Perpetuum

Anthony Romaniuk, multi-keyboardist, alchemist of pianos, or ‘musical polyglot’ as some people call him, presents his new album as follows: ‘I remember very clearly the occasions in my childhood when I would be at a concert and a magical feeling would overtake both the audience and the performers. It was as though everyone in the room was part of the performance and we were all experiencing a kind of collective bliss. As an adult I have tried to understand this phenomenon of communal concentration. It seems to me that a certain kind of musical work will naturally induce this state, works in which the rhythm is hypnotic, trance-like and ongoing. For this album I wanted to find music embodying this quality, pieces in perpetual motion.’ As if in some fascinating portrait gallery, we meet music by Kapsberger, Scarlatti, Purcell, Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Ravel, Satie, Ligeti, Adams, and improvisations, played on a Fazioli concert piano, a Graf fortepiano from 1835, a Flemish muselar, a seventeenth-century harpsichord, a Yamaha CP80 electro-acoustic piano and a Prophet Rev2 synthesiser.