Writing is a lot like playing piano, or at least it can seem that way when one is in an impressionistic mood. Certainly the typing part is: fingers tapping away at keys, hands moving around in rhythm, nerves guided by forces that are hard to divine.
So, can the reverse be true - is playing piano anything like writing? All of us can identify with what it takes to write or type, but far fewer know the mysteries that attend the ebony and ivory. And what could be more mysterious than a large, complex and improbably elaborate music-making machine with hundreds of years of history behind it?
In certain ways, the piano is the archetypal instrument, so it stands to follow that solo piano music deserves special status as something like a quintessential distillation of music itself. One musician, one mechanism - both conspiring to navigate an infinite array of possibilities made at least somewhat comprehensible by constraint.
All of which explains the momentous sense of drama and power at play in a recent raft of notable solo piano albums, each singular in its own way. Fans of the form have had much to follow in the past year or so, starting with a quietly startling hit called Avenging Angel by Craig Taborn. Released last summer by ECM, the revered German label, Avenging Angel garnered good notices early on and then continued to linger as word of it drifted beyond those cerebral realms where solo piano albums routinely find favour.
Taborn is nominally a jazz artist, with standing both as a bandleader and a sideman in New York, but the solo piano scenario has a way of smearing notions of genre out of sorts. So it is that Avenging Angel treks through a meticulous index of sounds, each of them subsumed by all the others. The Broad Day King opens the album on a careful and contemplative note, with a sense of empty space slowly filled in by more and more transactions as the pianist begins to establish his place. Glossolalia follows with a flurry of notes, each cleanly articulated and micro-focus clear, before Diamond Turning Dream sweeps them all away with a sparse, haunting rumination delivered in an avant-garde sense of atmosphere.
It's a lot to run through in just the first three songs, but range is to be expected from a solo piano format in which sameness might otherwise seem fated to pervade. By the time he's wrapped up the tumbling and churning at work in the vertiginous title track Avenging Angel Taborn has established a spellbinding sense of thinking out loud - of venturing towards temptation and searching for ideas for things to simply try out - that doesn't fade the least bit through repeated plays.
The same goes for Keith Jarrett's Rio, another solo piano album issued by ECM, this one a two-CD set from a raucous live concert in Brazil. Jarrett has been synonymous with solo piano performance since the 1970s, so it's no surprise that he is undaunted by the prospect of sitting down in front of a crowd for an hour and a half and simply winging it in the name of improvisation. The nature of his playing is wild and wandering, with a jazzy warmth and an aim to please when the time for acceptance is near. Jarrett plays bigger and brighter than Taborn, but he has a habit of humming along with what he plays in abstracted tones - a feature that gives certain tracks an eerie accompaniment while also amplifying the sense of being inside a musician's head and hearing what he hears as he himself hears it for the first time.
"Blue" Gene Tyrannycomes from a more classical context than Taborn or Jarrett, but the solo piano pieces on his album Detours share a similar sense of investment in the simple but profound act of making music try to say what can't be said quite the same way otherwise. One of them, George Fox Searches, plays as an aural travelogue inspired by the excursions of the 17th-century founder of Quakerism in England and, later, the new world of America. Another piece, 13 Detours, gets paired in the liner notes with a photograph of a man in a circus kissing an alligator; it's not clear what the link might be, precisely, but piano on its own leaves a lot of room for narrative indeed.
It also courts seriousness and solemnity. Both figure highly in a recording of the composer Morton Feldman's Triadic Memories, written in 1981 and reconfigured for a new release in recent months on the Belgian label Sub Rosa. Played by Jean-Luc Fafchamps, the solo piano in Feldman's soft, spare, suggestive piece sounds almost like it's talking to itself about the roles of patience and perseverance within its own chosen cloistered existence.
Its soundings also serve as a replacement for an earlier issue of the same piece by the same pianist, released in 1990, that was made according to an early draft version of the score that was subsequently corrected a few years later. The revised score, Fafchamps writes in the liner notes, featured a "tiny notation detail" that had "tremendous consequences on the form of the composition" and he could no longer live with the earlier recording. "I was mortified," he confesses. So Fafchamps returned to Triadic Memories to do it again, on the same piano with the same recording engineer and the same basic approach to Feldman's aesthetic that he had employed a decade earlier.
If solo piano often inspires work governed by nuance or a certain softness of touch, it also rewards radical reinvention. For his striking two-CD collection Inside Piano, Reinhold Friedl, a German artist who paired his formative study of the piano with work in mathematics, plays with a process by which he filled the inside of a piano with small objects (springs, screws, etc.) to affect the output of its sound. Some tracks reach cacophonous crescendos that border on noise, while others court austere resonances achieved by way of scraping the strings that make up the piano's inner workings.
