Io Pur Respiro marks the debut of pianist Elias Stemeseder and bassist Thomas Morgan on Squama, and it arrives as a fully formed statement rather than a tentative first step. Recorded live at Sala Vanni in Florence, the album captures two musicians who share an almost telepathic rapport, moving through centuries of musical material with a touch so light it feels more like conversation than interpretation. The title - “Yet I breathe” - is borrowed from an early‑17th‑century madrigal by Carlo Gesualdo, and that sense of fragile persistence, of melody held quietly against the pressure of time, runs like a current through the entire record.
The opening piece, “Madrigal, Variation, Courante,” takes Gesualdo’s madrigal as its harmonic basis, but rather than treating it as a historical artefact, Stemeseder and Morgan let it unfold as a living pattern. The piano traces the chromatic contours of Gesualdo’s world, then bends them into new shapes; the bass threads counter‑melodies and shadow harmonies, sometimes doubling the line, sometimes stepping aside to let silence carry the tension. What might have been a respectful homage becomes instead a kind of time‑traveling improvisation: Renaissance harmony refracted through the language of modern jazz and chamber music, the “courante” implied more in the flow of ideas than in a strict dance form.
That wide arc continues in the choice of repertoire. Alongside Gesualdo, the duo folds in two standards from the 1930s - “Love Came” and “I Have The Room Above Her” - as well as two original compositions by Stemeseder. On paper, this spans roughly four centuries of melodic evolution; in practice, the distinctions dissolve. A 1930s song might be introduced with the barest hint of its original cadence before being stretched into long, translucent lines; an original piece might carry the kind of poised, song‑like clarity that makes it feel as if it has always existed. Rather than presenting these as stylistic jumps, the duo treats them as points along the same continuum, showing how the basic forces of melody and harmony remain constant even as their surface idioms shift.
Stemeseder’s playing is central to this sense of continuity. He favours a singing touch and a refined dynamic palette, allowing individual notes to bloom and decay rather than crowding the register. His lines can be harmonically intricate, yet they retain a songfulness that resists abstraction for its own sake. Morgan, long admired for his work with artists such as Paul Motian and Bill Frisell, responds with his characteristic blend of clarity and understatement. His bass sound is warm but unforced; he can anchor a phrase with a single, perfectly placed note or spin out counter‑melodies that feel less like accompaniment and more like a second voice. Together, they build structures in which tension comes from the smallest inflections - the choice to delay a resolution, to let a chord hang a fraction longer, to allow a fragment of a standard to flicker through an otherwise free passage.
One of the album’s most striking qualities is its refusal to sound either “new” or “old.” There are no self‑conscious gestures toward the avant‑garde, nor is there any retreat into retro comfort. Instead, Io Pur Respiro inhabits a kind of suspended present where Gesualdo, 1930s songcraft and contemporary improvisation coexist without hierarchy. That timelessness owes much to the duo’s instinct for balance. Even at their most exploratory, Stemeseder and Morgan keep a clear line of song running through the music; even in the most familiar standards, they leave enough space and ambiguity for the listener’s ear to wander.
The live recording at Sala Vanni enhances this feeling rather than distracting from it. You can sense the room in the resonance of the piano and the body of the bass, hear how phrases are shaped by the acoustics and by the presence of an audience just out of frame. There is a gentle tension in the air - the awareness that these decisions are being made in real time, with no safety net. It’s in that space that Io Pur Respiro finds its quiet intensity: not in grandstanding solos or dramatic climaxes, but in the accumulated weight of small, careful choices made by two musicians who trust both the material and each other.
