This “back to” what he fondly defines “an old buddy of mine” by Belgian pianist and composer Jean-Luc Fafchamps smells like a liturgical anamnesis: “back to my first musical feelings, but also my first writing techniques, which werequite remote from my current aesthetical concerns; back to the music pieces engrained in my fingers through practice; finally, back to the numerous hours of free improvisation of my lazy youth…[…] those back to…are works about memory” and such a mnemonic elegy and idyll got crystallized in three touching pieces performed by Stephane Ginsburgh. Fafchamps’ return to piano could be thought as the comeback to workout of a sportsman after a crippling injury while listening to the first suite “Back To The Pulse”, where you can imagine a session of emotional high hurdles: the engaging rolling of legatoes and staccatoes manages to put a further strain on the insistent and somewhat feverish harmonic progression which could render an idea of motion with awesome and sudden ligatures, interruption, tumbles and variation like the amazing one after 4-5 minutes when the imaginary hurdler looks like running in the dark and the seriousness of the situation got emphasized by the insistent stroke on the lower and higher tones, before the last ones begin to get closer to the central octaves, keep on running and diving into a sort of ragtime till the end. Those breaks, those tonal dull thuds and frenzied slurs sound like expedients to highlight the evocative power of piano on the following “Back To The Sound”, as if each element means to say “listen to the range of emotions I can inspire and fan into you…”, while more emotional outgrowth intertwines with soulful quotations of Fafchamps’s mentors and peers in the final brilliant “Back To The Voice”.
Rated: 4,5/5
Vito Camarretta, Aug 04, 2013