Kathrine Windfeld – Aldebaran

After several albums with her big band, Danish pianist and conductor Kathrine Windfeld offers a recording with a sextet of Polish and Scandinavian musicians, with whom she has been performing in public for several years.

She has composed eight themes for this ensemble, in which we find again her art of nuance and the subtlety of her science of orchestral colors.

Her piano playing obviously comes to the fore in this context, and is convincingly rich and lively, alternating between rhythmic passages and those where her delicate touch works wonders.

The five accompanying instrumentalists each have their own specific sound, and it’s easy to sense that Kathrine Windfeld has composed her pieces with them in mind.

The three blowers also offer solos of the highest quality, and we follow their progress with ever-renewed pleasure. As for the rhythm section — the same as that of her big band — it supports the ensemble in a way that is both tonic and refined. The result is a repertoire of great modernity and classicism, combining dreamy moments with more vigorous sections that follow one another with a perfectly convincing sense of contrast.

Windfeld is a first-class composer, and her ability to marry timbres and sound colors – already remarkable in her big band recordings – is evident in this disc with a reduced formation, which she makes at times sound like a large ensemble.

A total success, then, from a musician from whom we always expect the best.