Hallelujah Concerto, an improvisation on Handel’s most beloved chorus. Composer and performer seem to spur one another on, whipping the soufflé together until the peaks stand just right. It is exuberant, inventive, and impossible to resist. A finish to end all finishes, at least until the next course.

When the last resonance fades, the table is cleared, and the listener is left pleasantly full. Satisfaction lingers, along with the faint sense that something mischievous and marvelous has just occurred. You may want to keep your napkin as a souvenir. It bears the marks of a meal well enjoyed and proof that Handel, in the right hands and feet, still knows how to cook.

The album is the third release from False Azure Records, an exciting new label where old and new make merry. My ear continues to follow them with keen interest.

Daniel D’Adamo: The Lips Cycle (YAN.008)

| Tyran Grillo

Isabel Soccoja voice
Nicolas Vallette flutes
Laurent Camatte viola
Élodie Reibaud harp
Recording: Daniel D’Adamo, Alexis Derouet and Maxime Lance (Césaré), Gérard de Haro, Jérôme Decque (Gmem), Vincent Carinola (ESM), Philippe Dao (GRM)
Mixing and mastering: Gérard de Haro, Nicolas Baillard (La Buissonne – 2019)
Production: Marc Thouvenot & La Buissonne
Artistic Direction: Pascale Berthelot
Release date: November 17, 2020

This album stands as a threshold document, both an ending and an aperture, tracing the emergence of a language that never stabilizes. The Lips Cycle is born from an inquiry that seems modest on its surface: What happens when speech is imagined but withheld, when the voice rehearses itself without crossing into audibility? During a period of isolation in São Paulo in 2010, Daniel D’Adamo turned inward, not toward silence but toward its hidden mechanics. Tongue grazing teeth, lips shaping absent vowels, breath circulating without destination. What emerged was not a void but a densely populated interior world, one smaller than phonemes and closer than words.

Listening becomes an ethical posture here, a sustained attention that must abandon expectation. These works unfold at a scale where meaning erodes faster than it can be grasped. The ear is asked to linger inside residues, murmurs, and half-gestures, where sound hovers between intention and disappearance. Sensuality arises not from excess but from proximity. The music leans close, breathes close, and insists on contact.

The cycle unfolds across works composed between 2010 and 2017 for voice, flute, harp, and electronics. Said electronics are not supplemental but anatomical, spun from the same material as the instrumental and vocal writing. They stretch physical effort into space, allowing sound to circulate, refract, and return altered. Spatialization becomes a way of thinking, a means of extending the performers beyond their own outlines. The listener is drawn into an immersive field where sound behaves like a tactile substance rather than a linear message.

Lips, your lips for mezzo-soprano and electronics opens the cycle by dwelling on the fragile perimeter of the voice. It studies what surrounds speech rather than speech itself. Inhalations splinter into texture, whispers fracture into particulate noise, and words cling desperately to coherence before slipping free. There is an almost ASMR-like intimacy to the listening experience, yet it is charged with volatility. Quiet never fully arrives. It is continually interrupted by a hovering, half-formed song that presses against audibility. The piece advances like a dream that cannot remain intact, gathering toward eruptions where fantasies flare and collapse, leaving behind delicate ruins of promise and ash.

With Keep your furies for mezzo-soprano, alto flute, and electronics, tactility builds. The alto flute enters not as accompaniment but as a second voice, equally bodily, equally vulnerable. Breath and metal converge until distinctions blur. The overlap between singer and instrument is so complete that only a sliver of separation remains. Sound seems to move through the body rather than around it, activating involuntary responses along the spine and scalp. Time behaves erratically here, like pages of a flip book animated in uneven bursts. Leaves become sounds, sounds become gestures, and gestures dissolve before they can settle.

Although Air lié for flute and electronics nominally removes the human voice, its presence lingers. Extended techniques, metallic inflections, and sustained resonances unfold according to their own internal logic. Breath persists, transposed into silver and duration. The piece’s ambient quality allows for a deeper enmeshment between ear and sound, a slow suspension in which spirals accumulate and tighten. One does not exit this space so much as become absorbed into its influence, gently erased as an observer.

Traum-Entelechiæ for mezzo-soprano, alto flute, viola, harp, and electronics reintroduces the voice into a thickened, almost alchemical texture. Convergences of tone function like temporary laboratories where language is subjected to stress and mutation. Texts drawn from Leibniz bring numerical rigor and philosophical speculation into collision with fragile vocal utterance. Questions of individuality, continuity, and becoming hover within the sound, never resolved. Even as the title gestures toward full realization, the music unfolds through asymptotic fragments. Moments of melodic clarity surface briefly, only to implode into breath and noise, as if coherence itself were an unstable state.

The emotional core of the cycle arrives with Fall, love letters fragments for mezzo-soprano, harp, and electronics, based on the correspondence between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Here, intimacy is not narrated but exhaled. Desire, ecstasy, and emotional turbulence emerge through wordless gestures that bypass articulation altogether. The harp and electronics cradle these eruptions with remarkable precision, allowing feeling to register without being named. It is love stripped of declaration, passion rendered as vibration and pulse.

Threaded between these works are three “Transitions,” brief passages that function as subliminal corridors of breath, clicking keys, and flickering tongues. They stitch the cycle together while dissolving any sense of stable orientation. One crosses from one state to another almost without noticing, already altered by the passage.

