Ola Gjeilo: Dawn
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OLA GJEILO
Ola Gjeilo: Dawn
Ola Gjeilo (piano)
[ Decca / CD ]
Release Date: Friday 1 September 2023
The music of composer Ola Gjeilo straddles the line between classical music and New Age. Listeners coming from Ludovico Einaudi on the classical side will be quite comfortable with Gjeilo, as will devotees of George Winston and the pianists he spawned. Gjeilo has written music in various genres; this time, it is just the composer and his piano. Gjeilo is a trained composer, and perhaps the larger canvases of his album Voices, Piano, Strings serve him better; some will find the unchanging tempos and textures of Dawn a bit monotonous, but others may value the pure meditative quality Gjeilo achieves here. One's reactions to this album will probably depend largely on one's basic feeling about the genre involved, but Gjeilo executes it well, and he gets excellent engineering support from Decca, working at Menuhin Hall in the U.K. (AllMusic)
"Over the past five years there has been an explosion of easy-listening solo piano recordings. Rippling broken chords, repetitive melodies, simple structures - these are to 21st-century peace-seekers what whale music was to the 1990s. While some pianist-composers such as Ludovico Einaudi can attract enormous in-person audiences, most of this music thrives online, where artists such as Ola Gjeilo notch up millions of streams. The Norwegian pianist-composer's latest album, Dawn - the follow-up to 2020's Night - exemplifies the pop-classical piano aesthetic (Stephan Moccio; Yiruma, Olivia Belli et al) with gently pulsing shapes and an emphasis on the middle, most resonant, part of the keyboard. Like Belli and Einaudi's albums, many of the pieces have titles alluding to the natural world (Sun Prelude, First Light, Manhattan Sunrise). Gjeilo studied at Juilliard and the Royal College of Music and his technical abilities elevate the quality of the performance above some of his contemporaries. However, there's not much within the music itself that's distinctive: there's some nice voice-leading in Shine, but Blue is a rather aimless meander; pieces like Origin and Homebound seem ripe for further development." BBC
Tracks:
Daybreak
New Moon
Eternity
Sun Prelude
Manhattan Sunrise
Blue
Homebound
Clarity
Montana Orange Sound
Stasis
Chronicles
Origin
Silver Lining
Dawn Sky
First Light
Shine
First Snow
The Holly and the Ivy
Away in a Manger
Dawn
The Coventry Carol
Silent Night
Wintertide
The Rose II
