Joram Feitsma is an excellent, creative pianist from Utrecht, whose day job is professor in the field of public policy. His new album Flux is out this week, and is a beautiful collection of solo piano numbers and ambient interludes. The opening track, "Struck", is just that, sort of a fanfare struck on strings and a synthesizer. It's a good appetizer for the outstanding piano work on offer. Speaking of which, here is "Lente", a pretty, meandering solo piano piece that brings to mind a walk in someplace strikingly beautiful, changing pace, changing direction, but never without beauty:
And here is the title track:
I love the way he cascades the higher notes, and holds and kind of shapes the lower notes that bring it back to the theme, back to Earth, so to speak. From Joram's press piece, he shared a bit about his inspirations, and not just musical ones: "Working in public policy science might not sound like a source of artistic inspiration, but the existential questioning of thinkers such as sociologist Max Weber and philosophers Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, whose work intimates a world bereft of intrinsic meaning, is paradoxically the inspiration for Feitsma's playing - cathartic, soul-stirring of inspiration and purpose, self-determined structure and meaning through repetition." [Rood Media]
Given that our blog is inspired by lo-fi guitar rock and Scottish pop (among other things), I can say that we do know melody, even if we are not credentialed to truly review a neoclassical piano album on its merits as neoclassical music. But this is beautiful stuff, and I am thrilled to bring it to you. It's available on all streaming services from Bigamo, starting Friday, April 23.
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