Classical Sessions: Francesco Tristano

There’s alchemy at work in pianist and composer Francesco Tristano’s enchanting blend of improvisations and personal responses to music from the past. His seven tracks, each recorded in a single take, deliver a heady mix of bold interventions here, gentle makeovers there. He begins with an otherworldly meditation on the anonymous 16th-century English fantasy for keyboard Uppon la mi re, reimagined on synthesizer and piano. “I found the piece on the internet,” Tristano tells Apple Music. “I love the way it breaks the rules of counterpoint and harmony. My mentor at the Juilliard School of Music taught me always to begin with your best jokes. I decided to have my wacky moment at the start to intrigue listeners about what comes next!” The next in question is supplied by the Sarabande and Allemande from J.S. Bach’s English Suite No. 2, played ‘straight’ on modern piano except for a final synthesizer thrum. Then Tristano throws a curveball with On Cadenza, his jazz-tinged companion to the Adagio from Bach’s Concerto in D minor. “I admire early music specialists who transplant themselves into a different time altogether. But I live in and make music for my time. Cadenzas can give you the freedom to escape from the score and give a glimpse into your time.” While Tristano recorded all bar one of his session’s tracks in a Paris studio, he made the programme’s final piece, On the current, at his home in Luxembourg. The first six tracks, he notes, are linked by close harmonic relationships. “I wanted to get away from that [for the seventh track] and have harmonies which are unlike the stuff before. Bach often adds new material right at the end of a composition. And so On the current is like an epilogue. It’s a 40-second digest, let's say, of what we’ve already heard.”