Miniatures is the first solo album for ECM by the Italian pianist Glauco Venier, subtitled Music for Piano and Percussion. Its fifteen short pieces combine his own compositions and improvisations with adaptations of music by Gurdjieff, Komitas and Guillaume Dufay. The piano is coloured throughout by gongs, bells and the metal sound sculptures of two visual artists, and the result is a quiet record of reflection.
Venier grew up in Gradisca di Sedegliano, a village in Friuli. He first came to music through the organ of the local church, and later studied the instrument at the conservatory in Udine. ECM listeners know him from his long partnership with the singer Norma Winstone, heard on Distances, Stories Yet To Tell and Dance Without Answer. According to James Poore of MusicWeb International, the approach grew out of music Venier made for a documentary about the sculptor Giorgio Celiberti, playing piano together with his sculptures. For the album, works by Harry Bertoia were added to Celiberti's, along with gongs, cymbals and bells. The recording was made in December 2013 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, with Stefano Amerio as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer.
The borrowed pieces come from far apart. Asian Songs and Rhythms No. 40, credited to Gurdjieff and Thomas de Hartmann, is played as a plain, singing melody. Ave Gloriosa Mater Salvatoris, an anonymous thirteenth-century piece, starts slowly and gradually builds. In Abstractio the keyboard stays silent and the gongs and metals sound alone. Around them sit Venier's own pieces, such as Ritual, Byzantine Icon and Madiba. There are also Komitas's Krunk, Gunam by the singer-songwriter Alessandra Franco, and Dufay's Ce jour de l'an as the close.
In the Irish Times, Cormac Larkin noted that Venier adds gongs, bells and tuned metals "as background colours", offering "simple, elegiac improvisations which owe more to texture and timbre than to linear melody". Peter Bacon of The Jazz Breakfast called it "a beautiful, unassuming album which defies pigeonholing". Larkin also pointed to the natural acoustics of the Lugano hall, while Bacon pictured the music in a church, or a space with a lot of air in it.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2385, first released on 10 June 2016.
