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Rating: Let's start with a fundamental contrast. Acoustic piano and electric guitar, two instruments that on paper can only clash. Let's raise the level of the confrontation and take a pianist with a proven classical background, with a penchant for the gentlest and most elegiac romanticism (read: Grieg). Let's take a guitarist who skillfully handles his Stratocaster between the most virtuosic and informal jazz, and the most heated and transgressive rock.
What other ingredient can we add? How do we make these two get along? What element can integrate all these driving forces within itself, what element can be at the same time perpetually changing and always the same?
The Sea.
So, that evening in Leipzig on stage, there was an ascetic pianist, a curious and eclectic experimenter, a guitarist who was once a bad boy, now enjoying peaceful, incipient plumpness, dividing his time between electric Miles, acid Hendrix, and symphonic temptations, and in the midst of them, invited, evoked, constantly present, the North Sea. The Sea that creeps among the fjords ("By The Fjord"), that engulfs and surrounds everything ("Flotation And Surroundings"). The indescribable sea, which can be flat surface, barely rippled but teeming with light, and suddenly become dark, changing its voice to a deep and muted tone, until it explodes into a dissonance of waves. ("The Sea"). It's Norway, beauty, and the two are Ketil Bjornstad and Terje Rypdal. The result is an intense and unclassifiable music, and a series of themes of great charm, that blend into each other in a suggestive and spontaneous way.
Whispered phrases and devastating guitar improvisations. Romanticism and ecstatic cries of seagulls to the sky. "The Sea II", where the delicate piano arpeggio allows the guitar to soar towards infinite spaces. The two exchange roles with seasoned mastery, cemented in years of mutual musical acquaintance: Bjornstad abandons his calm lyricism and becomes energetic, percussive. Rypdal alternates muscular passages with long and atmospheric notes, feedback, and delay ("Foran Peisen").
Grand finale: everyone standing, playing air guitar with Rypdal's classic "The Return Of Per Ulv", energizing and vitamin-filled. It would be the return of Wile E. Coyote, for those who, like me, don't speak a word of the fjords' language. The frigid Bjornstad catches the enthusiasm of his companion and the audience, perks up and shows he knows how to rock indeed.
It would have been great to be there, that night in Leipzig.
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