On Early Music

For many years, Francesco Tristano has had a love affair with 16th- and 17th-century keyboard music: the stately pavans and grounds of Gibbons and Philips; the extraordinary, virtuosic partitas of Frescobaldi and Sweelinck. “We tend to forget that every music has been contemporary at some point,” the pianist tells Apple Music. “I feel with this old repertoire that it’s easy to make it sound relevant today.” Tristano’s original plan was to record an album of 450-year-old English, Spanish and Italian music. After all, simply playing it on a modern Steinway piano would have been a novelty in itself—much of it remains largely unknown, composed, in some cases, over a century before the piano was even invented. But as with so many music projects since 2020, the pandemic brought about a change of heart. “I realised I wanted to go beyond just an early music album,” says Tristano. “I wanted to make this music even more relevant for our times.” Some works, such as Gibbons’ “Italian Ground” and Frescobaldi’s “Aria la folia” are performed note for note as they were originally composed. On others, Tristano presents his own versions, including John Bull’s “Galliard in D Minor” and Cristobal de Morales’ “Circumdederunt”. “They’re re-readings or remixes, but I’m really just giving the music another spin,” he explains. Then there is his breathtaking original music, which appears at various points in the programme. “I wrote these pieces during the pandemic, because it was part of my reflection on early music to have a contemporary context for it,” he says. “But at the same time, each of my pieces has a chord progression or melodic idea that is taken from early music.” The result is a recital that both shines light on centuries-old masterpieces and extends a hand across the ages, uniting ancient and modern in thrilling new ways. Read on as Tristano guides us through each track on this beautiful album. “Toccata” “I wanted to set the tone for the album with this piece. I find early music really uplifting, and this is the energy that I try to capture here. It’s music that makes you feel good. Early music rarely makes me feel anything else than good. Yes, it’s full of laments, but even then, the music’s rhythm and harmonies are fantastic. This is fun to play—the word ‘toccata’ refers to the keyboard ‘touch’, and here I really play with the touch of the piano.” “On John Bull Galliard in D Minor” “I love the rhythm of this galliard. It reminds me of a troubadour or a Renaissance entertainer. I realised that the last section is really pop music—its chord progression could have been written by The Beatles. So, I decided to loop it and use it for my personal take at the end.” “Fantasy in D Minor” “This is an incredible, enigmatic piece, but it’s rarely performed—I don’t think I’ve heard another recording of it. Here, I’m using the middle piano pedal to create resonances. The pedal enables me to raise the dampers on notes in the bass, so that the strings resonate naturally. At the start, I improvise around a D major chord to open up the sound of the instrument, to allow the sounds to travel. In this piece, I find it amazing how much is being said in so little time. It’s just two-and-a-half minutes, but it’s like the story of a life. It has an opening, a development and then a question mark before everything is wrapped up together. It’s a masterful little miniature.” “Serpentina” “Here, I use a special musical cadence called a ‘landini’ cadence that, as far as I know, only appears in early music. But really, this piece is a straightforward theme and variations where I really get the groove going. I set up the theme and add one rhythmic layer after another, but the harmonic structure underneath, based on fourths and fifths, is always the same.” “Let ons met herten reijne” “I don’t think this piece has been recorded on the piano before, and I’m playing from a transcription I found online. The opening is very intimate, and I’ve added reverb to it. Again, it’s all about storytelling. I’ve added one variation at the end, just 12 bars, so it’s almost entirely original. But what I like about this piece is that it has this real progression of energy from the opening single note that seems to contain everything. We brought in sound from the room mics at the end, so the piece opens up as the narrative progresses.” “On Girolamo Frescobaldi’s Quattro correnti” “Frescobaldi is one of my favourite composers. He’s so extravagant and really rhythmical and virtuosic. Each corrente steps up from the one before. And so, I decided to add some rhythm. Those are piano hits you can hear. I play inside the piano, on the bass strings and the metal, and I play on the wood. This is the first piece where you can hear some heavy processing—it’s really