OUT NOW !

piano rhapsody

 

a production by

www.auster-medienmusik.de

 

“Master of graceful madness”, “a polymorphic poet”,

“unpredictable yet economically ardent”,

Australian piano player Ashley Hribar

offers the listeners an exceptional musical adventure.

 

Piano Rhapsody starts on a paradoxical intersection point

between a highly intimate artistic visionand the radical impossibility

in revealing oneself behind a vast number of masks and styles.

 

Each of these felicitously chosen pieces stem from radically different contexts.

From Ravel’s nostalgic Pavan to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue

through to his own Paganini Variations, Ashley Hribar reflects the outside world

and transfers the post-modern paradigm to the dimension of classical piano tradition.

Older stories are told anew, subtly reshaping older traditions as in Roberts’ Sad Bird Blues.

On the Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues Rzewski writes:

“Ashley Hribar’s version is just about as good as I could imagine it, it tells a clear story: machine, soul and then both of these in counterpoint.”

 

Hribar’s aim is not to blend different styles subtly

in order to avoid conflicts, quite the contrary;

in the mostly improvised “Ash” Fantasy for example,

he consciously lets them collide and reveals clusters of

new meanings and unexpected qualities.

 

Full of surprises and narrative anomalies,

Piano Rhapsody is ready to fly, ready to change its own direction

disregarding the gravitation pull of a certain musical style or consensus.