Stefano Battaglia

Pelagos is a double album of solo piano by Stefano Battaglia, an extended meditation on exile and migration. It mixes his own compositions, spontaneous improvisations and two versions of the Arabic traditional song Lamma Bada Yatathanna. Battaglia plays piano and prepared piano, sometimes both at once, to widen the range of colours. The concert programme spoke of "songs and dances of the suffering countries of the Mediterranean and Balkan areas". The track titles follow the routes of people crossing those borders.

Everything was recorded in May 2016 at the Fazioli Concert Hall in Sacile, in north-east Italy, in two sessions on the same day. One was a concert before an audience, the other took place behind closed doors. Producer Manfred Eicher then interleaved the takes across the two discs and removed the applause, so the set unfolds like one continuous performance. Battaglia described the result as "a wonderful new shape with a completely new dramaturgy". Stefano Amerio engineered the sessions, and Battaglia wrote the English liner notes.

Some titles name places directly. Lampedusa is the Italian island where many boats from North Africa come ashore. Horgos e Roszke names two towns facing each other across the Serbian-Hungarian border, Brenner Toccata the Alpine pass into Austria. Lampedusa is spare and minimal, one of the most sorrowful pieces in the set according to Filipe Freitas of Jazztrail. In Exilium a relentless chord runs beneath both fast and meditative passages, until the prepared piano turns the ending percussive. The two readings of Lamma Bada Yatathanna keep the song's melody while letting its Eastern colour fade into the sound of the piano.

Reviewers took it as one of Battaglia's strongest statements. In JazzTimes Thomas Conrad wrote that "Pelagos, Stefano Battaglia's seventh recording for ECM, is his best", adding that its universality is the source of its power. Simon Adams in Jazz Journal described "an undemonstrative style of playing, with rarely any flourish or excess but with considerable hypnotic allure". In Jazz Podium Heribert Ickerott noted how Battaglia subordinates technique to empathy. The grief for the tens of thousands who died, he wrote, reaches the listener quietly.

Released by ECM Records in September 2017 as a double CD, ECM 2570/71, with seventeen tracks running a little over two hours.