On June 15, 2025, in the hushed setting of the Son de la Terre Péniche, Pieternel Van Oers’ trio offers us a privileged moment, oscillating between sky and water, tightrope walking in a serene atmosphere.
The musicians take us on a journey with compositions from the pianist’s debut album, Dialogue, and new EP releases Right Before and Unexpected.
The excellent acoustics of Son de la Terre allow the combo’s “ECM” aesthetic to unfold all its contrasts and nuances, as well as its unspeakable richness.
The compositions performed are not, as with Dave Brubeck, about playing with structures, tempos or rhythmic signatures, but rather about playing with intervals, harmonic tensions and out-playing, to enrich the fabric of compositions to which we breathe strength and sensitivity.
The trio’s dreamlike temperament is exemplified by the long, warm notes played in the bowed cello register of Tommaso Montagnani, a key player on the album Dialogue.
Karl Jannurska‘s drums are imbued with a beautiful feeling, with a definite delicacy, in interventions that are sometimes suggestive, sometimes full of determination on the toms.
Paradoxe was born out of the apparent contradictions between preservation of the world and human growth, which appeared to the composer as divergent during the confinements suffered during the COVID epidemic.
La Poupée Confinée (The Confined Doll) is also in this vein, featuring a woman with a passion for art who wonders what remains when she’s away from social life, which is also conducive to a fuller exploration of the questions raised by technological singularity.
Pieternel Van Oers thus highlights the relationship between her personal emotions and the universe as a whole, a singular and universal perspective translated into melodic motifs that mark out a quest for the self and the links that unite us to one another.
There is in this music a simple conviction, rich in development, the intuition that the summit of art is also the summit of being, that one cannot exist without the other, and that this is even what we call “the purpose of art”.
Unexpected, a mixture of fragility and strength, is, so to speak, played in two different versions this evening, testifying to the composer’s strong incidences of personal experience and sensitive reality.
With the steady roll of the barge that shelters us, the rhythmic pulse of Floating becomes synonymous with a floating world, between real sensations and transcendent emotions. Summer Shadow and Valse Bleue transform us into aeronauts of the spirit, establishing a kind of spiritual meteorology, evocative of renewal for one, melancholic rejoicing for the other.
For this piece, the artist points out that it’s not a three-beat waltz, but rather a regular pulse that evokes the flight of doves, probably in homage to Bill Evans.
Right Before is played here in a stripped-down, intimate and sensitive formula, in the manner of essentialized jazz.
Finally, Dialogue is a profession of faith, as well as being the eponymous title of the trio’s first album.
The vocabulary developed on East Of The Moon with Miguel Castro is also present.
And the special atmosphere of the venue, as well as the daylight, enrich this special feeling of those present, who follow the trio’s improvisations with fascination.
A beautiful concert, the principle of which is to let us catch our breath only after having reached a full sense of reconciliation with the world.
Line Up:
Pieternel van Oers: piano & composition,
Tommaso Montagnani: double bass Karl
Jannuska: drums
RECENT COMMENTS