multilayered. There are some hints at medieval music here, again, like a troubadour.” “Aria la folia” “I play with the piano’s resonance here too. And although I only really play within four-and-a-half octaves, I use the bass register to bring more body to the piano. Sometimes it sounds like there’s something else playing alongside, but it’s actually only the resonance of what came before. With so many of these pieces, it’s incredible how much storytelling there is in such little time. Nowadays, we listen to a lot of contemporary classical music, where there are eight minutes of the same feeling, but then you go back and you find these little pieces, little gems, where so much is being said in such little time. It’s like an album in itself.” “Ritornello” “The ritornello marks a kind of midpoint. It’s the before and after. Up until now, the album has been in the key of D. And now, we shift to F minor, where I’m adding flats and a whole different sonority. The term ritornello comes from the Renaissance and Baroque era and is like a chorus that everybody knows, and everybody sings. The first part is stable and constant, and then it breaks up with these modulations that go all over the place.” “On Cristobal de Morales Circumdederunt” “A composer friend of mine suggested I include some Spanish music, and Morales is a really interesting composer. I didn’t know him, I have to say. This is a heavy studio piece, and to make this version, I used pretty much all the tools I had! The original is a vocal piece, and I wanted the piano to have this vocal quality, so we used a processing tool called freeze reverb where the note has endless sustain until you move to the next pitch.” “Pavan” “This is one of the pieces that I’ve played for at least 20 or 25 years, and this is my real, my very personal take on this music. I love it so much. This pavan is an absolute masterwork. I play it way too slowly for it to be considered a pavan, but I just find the harmony so shockingly beautiful. And I also find it so contemporary in a way, like Gibbons is playing with our feelings.” “Air & Alman” “This is really two pieces, but I put them together because they’re so short. One is in F major, and the other is in D minor. So, we have this little, beautiful short melody followed by a really raunchy Alman that I play very fast and very kind of rocky.” “Italian Ground” “The ‘Italian Ground’ is a piece that I know from Glenn Gould’s recording, which I think he did in the 1960s. It’s very rock ’n’ roll, harmonically speaking. It’s a ‘ground’, meaning that the structure repeats itself. And then, suddenly, there’s a new section, a surprise. It starts off really happy and it breaks apart after the first couple of runs and you think, ‘That’s not what I thought it was.’ I make that change very clear in this recording—I really take my time with the modulation. It’s like moving into a different world.” “Ground” “This ground is maybe more typical of Gibbons in terms of the polyphony and his equal treatment of the hands. But again, it’s very, very beautiful and very simple with an A minor theme that develops into a set of variations. This piece was, again, part of my upbringing at the piano.” “Ciacona seconda” “The idea was to use the form of the chaconne, with its repeated bassline, and give it a contemporary feel. The cool thing about this bassline is that it’s taken from Frescobaldi—it has seven bars. So, whenever you think you’re at the end of the cycle, you’re not quite there yet! At the very end, I use a tool that’s been banned from classical music: fade-out! But the fade-out here is fantastic because it means the music doesn’t stop. I thought it was nice to get at least one track where the music keeps going.” “Cento partite sopra passacaglie” “This is one of Frescobaldi’s most intricate keyboard compositions. And it’s arguably the first time in music history that the term ‘hundred’ is used as a kind of sport or virtuoso challenge. Of course, there aren’t 100 variations in this piece. But for me, it’s a really fantastic composition on a level with Bach or Xenakis, or whoever we think of as the great composers. What’s amazing is the flow of tonalities—after every cycle, he steps up with a new tonality and a new beginning, a new chapter. This piece is the last track, really, because the next one, the ‘Aria for RS’, is the album’s coda.” “Aria for RS” “The ‘Aria for RS’ is for a friend. I wrote it when I knew he was ill, and I wanted to wish him well with this music. So, I wrote this really simple melody. Many Baroque and pre-Baroque composers use the aria as a keyboard form, and I wanted something kind of sweet and nice to finish off the album. We shuffled most of the other pieces around on the album, but this one was always going to be the last track.”