Nils Frahm - The Bells

I got to Nils Frahm via a little detour. A few weeks ago I saw an impressive movie. Waltz with Bashir is an animation movie directed by Ari Folman that recounts the horrors of the 1982 Israeli campaign in the Lebanon. I was not only struck by the film but also by the music, written by Max Richter,  a composer unbeknownst to me. I poked a little bit around and hit a seemingly rich vein of many other musicians I hadn't heard about. One of them is Nils Frahm, a young German pianist, born in 1982. The Bells is a solo piano album, improvised and recorded over two nights in November 2008 in a Berlin church. Five and a half hours of music was condensed into a 40 minute recital. Instigator behind the scenes was Peter Broderick, another young and eclectic musician I hadn't heard of before.

Frahm's recital is impressive. Whilst harmonically, formally and gesturally the music doesn't break any new ground, I feel it is never banal or cloying. We are somewhere in the territory explored by Brad Mehldau, Keith Jarrett or Vasilis Tsabropoulos. Frahm does not have the stature (yet) of these giants in the contemporary solo piano niche, but what ties him to these men is the basically uplifting and hymnic vein that runs through the whole recital. His tone - lean, but full and deep - makes it easy and rewarding for the listener to connect. In some tracks (Said and done, Down down, My things) he really reaches for the level of exultation that we find in some of Mehldau's most brilliant extemporisations. The recital is short but it is well sequenced. There is not a weak moment in a natural flow between rapture and introspection which ends with the rather modest and laconic Somewhere nearby. Throughout one senses a disciplined and authoritative musical imagination, a passion that is kept in check by a desire for understatement and a genuine identification with the instrument.

The recording has a lot of presence. 2 mikes at the piano and 3 more to record the resonant acoustics of the church. At one point the bells of the Grunewaldkirche intrude gently in the musical proceedings. But they are only a natural complement to an affirmative musical fabric in which their celebratory intonations are woven deeply into. 

I look forward to hearing more from Nils Frahm.