Mehldau has a considerable collection of solo piano albums to his name already: from 1999’s Elegiac Cycle through 2004’s Live in Tokyo, 2011’s Live in Marciac, 2015’s 10 Years Solo Live, 2018’s After Bach, 2020’s Suite April 2020 and 2023 Beatles tribute Your Mother Should Know.
He dips in and out of many styles and this lands more on the classical and compositional side. In classical music, a fantasy is a free-form instrumental composition that follows the composer’s imagination rather than a strict musical blueprint; a fantasy lets the music wander wherever the composer’s creative impulse leads. The freedom in the format fits very well with his jazz background especially the chamber jazz side of his artistry.
It is inevitable perhaps that thoughts of classical music intervene a good deal while listening. That isn’t distracting. I went off to listen to Brahms’ Fantasien, Op. 116 after I got to the ninth of the tracks.
They were written late in Brahms’ life, and formed a set of seven short pieces and share Mehldau’s gift for rich, dense inner voices and rhythmic ambiguity. Listen to No. 4 (Intermezzo in E major) and then carry on listening. That’s what I did – Turkish pianist İdil Biret’s version above for instance is perfect.
Doing that listening at home won’t break the flow of what’s here at all. And the shared community with this historic body of work as exemplar is uncanny.
There is a great romanticism and an ageless strictness to Mehldau’s approach.
So thinking like that I then returned to the remaining part of the album, that pause to look beyond helping me make sense more of what is here without being in any way a direct link or compulsory to do!
Born Bradford Alexander Mehldau on 23 August 1970 in Jacksonville, Florida, Mehldau studied at The New School in New York, graduating in 1993. After early acclaim touring with saxophonist Joshua Redman – including appearances on the landmark 1994 album MoodSwing – Mehldau formed his own long running trio with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy, launching the hugely influential The Art of the Trio series towards the latter part of the 1990s.
The Jarrett of his generation. But – warning – what’s here does not compare at all with Jarrett’s Roma just released. The level of intensity is completely different and so is Mehldau’s essential style. You get a different kind of contrapuntal flow, but like Jarrett Mehldau is able to hold multiple musical ideas in his head at the same time and translate these into interconnecting, overlapping results that ebb and flow like the sea a seemingly natural, rhythmic cycle of increase and decrease, rising and receding.
The recording (Mehldau on a mighty Hamburg Steinway D) was made at Casals Forum in the German town of Kronberg im Taunas in Hesse, not far from Frankfurt, over two days in December last year. It certainly puts the place on the map! The concert hall opened in 2022 – it is named in honour of the Catalan cellist Pablo Casals famed for his beautiful recordings of Bach’s cello suites in the 1930s.
– Mehldau returns to play London at Wigmore Hall on 28 January – a concert that is already sold out.
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