III

Description

After two albums entirely devoted to the dreamy purity of melodies played alone on the piano, Alban Claudin opens his music to new horizons. With III, the composer hems his short pieces with arrangements for strings, winds, or organ, painting delicately contrasted landscapes, sheltered from the world's clamor. Concise and inviting, alternately minimalist or more densely romantic, his compositions form an ambitious album—the full and complete expression of an artist in motion. The piano remains at the heart of these delicate and organic architectures but often dialogues with other instruments—saxophone, bass clarinet, violin, cello, organ—whose presence the composer envisioned early on and whose arrangements he wrote alone. Always guided by pure and agile melodies, his pieces are thereby illuminated differently, and III captivates with its art of contrast, the precision of its line, and the richness of its colors. Alban Claudin engages in small rectilinear runs inherited from the minimalists (The Run, piano strings struck in rhythm and a cavalcade of winds; L'échappée, organ, ebb and flow of strings; L'Île, piano and light electronic treatment) as well as romantic escapes (the almost waltz Of Love or Origami, unfolded in an emotional profusion of strings). Some very short pieces capture a separate, floating moment, like this Phantasia, whose dense and undulating melody eventually fades into a brief maze of strange sounds. For Alban Claudin's sense of melody and mastery of arrangements meet throughout the album with a pointillist and audacious work on sound textures, making it both homogeneous and singular. III is the radiant and intense work of a composer who has chosen to invent the path he follows by following his intuitions. Born from a tension between a taste for movement and the call for calm, the rumble of turmoil and the search for inner fullness, the 13 pieces that make up the album harbor places, emotions, and feelings, and will themselves be refuges for anyone who surrenders to them.