Precious few passages of Inside Piano are immediately identifiable with the instrument that serves as their subject, but, as so many moments on so many records suggest, piano can summon a panoply of sounds. It's all written into the way the instrument is played.
Andy Battaglia is a New York-based writer whose work appears in The Wall Street Journal, The Wire, Bookforum and more.
MATCH INFO
Final: England v South Africa, Saturday, 1pm
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The National's picks
4.35pm: Tilal Al Khalediah
5.10pm: Continous
5.45pm: Raging Torrent
6.20pm: West Acre
7pm: Flood Zone
7.40pm: Straight No Chaser
8.15pm: Romantic Warrior
8.50pm: Calandogan
9.30pm: Forever Young
Auron Mein Kahan Dum Tha
Starring: Ajay Devgn, Tabu, Shantanu Maheshwari, Jimmy Shergill, Saiee Manjrekar
Director: Neeraj Pandey
Rating: 2.5/5
The specs
Engine: 1.5-litre turbo
Power: 181hp
Torque: 230Nm
Transmission: 6-speed automatic
Starting price: Dh79,000
On sale: Now
Living in...
This article is part of a guide on where to live in the UAE. Our reporters will profile some of the country’s most desirable districts, provide an estimate of rental prices and introduce you to some of the residents who call each area home.
VEZEETA PROFILE
Date started: 2012
Founder: Amir Barsoum
Based: Dubai, UAE
Sector: HealthTech / MedTech
Size: 300 employees
Funding: $22.6 million (as of September 2018)
Investors: Technology Development Fund, Silicon Badia, Beco Capital, Vostok New Ventures, Endeavour Catalyst, Crescent Enterprises’ CE-Ventures, Saudi Technology Ventures and IFC
THE BIO:
Sabri Razouk, 74
Athlete and fitness trainer
Married, father of six
Favourite exercise: Bench press
Must-eat weekly meal: Steak with beans, carrots, broccoli, crust and corn
Power drink: A glass of yoghurt
Role model: Any good man
Key facilities
- Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
- Premier League-standard football pitch
- 400m Olympic running track
- NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
- 600-seat auditorium
- Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
- An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
- Specialist robotics and science laboratories
- AR and VR-enabled learning centres
- Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills
Results
Final: Iran beat Spain 6-3.
Play-off 3rd: UAE beat Russia 2-1 (in extra time).
Play-off 5th: Japan beat Egypt 7-2.
Play-off 7th: Italy beat Mexico 3-2.
Company%20Profile
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In numbers: PKK’s money network in Europe
Germany: PKK collectors typically bring in $18 million in cash a year – amount has trebled since 2010
Revolutionary tax: Investigators say about $2 million a year raised from ‘tax collection’ around Marseille
Extortion: Gunman convicted in 2023 of demanding $10,000 from Kurdish businessman in Stockholm
Drug trade: PKK income claimed by Turkish anti-drugs force in 2024 to be as high as $500 million a year
Denmark: PKK one of two terrorist groups along with Iranian separatists ASMLA to raise “two-digit million amounts”
Contributions: Hundreds of euros expected from typical Kurdish families and thousands from business owners
TV channel: Kurdish Roj TV accounts frozen and went bankrupt after Denmark fined it more than $1 million over PKK links in 2013
If you go
Flights
Emirates flies from Dubai to Phnom Penh with a stop in Yangon from Dh3,075, and Etihad flies from Abu Dhabi to Phnom Penh with its partner Bangkok Airlines from Dh2,763. These trips take about nine hours each and both include taxes. From there, a road transfer takes at least four hours; airlines including KC Airlines (www.kcairlines.com) offer quick connecting flights from Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville from about $100 (Dh367) return including taxes. Air Asia, Malindo Air and Malaysian Airlines fly direct from Kuala Lumpur to Sihanoukville from $54 each way. Next year, direct flights are due to launch between Bangkok and Sihanoukville, which will cut the journey time by a third.
The stay
Rooms at Alila Villas Koh Russey (www.alilahotels.com/ kohrussey) cost from $385 per night including taxes.
