Vadim Neselovskyi

Perseverantia presents Vadim Neselovskyi as both storyteller and architect, offering a suite of pieces that treat the piano as a place where resilience can be heard rather than declared. A Ukrainian‑born, classically trained improviser who has long moved fluently between chamber music, jazz and contemporary composition, Neselovskyi designs this album as a series of tests and recoveries: themes that strain and hold, harmonies that hover on the edge of collapse before finding unexpected resolutions, rhythmic figures that stumble only to regain their footing in altered form. You can hear in the writing the same blend of structure and spontaneity that has marked his work with figures like Gary Burton and Fred Hersch, but here it is turned inward, focused less on virtuosity than on the question implied by the title – how sound persists when everything around it is unstable.

Across the programme, Neselovskyi lets his pieces breathe. Some tracks move with quiet, song‑form clarity, their melodies simple enough to hum but harmonically skewed just enough to keep you alert; others head for more jagged terrain, with lines that break apart into shards and clusters before reassembling around a small, anchoring motif. His classical background shows in the way he shapes arcs over several minutes – revisiting a fragment in a different register, letting a bass figure swell into counter‑melody – while his jazz instincts surface in the elasticity of his phrasing and his readiness to abandon the script when a new direction suggests itself. The overall impression is of music that is constantly negotiating with itself, refusing easy catharsis in favour of something more honest: a perseverance that includes doubt, fatigue, flashes of anger and hard‑won moments of light.

The recording foregrounds the physicality of the instrument: hammers, pedal noise, the resonance of the soundboard are all part of the story, underscoring the sense that this is music made by a single body moving through ideas in real time. Sequenced as a continuous journey rather than a collection of unrelated pieces, Perseverantia feels like an invitation to follow that movement closely – to notice when the touch hardens, when the tempo sags, when a dissonance is allowed to linger longer than comfort would dictate. It is an album that rewards patient listening, not because it is forbidding, but because it trusts the listener to stay with it through its quieter stretches and its roughest edges. In doing so, it turns its title into more than a theme: perseverance becomes a shared practice between pianist and audience, enacted afresh every time the first note sounds.