ALBUM REVIEW BY ANDREW C. KIDD
Gabríel Ólafs ‘Lullabies for Piano and Cello’
(Decca Records) 9th June 2023
Unsurprisingly, Icelandic lullabies are hard to come by. The few that do exist are comparatively bleaker – less cradle song; one could argue abstruse. Take the title of Móðir Mín Í Kví, Kví (in English, Mother of mine in the sheep pen), or the lines of Bíum bíum bambaló, a lullaby from Iceland made famous by Icelandic post-rock stalwarts Sigur Rós: ‘Bíum bíum bambaló / Bambaló og dillidillidó’; in English, ‘My little friend I lull to rest / But outside, a face looms at the window’. Still, a lullaby in the orthodox sense should serve to lull. Enter pianist Gabríel Ólafs. Lullabies for Piano and Cello offers something altogether gentler and less menacing. It is his second long play after the 2019 release Absent Minded, which earned him plenty of plaudits.
The opening piece is the spry Fantasía. It is finely poised and well-balanced. The long notes of Sigurðardóttir’s cello play slowly and jig around the piano keys that staccato and pirouette. Sálmur derives its title from the Old Norse word ‘salmr’, a psalm. The keys are bittersweet. Here there is clever use of the foot pedal: Ólafs holds the notes suspensefully, allowing the cello to inhale and exhale measuredly as they alternate between legato and bowed tremolo. Octaves are climbed by the piano, but the cello remains rooted in the bass clef. Moonlight streams in glittering certitude on Noktúrna. The piano is light and a little more distant than it was previously, perhaps in the same way that the eye perceives the blue light of the moon: familiar but altered – illusory even. Embers emerge and billow away on Eldur (from the Old Norse ‘eldr’, or fire). The cello enters and vacates as quickly as it emerged. It echoes the
piano, elongating the notes as it evaporates into the ether.
Ólafs is an effective narrator. On Frost, the left-hand plays gently. Its melody is simple and dots around a major scale. It is clear and glistens and is made momentary as it welcomes the sun; soon, it will become water, evaporating to air, exiting the world as quickly as it entered it. Is it too far-fetched to suggest that this is a bleak allegory of life? I shall leave that for the listener to decide. It is an Icelandic lullaby after all.
The harmonics of the cello play quietly, deepening the piano on Vísa. The melody is played legato. It is fluent. This deftness, this wonderful una corda (soft pedal) of the piano is felt again on Mamma which almost progresses into a lullaby; I write ‘almost’ because although the structure is circular, the melody is not repeated. Barnkind is Icelandic for ‘child’. The cello is the sole focus here. In the accompanying album notes, the cello is considered to be the “mother’s voice, sometimes speaking, sometimes singing” – this assertion is most evident on this piece. It soothes.
On Bambaló the cello bows quietly. It encompasses the mysticism of early folk – was this an ode to a tree, or a long-lost lover, or an ideal? The piece intensifies, yet the piano remains light and unimodal throughout. Its chords, its narrative, are progressed solely by the cello. The keys mimic in gentle accompaniment. It ends thoughtfully. Draumheimar is the final piece. It translates into English as ‘dreamworlds’. Clocking in at over three-minutes, it is longest piece on the album. The piano takes centre stage and plays a major key melody. I hear echoes of Ólafs’s previous LP at this juncture. The keys become less distinct and the hammer-action of the piano strings are audible here: they are dulcimer-like. It is pianissimo: very quiet; then calando: it softens and slows.
Lullabies for Piano and Cello is beguiling. Compared to much of modern-day classical composition, the pieces are very short, yet none are perfunctory. More so, it is completely emptied of electronics and field recordings. It is a work of simplicity. The melodies are short-lived and never reprised. Even more beguiling is the origins of this album: Ólafs chancing upon a collection of melodies in an antique bookshop. It beggars the question as to how many unplayed lullabies are lying unthumbed and unturned in bookshelves elsewhere in our world.
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