Gizeh Records – 3rd November 2023
Christopher Nosnibor
While Christine Ott has maintained a steady flow of works over recent years – her fifth album arrives just two years after Time to Die – her latest offering has been a long time in the making. For example, we learn that ‘Die Jagd nach dem Glück’ (The Pursuit of Happiness) is an extract from her original composition for Lotte, mon amour, a film-concert created in 2014 based on 4 short films by Lotte Reiniger, a German director from the first half of the 20th century.’
It’s pitched as ‘a collection of twelve pieces for solo piano, twelve impressionistic miniatures, instrumental and cinematic fractals celebrating the beauty of life…
Éclats (Piano Works) is a kind of mirror image to Chimères (pour Ondes Martenot) (2020, Nahal Recordings).
‘Pluie d’arbres’ introduces the album with magnificently weighted, perfectly paces, rolling notes which balance grace and tension, and it’s a beautiful and engaging composition that comfortably slots into the ‘classical’ bracket not simply by virtue of its being a piano piece, but the delicacy of it all, and the way it articulates changing moods intuitively and with a depth of spirit.
The individual pieces follow one another in such a way as to create the impression of their being written to flow together, and while the tempo and tone may shift during the course of a single piece – there are flurries and flutters, moments of airy levity like the morning sun filtering through a curtain wafting on a gentle early summer breeze, notes coming suddenly in tinkling cascades – the album as a whole feels like a single, continuous piece. Rather than any one track being ‘dark’ or ‘light’, they each run through a succession of sensations, turning on a pinhead from brooding to playful, uplifting to reflective.
There’s an honesty about this, which speaks to the human condition. Yes, you may have good days and bad days, but most days are a series of peaks and troughs, highs and lows, unexpected and near-immediate switches that some about as the result of various but specific interactions – or, indeed, sometimes, a lack thereof. Éclats feels real because it doesn’t try to be any one thing, but more taps into the unpredictability of life. And Ott plays in such a way as to bring all of this out through the music, through her connection with the keys.
At times sad, at times uplifting, at times, it simply is… and this is the real joy of the experience of listening to Éclats. At its lightest, it carries you on rippling sonic clouds and pokes at the sky: at its darkest, it hangs heavy in your stomach. It’s hard not to be drawn in and fully engaged with this set of pieces, and it will take you anywhere if you let it.
AA