War
Director: Siddharth Anand
Cast: Hrithik Roshan, Tiger Shroff, Ashutosh Rana, Vaani Kapoor
Rating: Two out of five stars
DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE
Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin
Director: Shawn Levy
Rating: 3/5
ARSENAL IN 1977
Feb 05 Arsenal 0-0 Sunderland
Feb 12 Manchester City 1-0 Arsenal
Feb 15 Middlesbrough 3-0 Arsenal
Feb 19 Arsenal 2-3 West Ham
Feb 26 Middlesbrough 4-1 Arsenal (FA Cup)
Mar 01 Everton 2-1 Arsenal
Mar 05 Arsenal 1-4 ipswich
March 08 Arsenal 1-2 West Brom
Mar 12 QPR 2-1 Arsenal
Mar 23 Stoke 1-1 Arsenal
Apr 02 Arsenal 3-0 Leicester
match info
Southampton 0
Arsenal 2 (Nketiah 20', Willock 87')
Red card: Jack Stephens (Southampton)
Man of the match: Rob Holding (Arsenal)
Company profile
Company name: Suraasa
Started: 2018
Founders: Rishabh Khanna, Ankit Khanna and Sahil Makker
Based: India, UAE and the UK
Industry: EdTech
Initial investment: More than $200,000 in seed funding
COMPANY%20PROFILE
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The rules on fostering in the UAE
A foster couple or family must:
- be Muslim, Emirati and be residing in the UAE
- not be younger than 25 years old
- not have been convicted of offences or crimes involving moral turpitude
- be free of infectious diseases or psychological and mental disorders
- have the ability to support its members and the foster child financially
- undertake to treat and raise the child in a proper manner and take care of his or her health and well-being
- A single, divorced or widowed Muslim Emirati female, residing in the UAE may apply to foster a child if she is at least 30 years old and able to support the child financially
MORE ON THE US DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES
More Expo 2020 Dubai pavilions:
The specs
Engine: Four electric motors, one at each wheel
Power: 579hp
Torque: 859Nm
Transmission: Single-speed automatic
Price: From Dh825,900
On sale: Now
The specs
AT4 Ultimate, as tested
Engine: 6.2-litre V8
Power: 420hp
Torque: 623Nm
Transmission: 10-speed automatic
Price: From Dh330,800 (Elevation: Dh236,400; AT4: Dh286,800; Denali: Dh345,800)
On sale: Now
Specs – Taycan 4S
Engine: Electric
Transmission: 2-speed auto
Power: 571bhp
Torque: 650Nm
Price: Dh431,800
Specs – Panamera
Engine: 3-litre V6 with 100kW electric motor
Transmission: 2-speed auto
Power: 455bhp
Torque: 700Nm
Price: from Dh431,800
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Kumulus Water
Started: 2021
Founders: Iheb Triki and Mohamed Ali Abid
Based: Tunisia
Sector: Water technology
Number of staff: 22
Investment raised: $4 million
UFC%20FIGHT%20NIGHT%3A%20SAUDI%20ARABIA%20RESULTS
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UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Spare
Profile
Company name: Spare
Started: March 2018
Co-founders: Dalal Alrayes and Saurabh Shah
Based: UAE
Sector: FinTech
Investment: Own savings. Going for first round of fund-raising in March 2019
Anghami
Started: December 2011
Co-founders: Elie Habib, Eddy Maroun
Based: Beirut and Dubai
Sector: Entertainment
Size: 85 employees
Stage: Series C
Investors: MEVP, du, Mobily, MBC, Samena Capital
Essentials
The flights
Emirates and Etihad fly direct from the UAE to Geneva from Dh2,845 return, including taxes. The flight takes 6 hours.
The package
Clinique La Prairie offers a variety of programmes. A six-night Master Detox costs from 14,900 Swiss francs (Dh57,655), including all food, accommodation and a set schedule of medical consultations and spa treatments.
RESULTS
6.30pm Handicap (TB) $68,000 (Dirt) 1,200m
Winner Canvassed, Par Dobbs (jockey), Doug Watson (trainer)
7.05pm Meydan Cup – Listed Handicap (TB) $88,000 (Turf) 2,810m
Winner Dubai Future, Frankie Dettori, Saeed bin Suroor
7.40pm UAE 2000 Guineas – Group 3 (TB) $125,000 (D) 1,600m
Winner Mouheeb, Ryan Curatolo, Nicholas Bachalard
8.15pm Firebreak Stakes – Group 3 (TB) $130,000 (D) 1,600m
Winner Secret Ambition, Tadhg O’Shea, Satish Seemar
9.50pm Meydan Classic – Conditions (TB) $$50,000 (T) 1,400m
Winner Topper Bill, Richard Mullen, Satish Seemar
9.25pm Dubai Sprint – Listed Handicap (TB) $88,000 (T) 1,200m
Winner Man Of Promise, William Buick, Charlie Appleby
The biog
Hometown: Cairo
Age: 37
Favourite TV series: The Handmaid’s Tale, Black Mirror
Favourite anime series: Death Note, One Piece and Hellsing
Favourite book: Designing Brand Identity, Fifth Edition
NO OTHER LAND
Director: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal
Stars: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham
Rating: 3.5/5
