Dino Saluzzi/Horacio Lavender’s Imagenes: Music for Piano

Title: Imagenes: Music for Piano

Label: ECM

This album for piano features music written between 1960 and 2002, create in Salta, Buenos Aires, Stuttgart and on the road. Horacio Lavandera, a young Argentine pianist specialising in both classical music and contemporary composition, interprets the music.

This is an album of tones. It’s musical colour and the idea is that you go with its flow. So when you move from track to track there is not a great deal, not to put too finer point on it, a great deal of difference in basic rhythm and structure. That said, complexity and maturity and richness and depth is high throughout each of these pieces. The sense of exploration is intense, the melancholy that pervades the album is a constant, even when the emotions run rather high.

This is not even an album really, not in the traditional sense of the word, as a collection of songs or individual pieces. Nor is this a concept piece in which a story is told or one over-riding theme is adhered to.

It is a frame for a mind. A sort of musical diary of thoughts. If there is a theme on this collection then it is one man’s mind. He is the obvious connection. Like any diary, though, moods change, different issues are addressed but that sense of thoughtfulness sticks with you. That melancholy I mentioned earlier. The narrator is a constant as is his natural rhythmic flow.

If you let go of the side and allow yourself to float on the updraft and the thermals of this music then you will be rewarded with an, at times, mesmerising, journey that will take you to places of contemplation, places of light and darkness and places of wonder.