Placing this cycle in the lineage of works such as Berio’s Visage feels inevitable, yet these compositions speak in a quieter register. They do not confront language so much as destabilize it from within. What ultimately binds them is a sustained meditation on the fragility of the utterance. Language here is never secure. It trembles, erodes, and transforms under pressure. Words aspire to fix experience, but sound exposes their impermanence. In these pieces, speech is always in the process of becoming something else. Like those of us wielding it, it survives only by continually undoing itself.

Yann Robin: Inferno / Quarks (YAN.007)

| Tyran Grillo

Orchestre National de Lille
Alexandre Bloch conductor (Inferno)
Peter Rundel conductor (Quarks)
Éric-Maria Couturier cello (Quarks)
Recordings made by France Musique on October 13, 2016 and by the technical team of the Orchestre National de Lille on July 1, 2017 at the Auditorium du Nouveau Siècle in Lille
Mixing of Inferno and mastering: Anaëlle Marsollier (Studios La Buissonne – 2018)
Production: Marc Thouvenot & La Buissonne
Artistic Direction: Pascale Berthelot
Release date: November 17, 2020

The seventh release from the CUICATL label, distributed by ECM Records and realized under the careful ear of Studios La Buissonne, unfolds like a descent staged in slow motion. It gathers two major works by French composer Yann Robin, not as paired opposites but as adjoining chambers within the same cavern, each carved by pressure, time, and an almost obsessive attention to sound as material that resists obedience.

Inferno for large orchestra and lectronics (2012/15), extends the molten logic of Robin’s earlier Vulcano into a broader and more perilous terrain. Where its predecessor seethed and erupted, Inferno opens the earth itself, widening the aperture to accommodate a full symphonic body and an electronic presence that behaves less like an accompaniment than a witness condemned to remain. The piece draws energy from volcanic force, from the grinding insistence of tectonic movement, but it also looks backward toward older cosmologies, toward the crater imagined as a mouth leading downward into realms where weight and consequence become absolute. Dante’s descent through the nine circles of Hell hovers here not as a story retold but as an organizing gravity, a philosophical excuse for sound to fall, to sink, to stretch itself into registers that feel less heard than endured.

From the outset, an oscillating electronic rhythm seeps upward from darkness, insisting on existence. It is tethered to the depths like a ferryman who has forgotten the surface, guiding others while remaining trapped in transit. Around it, the orchestra gathers in fragments. Flutes flicker briefly, offering half-phrases that seem to remember speech without fully recovering it. Other winds echo these gestures, voices reaching upward only to be pulled back by the mass below. The strings surge and recoil, animated by digital reactions, their undulations fueled by something restless and unnameable. They rise, they strain, and they fall back into place, condemned to repeat the same arc with minute variations, a ritual of motion without escape.

As the descent deepens, distorted impulses dart through the texture like fleeting hallucinations. They pass too quickly to be grasped, yet not so quickly that they leave no residue. The mind latches onto their outlines, assembling meaning where none is offered. Horns enter alongside radio signals, sharing air and intention without ever truly merging. They pass through narrow spaces, stiff and unyielding, only to warp once released, bending themselves into unfamiliar shapes as though testing the idea of survival beyond the threshold. A distant pulsing emerges, eerily reminiscent of a helicopter circling far above, a cruel reminder that time continues elsewhere, measured and indifferent. The balance of the piece begins to tilt. Timpani recede into silence while stillness itself becomes percussive. Out of this exchange rises a shrill, piercing song, demonic not in caricature but in its inevitability, spreading a thin carpet of resignation across the sound field. When the music finally withdraws, it does so gently, offering a softening that feels less like relief than a carefully staged illusion.

Quarks for cello and orchestra, composed in 2016, shifts the axis of inquiry without abandoning the underlying tension. Its inspiration lies not in physics as a system of laws but in the instability of language itself. Murray Gell-Mann’s decision to name the quark with a phoneme stripped of inherited meaning becomes the conceptual spark. Robin follows that gesture into sound, tracing how an idea becomes vibration, how vibration becomes articulation, and how articulation acquires the dangerous authority of a name.

The piece begins almost below perception. The cello stirs with grating gestures that refuse pitch, as if testing the edges of its own body. These sounds feel private, internal, the murmur of a language not yet agreed upon. Gradually, a chittering vocabulary forms, its units stitched into larger phrases by the orchestra. But coherence is never allowed to settle. Each structure is dismantled, recycled, pasted back together like fragments in a scrapbook whose chronology has been deliberately erased. Snippets of history drift through, human and otherwise, and with them comes a persistent unease. For all its orchestral breadth, the work remains fiercely intimate. The cello’s relentless friction keeps the listener tethered to its interior life, to the sensation of an instrument pushing against the limits of its own coherence.

Listening becomes a form of inhabitation. The ear does not observe the cello from a distance but moves inside it, sharing its insistence. It ceases to function as a soloist in the traditional sense. In its highest squeals, animal and raw, something elemental surfaces: an echo of creation itself, a human attempt to mirror the authority of the divine by assigning boundaries where none naturally exist.

Taken together, these works do not offer answers so much as conditions. They place the listener in situations where descent and emergence are concurrent states. What lingers after the final vibrations fade is not the memory of specific gestures but a quieter unease. If meaning arises only when we impose it, and if naming is always an act of power, then listening becomes an ethical move. To hear without conquering, to remain attentive without demanding resolution, may be the closest we come to understanding a world that does not require our comprehension in order to continue.