Andrew Keeling Blue Dawn

Making light work

Blue Dawn
Andrew Keeling
Burning Shed

“Follow nature!” cries Paracelsus in the notes for Blue Dawn, advice which Andrew Keeling has acted upon for several years. Going against the prevailing direction, his writing has been steering a path from egg-headed complexities associated with much of the clatter of the contemporary classical scene, to a pared-back approach unconcerned with knotty grandstanding or intertextual SFX.

Opening with a single attention-gathering piano note, “Distant Skies, Mountains And Shadows” delicately unfurls into the ruminative ambience of the Kerzo Chapel in The Hague. The particular pathway Keeling charts for the piano flute and clarinet of the Het Trio maybe angled and occasionally steep, but throughout the piece radiates lyrical warmth.

However the real heart of the album is to be found in “Blue Dawn”. Written between 2005/6 it consists of seven solo piano pieces touchingly played by Steven Wray. Though each is individually titled they work best when listened to in one sitting.

Occupying the hushed spaces from which Pärt’s “Für Alina” resonates, the themes gently see-saw between light and dark, between hope and fear, constructing a solemn reverie from starkly-drawn materials. Yet the effect of these halting, sensitive movements is anything but austere or simple. Over the course of a half hour, “Blue Dawn” creates a soundtrack to haunting dreams that touch upon the losses we experience and the gains which may be found arising from them.

The dawn of a new day can be viewed as a mere set of physical reactions within the natural world, or something, despite its repetition, that is resplendently unique. With a luminous clarity, Keeling probes for that startling, fresh beauty residing within the mundane, and which leaves us breathless when we find it. Magnificent.

Buy it here.