Elaine Freeman: La Speranza
Big Round Records

Antonija Pacek: Forever
Navona Records

Forever, Antonija Pacek's fourth album and her first for Navona, presents a splendid portrait of the Vienna-based pianist and her neoclassical style. A native of Croatia, Pacek creates music of deeply personal character. Though it leans towards melancholy and tenderness, she aspires to encompass the gamut of emotional experience in her music. While grounded in emotional expression, Pacek's romantic settings never lapse into vulgarity or kitsch when they retain their classical elegance.

By the pianist's own admission, her music draws for inspiration from real-life experiences. Moments of creation come readily, with events and individuals triggering music within that she then formalizes in turn. If Forever exudes an overall hopeful tone, it's deliberate, the move reflective of Pacek's wish to create material that would offset the sadness caused by the pandemic (the album was recorded between October 2019 and May 2020) and give listeners a therapeutic respite from the gloom. It perhaps shouldn't surprise that she is also a professor of psychology at several universities in Vienna.

“Sofia” is understandably melancholic, considering that it's titled after a friend of Pacek's who's had a particularly difficult life; after details were shared with the pianist in an emotional encounter, the song “flew out” of Pacek, its emergence characteristic of her music. Delicate and bittersweet, “If Only Time Allowed” speaks to her acumen as not just composer but performer too when her rendering of the material is executed with sensitivity and grace. Sadness permeates “Gone Young,” which was inspired by 1985, a film that tells of a young AIDS-infected man disclosing to his family the details of his condition and its then-inevitable end. Rather than deny the facticity of death, Pacek chose to confront it head-on, especially when COVID-related deaths occurred so often during 2020. Similarly sombre in tone are “Almost Goodbye” and “Before the Rain.”

Not every song's suffused with melancholy. “Light” makes good on its titular promise, and the gently radiant title track brims with optimism, the message clearly imparted that present-day woes will eventually end. “Deep Red” sees her venturing outside neoclassical for an evening reverie tinged with blues feeling and jazz inflection. Pacek's music is also unfailingly pretty, no better illustrations than “Lullaby” and “Inner Child,” which were inspired by the time she spent with her children during the pandemic. As stated, the fourteen settings, including the dramatic closer, “Before the Storm,” recorded live at the Auditorium parco della musica in Rome, Italy, present a flattering portrait of the artist and also serve as a stellar introduction to anyone unacquainted with the three earlier releases.

A natural companion to Forever is La Speranza by Elaine Freeman, like Pacek a composer and pianist who specializes in music that communicates with immediacy. The material the Dublin-born Freeman creates is slightly different than Pacek's, however: the personalized dimension remains very much in place, but Freeman hews less strictly to a neoclassical style. Instead, her pieces resist easy categorization and emerge simply as spontaneous melodic expressions, a result in keeping with the manner by which they're created. She writes her pieces by ear and plays them as such without sheet music, which lends the material an unfiltered quality. When Freeman plays, music naturally comes out.

Building a piece around a central theme or rhythm, she allows it to organically develop, Freeman choosing to let her music dictate its shape. Feeling and mood are paramount in settings that, like Pacek's, draw directly on unique life experiences. Alternately yearning, sorrowful, melancholy, and wistful, the ten pieces are physical delineations of Freeman's inner world. Though four tracks were recorded in Dublin in 2013 and 2014 and the others in early 2020, consistency of tone and style makes the release sound as if it could have been recorded in a single session.

The lovely “Intro to La Speranza (Song for Angelo)” establishes a heartwarming tone, after which the minuet-like lilt of “Mantova” proves as appealing. It was in that small city north of Italy that she'd relocated to nine years ago where she had her first child and days later learned of her dad's sudden passing. Bewilderment and sorrow gradually gave way to recovery and eventually a productive period of composing, with “Mantova” paving the way for other pieces. As composed as “In Here” is on the surface, its title references the fact that inside she was still grieving her father's death

December 2020