Keith Jarrett

Vienna Concert documents a solo piano recital that Keith Jarrett gave at the Vienna State Opera on 13 July 1991, released by ECM in 1992. As on his other solo concerts, everything was improvised on the spot. Jarrett set it apart from his earlier concerts in the booklet: "I have courted the fire for a very long time, and many sparks have flown in the past, but the music on this recording speaks, finally, the language of the flame itself."

The recording comes from a single evening in the opera house, engineered by Peter Laenger and produced by Manfred Eicher together with Jarrett. Its predecessor in his solo series on ECM was Paris Concert, recorded at the Salle Pleyel in October 1988 and issued in 1990. Where the Paris disc followed its long improvisation with a ballad by Russ Freeman and Jerry Gladstone and a short blues, the Vienna programme has no encores on record. The booklet adds to Jarrett's own note a text by the American poet Robert Bly, and the cover is by Barbara Wojirsch.

The concert falls into two long spans, close to 68 minutes of music in all, and the audience can be felt listening closely from the first notes. Vienna, Part I runs almost 42 minutes. It opens quietly, with a gentle, lullaby-like theme, and grows through long passages built on repeated left-hand figures into dense, rapid climaxes, before closing on a light, harp-like touch. Vienna, Part II, about 26 minutes, is more suspended and inward. Jarrett plays it at times as if strumming the instrument, and it ends in a melody close to a folk song.

Writing on ECM Reviews, Tyran Grillo called the album "a stunning account" of the Vienna performance. He also argued against measuring every Jarrett solo concert against the famous one from Cologne, since each, in his view, is its own story. When ECM issued New Vienna, a 2016 recital at the Musikverein, in 2025, its title referred back to this State Opera concert of 1991.

This is the CD edition, ECM 1481 (513 437-2), first released in September 1992.