Olivia Belli: River Path
1631 Recordings

Itoko Toma: The Window
1631 Recordings

Two recent releases from David Wenngren's 1631 Recordings, renowned for featuring melodic piano music by artists from around the world, come from Italy and Japan by way of Olivia Belli and Itoko Toma, respectively.

The Mantova-born Belli spent her childhood moving from one Italian town to another, all the while soaking up the countryside and living close to nature. Given such beginnings, it doesn't surprise that after a stint working for a music agency in a London too hectic for her liking, she returned to the countryside, specifically to Marche where since 2012 she's looked for inspiration to her natural surroundings; in fact, the title of her latest album, River Path, refers to the river running down the valley next to her home. Upon returning from outdoors excursions, Belli turned those walks into highly personalized reflections of the setting, some evoking the scene directly, others responding to it as a source for mystical contemplation.

Belli lists Bach, Chopin, Satie, Glass, Max Richter, and Ludovico Einaudi as musicians she loves, and while one might naturally expect to hear evidence of their influence on River Path, its dozen pieces show she's subsumed those influences into an expressive style all her own; one hears Belli here, in other words, not a pastiche of others. The release, incidentally, is merely the latest in a large number of full-lengths and EPs she's issued since 2016, with some featuring her own compositions and others treatments of Glass, Satie, Richter, and Einaudi. She hasn't, in short, been idle.

River Path is many things—pretty, romantic, lyrical—but perhaps more than anything else intimate, especially when Belli reveals herself so unguardedly in the pieces and performs them with an equivalent degree of openness. That intimate character's bolstered on the thirty-four-minute recording when the action of the piano is consistently audible and even sometimes the creak of the bench. The tone of each piece is often reflected in its title: whereas “The Faun's Dream” and “The Nymph's Gaze” exude mystery and wonder, “Gleaming Flow” glistens like a rushing, sun-speckled stream. Elsewhere, “Path to Yourself” is delicate but most of all introspective, while the urgent propulsion of “The Circling Hawk” suggests the intense focus of the winged creature as it scans the earth for prey.

Animated pitter-patter propels the rhythms of “Rolling Pebbles”; “Iridescent Sparks” by comparison calls to mind the image of darting fireflies illuminating the night sky. Each engrossing piece feels connected to the others in fundamental ways yet individuates itself in mood and design. As stated, Belli's released a generous amount of material over the past four years, but if you're new to her music River Path is as splendid an entry-point as any.

Itoko Toma's The Window is not only a fine complement to Belli's, it's also a satisfying follow-up to the full-length the Japan-based pianist issued in 2017 on Schole, When the World Will Mix Well. Whereas that set mixed instrumental and vocal pieces, her twenty-minute EP for 1631 Recordings is wholly instrumental. Much like Belli, Toma's influenced by her surroundings, in her case the Setouchi region, a peaceful setting conducive to creativity. A pianist since the age of four, she enjoys playing Bach, Schumann, Schubert, and Debussy, and while some of the classical formality of their music might be heard in Toma's own pieces, track titles such as “Leaves and Light” and “Shade” suggest nature's influence is as strong.

March 2020