Francesco Tristano

Francesco Tristano – Bach Stage (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 46:57 minutes | 481 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Scala Music

Eighteen years after first recording the Bach piano concertos, Francesco Tristano revisits three of these classics in partnership with Leo Margue as the conductor and the Bach Stage Ensemble, set up, especially for the project. Recorded for the label Scala Music, this new version has historically been documented but never set in stone. Three composers were also given the opportunity to write Cadenzas for these concertos. Francesco Tristano plays while standing with great spirit and energy! The pianist shakes up musical habits with this album. We have never heard these concertos with such an obsessive and forceful rhythm as the Concerto in A Major BWV 1055. The piano section radiates with its succession of arpeggios while the string ensemble punctuates the dialogue with incisive and rhythmic interventions.

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Francesco Tristano – Piano Circle Songs (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 54:08 minutes | 954 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sony Classical

Unifying rather than choosing. Between his purely classical activities and his openly electro ones, Francesco Tristano Schlimé would rather not decide. For his first disc with Sony Classical, the Luxembourgish pianist and composer goes back to the solo piano. After a quick listen, we could easily place his Piano Circle Songs alongside the albums of Ludivico Einaudi, Olafur Arnalds, Nils Frahm and other Max Richter. But Francesco Tristano possesses a true musical personality. He has a relation to the music of Girolamo Frescobaldi and Carl Craig which has sculpted his musical personality. Here, the intimate and the personal are in command. The offered interlacing play as much upon the stripped-down than the repetitive. Upon the space and silence as well as the untold. The pianist avoids here the dead ends and vacuity. Recorded with a microphone put really close to the piano to pick up all the natural sounds from the instrument “as if your ear was in the piano”, this essay hosts, for four duets, another extraterrestrial pianist in the persona of Chilly Gonzales, a great magician of this type of musical miniatures… It’s a success, but above all, it’s another piece in the vast puzzle that is Francesco Tristano.

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Francesco Tristano – Long Walk (2012)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:01:26 minutes | 1,09 GB | Genre: Classical, Piano
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)

“Long Walk” – the twenty-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach undertook one such walk in 1705, when he hiked the 250 miles from Arnstadt to Lübeck to hear Dietrich Buxtehude, who was famous for his organ playing. The visit had been planned to last only a few weeks but turned into a three-month period of study, during which Buxtehude became Bach’s teacher.

Dietrich Buxtehude (1637–1707) is arguably the most famous early Baroque German composer. As Kantor at the Marienkirche in Lübeck he occupied one of the leading positions in Germany’s musical life. His musical language is notable for its wealth of imagination and harmonic boldness. Central to Francesco Tristano’s new album is Buxtehude’s most important keyboard composition, the aria La capricciosa, thirty-two variations on the folksong Kraut und Rüben.

Bach’s three months with Buxtehude left a lasting mark on his musical output, a point that emerges with particular clarity from one of his most famous late works, the Goldberg Variations. Like La capricciosa, this set of variations is in G major. Both pieces, moreover, are formally identical and reveal many musical parallels. In his final variation, the Quodlibet, Bach even quotes the Kraut und Rüben theme as a homage to his teacher.

In 1974 Bach’s personal copy of the printed score of the Goldberg Variations came to light and was found to contain a kind of appendix in the form of fourteen canons on the first eight bass notes of the Aria. This appendix is now officially numbered as BWV 1087. In Long Walk, Francesco Tristano has combined and, as it were, “remixed” these sophisticated miniatures, in that way exploring the more playful dimension of Bach’s learned counterpoint. Tristano picks up another Baroque tradition with the second of his pieces in this album: Ground Bass is essentially a chaconne, a set of variations on an ostinato bass similar to the one that Buxtehude created three centuries earlier in his Ciaccona BuxWV 160.

In Long Walk Francesco Tristano relocates Baroque music in the here and now, which he does not only through his interpretation and adaptation of the music of Buxtehude and Bach but also in terms of the recording’s use of technology, which opens up new dimensions with regard to sonority: twelve microphones of differing tonal characteristics were used in the Kyoto Concert Hall in Japan, which was chosen because of its exceptional resonance. They capture the undistorted sound of the Yamaha CFX concert grand on which Francesco Tristano performs these works, a high-tech piano that is the result of many years of research into materials, tone colours and construction techniques.

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Francesco Tristano – On Early Music (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 59:41 minutes | 1,06 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sony Classical

We have known for a long time the versatility of Francesco Tristano and his blessed inability to choose between electro and early music. From album to album, the Luxembourg pianist builds a unique and enchanting discography that blurs the lines between genres and eras, where we come across both Jean-Sébastien Bach and Derrick May. With On Early Music, Tristano pays homage to the great English masters of the Virginalist period, a pivotal moment between the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Baroque era. Alongside works by John Bull, Peter Philips, Orlando Gibbons and John Bull, there are two compositions by the Italian Frescobaldi, to whom Tristano had already devoted the very beautiful disc Frescobaldi Dialogues (2007). We will never get tired of Tristano’s playing, whose round and bouncy touch brings to the score an extra, almost jazzy vitality without ever distorting the subject. But the ultimate pleasure arises when the pianist improvises himself as a composer and sows here and there a few tribute titles to his elders. Somewhere between pastiche (Toccata, On Bull Galliard in D), arrangement for percussive piano (On ​​Girolamo Frescobaldi’s Quattro correnti) and futuristic variation (On Cristobal by Morales Circumdederunt), Francesco Tristano commits here the most beautiful sacrilege!
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