Miha Gantar - Introducing Miha Gantar (2022)

Amsterdam based Slovenian pianist and composer Miha Gantar has a very personal and very wide music vision, and the simultaneous release of several of its aspects seems logic, from the point of view of the artist but also of the listener, who is capable, this way, to achieve a complete experience of that sound world of a new, fresh, surprising and much welcomed player in the international creative music game. Each configuration (solo: “Origins of the Pure”; duo: “Songs and Serenades”; trio: “A Portrait of the Imaginary”; quartet: “Polymorphic Realities”; large ensemble: “Alternate History of the Future”) unrevels different approaches that are much more than the respective instrumentations, all of them «human and intimate» aspects of a defined aesthetic, as Nate Wooley points out in his liner notes. You can recognize the names of some participants, like Gerry Hemingway, Christian Lillinger and Axel Dorner in the quartet disc, but don’t listen to Gantar’s music starting on the basis of what you think you can recognize. The inverse audition would be more gratifying, for instance his association in duo with singer Marta Arpini, a work of pure affection, very emotional, in which melancholy and vivacity are expressions of the human spirit facing difficult circumstances. Five gems to discover.