Dustin O'Halloran
Piano Solos

The asphalt is wet and the rain, slow, continues to fall on the silent and motionless trees, on the windows, on the glistening pavement reflecting the first artificial lights of the evening. A light mist envelops everything. There is no trace of wind. Everything is silent. The road is almost deserted. The sidewalks bare and lonely. It seems like a movie. Dustin walks in his dark raincoat, head down, a few sheets in his hands. He enters the café barely smiling. Who knows what he's thinking. He waits a few minutes looking out from the café's windows and takes off his rain-dampened hat. The trees beyond the glass are like many skeletons, the drenched leaves almost a timid mantle to wrap them and sustain them. Dustin writes sitting at the table. Perhaps words, perhaps music, and in his mind, a whole unknown world opens up. Dustin writes. No one in the scarcely crowded café seems to notice. He writes of vulnerable feelings, of vivid nostalgia, of faded loves in front of an open doorway, in front of a floor scattered with vinyls. He writes of taxis that come and go. Of a city you don't know. Of you and your suitcase still to unpack, or of the rain that incessantly falls, wetting everything around, diluting emotions. Dustin rises. The piano is there in front of him. Alone. It's an old Swiss piano. Elegant, well-kept or perhaps restored. He sits down and begins to play his story or mine or yours.

Piano Solos vol. 1. Just Dustin and his hands feverish with thoughts clinging to those amber keys. It is elegant, bitter, fragile, delicately majestic. There's Debussy in his veiled harmonies and light fingers. There's all the volatile emotion felt in the magnificent Chopin. Dustin cradles you with grace and seduces you with his late winter melancholy ('Opus # 13'). It is moving ('Opus # 14' and 'Opus # 12'). It is solitary ('Variazione Di Un Tango', 'Opus # 7', 'Opus # 15'). With elegance he paints memories around you that slowly melt like the rain that dissolves the ink of your thoughts, awakening the distant atmospheres of his most poignant Devics. He plays and speaks to you silently almost simultaneously. He plays and you are the protagonist of his stories, of his elegiac and touching music. Marble gardens and ivy around or the flooded city tonight, it doesn't change anything. It doesn't matter who you are or where you are, he continues to play, intimate, appealing, harmonious, of himself or of you. Gently, with reserve, and it matters little. Far from everything, in this small place where no light reaches, softly drowning in a puddle of memories this cascade of beautiful and perfect notes.

Dustin looks up, his gaze cloudy but sweet. He was absorbed in all that emotion in music while he played. He hadn't noticed the hidden woman who listened to him, captivated. Who knows what she was thinking. A fleeting glance, a liberating smile. Dustin’s piano had warmed and enchanted them both. He takes his coat, hat, scores; yet another glance with the astonished listener and he goes away. Solitary, bitter, and moving beneath the rain. The notes have not been lost in the air. They have not dissolved like memories in the water, they resonate passionate and fragile among the trees and the muted leaves, on the bare sidewalk and the deserted road. They are still there... clutched between his fingers, in the scores, and in the unspoken words.