Time Remembered

From the opening moments of Matthias Kirschnereit’s latest album, you know you’re in for something different. The Steinway’s tone is crystal clear, but this is not the typical sound of the German pianist renowned for performances of Brahms, Schubert and Mendelssohn; nor does it sound like the same recording artist who has in the past given us the complete Piano Concertos of Mozart and Haydn. Instead, what first draws us in are the rippling harmonies of jazz genius Bill Evans’ “Time Remembered”. “I love Bill Evans, and the title of this piece perfectly introduces the theme of the recording,” Kirschnereit tells Apple Music Classical. When, three tracks in, Mozart does finally arrive, with an elegant rendering of his Marche funèbre del Signor Maestro Contrapunto (Funeral March for the Masterful Mr Counterpoint), it does so after an excursion into the 17th-century polyphony of one of Italian composer Frescobaldi’s Canzonas. “This album is not supposed to be a lecture running through musical history; it’s more personal than that,” Kirschnereit explains. “Each of these 32 short pieces fits with a certain part of my life.” This is eclectic listening for the TikTok age, then—“a crazy constellation of pieces” that covers a wide range of styles. The snapshots of the musical canon are so diverse you might wonder whether the title of the album’s fifth track, Gershwin’s “Who Cares?”, is a fair summation of the pianist’s new anything-goes attitude. As Kirschnereit says candidly: “I’m not a jazz pianist. There are others that can do much better.” But listen closely, and you’ll find a myriad of musical ways in which these works are connected. The humorous playfulness of Frescobaldi’s counterpoint, for example, is echoed by the “unserious” spirit of Mozart’s Funeral March (which, says Kirschnereit, “Mozart wrote with a twinkle in his eye”). Later, Impressionist colours link Debussy’s “Mouvement” from Images I with the chiming bell-like sonorities of Takemitsu’s Rain Tree Sketch II that follows. Or there’s continuity in the sense of narrative momentum created when, as Kirschnereit explains, “Smetana’s ‘Desire’ leads to Liszt’s Schlaflos! (Sleepless!), followed by the touching ‘Gute Nacht!’ (‘Good Night!’) by Janáček”. And then there are the subjective, more personal connections. Kirschnereit spent his childhood years, aged nine to 14, in Namibia where his father was a pastor (hence Kirschnereit’s love of church-style polyphony). While the pianist expresses his early enjoyment of The Beatles with George Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun”, his appreciation of African grooves takes shape in a piano and percussion arrangement of Namibia, the Liberation Group song from 1976. After returning to Germany in his teens and studying with Renate Kretschmar-Fischer in Detmold, Kirschnereit moved to Hamburg, where he now lives—local composer Ettore Prandi has written a work specially for the recording, his Bagatelle “an die verlorene Zeit” (Bagatelle “To Lost Time”). Prandi’s is just one of the works that specifically unpacks the notion of time on an album in which listeners are frequently invited to explore pockets of musical memories: Anton Bruckner’s Erinnerung, for example, comes after the nostalgia of Ravel’s bittersweet Pavane pour une infante défunte and the Memories of the Mazurka by Glinka. Time almost seems to stand still with Satie’s hypnotic and ever popular Gymnopédie No. 1, and it takes on one last nostalgic twist with the Casablanca theme “As Time Goes By”—but only after some Bartók and Bill Withers. “I always think it’s interesting to have contrasts,” Kirschnereit says. “Contrasts are what inspire us; contrasts keep us alive.”