She may be based in Chicago, but the mellifluous minimalist compositions of pianist/composer Lena Natalia bring a very different place to mind. Her latest recording, Rendezvous in Paris, joins her Global Music Award winning Sundays in Paris (2015) to form a 24 song diptych which manages to capture the very zeitgeist of the City of Light in all its timeless elegance and effusively bittersweet joy.
“He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo.
Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic.
Nothing is more sublime.” ― Victor Hugo
Like any other city, Paris is not immune from or absent of the harsh realities of the world, but the Paris of these songs is the intimate and inspiring city of our collective cultural memory, the backdrop of countless stories written, unwritten, or simply imagined. On each of these lovely pieces, Natalia’s fingers dance effortlessly and rapturously among the borderlands that live between minimalism and romanticism offering a moveable feast of music that no enthusiast of solo piano music could resist.
Rendezvous in Paris is available in a limited edition CD or digital download from the artist’s Bandcamp. Both albums are also available in digital form from CD Baby and other major digital outlets such as iTunes & Amazon.
“Chiaroscuro” from ‘Rendezvous in Paris’
“Sundays in Paris” from ‘Sundays in Paris’
Stationary Travels 