Comparing making music to painting a picture is a rather romantic and apt idea on paper: just like a painter might add a certain colour to evoke more of a certain emotion, the musician will add in certain chords, notes or, indeed, certain instruments to capture and try evoke a certain mood from the listener. In practice writing out sadness in musical form isn’t quite as easy as adding some cold blue to a canvas although doing both successfully is something else completely. On his latest album Lumiere, American composer Dustin O’Halloran found himself approaching his work and working like a painter; “adding colours, texture, adding space, painting over the whole thing and maybe leaving just a corner.” The end result sees him spreading washes of meditative, patient and considerate orchestration over his original solo piano compositions which makes for an interesting (albeit somewhat inevitable) step forward for O’Halloran.
It’s interesting because if you consider the solo piano compositions on his first two albums (Piano Solos and Piano Solos Vol. 2), it’s hard to imagine anything but the piano playing. However, comparing the compositions on Lumiere to those on his previous albums, the style seems much more welcoming like he was always writing with the orchestration in mind, keeping lots of space around and never complicating the music. And this consideration pays off: the instruments weave together and move together.
“Fragile N.4” begins with a light piano line that treads softly but as the track builds and the strings swell, the piano seems to become something else entirely. The effect hits you fully during the last minute of the composition as the music sways from side to side, like some beautiful forgotten waltz written for everyone’s personal romantic moments. On “We Move Lightly” the instruments are played with a quality that remains true to its title as a gentle spiralling cascade hovers about behind the careful but casual piano, kind of like an excruciatingly tamed version of a cut from Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo soundtrack.
As very lovely as these moments are (and when they hit their peak they really are), as a whole the album comes off as a sort of passing melange of strangely ambient classical music that’s far too easy to put in the background. It’s kind of strange (and that little bit ironic) that by augmenting his work with the addition of a quartet or quintet, O’Halloran has made his music easier to ignore. In the end it’s the “corner’s left” that seem to hold the best moments as they leave O’Halloran alone as he plays. “Opus 44” is a brief and sad piece and it’s the sadness that makes it memorable as it’s one of the few moments here that he really captures a seemingly simple emotion and puts it to music instead of trying to create a vast expanse. On “Opus 55” O’Halloran spreads himself out across the keyboard and in turn creates one of the best pieces he’s ever recorded – the track is suspenseful and enticing throughout and he realises this and releases the suspense all on a few bass notes, catching you off guard and making you realise just how engrossed you were for the space of three minutes.
There’s also the corners he’s brushed ever so slightly with some sonic effects which help save the album from becoming a complete blend of gentle classical swaying as evidenced by the creaking of the piano itself on “Opus 44” or that eerily divine sound that begins and lingers thoughout “We Move Lightly.” I don’t mean to demean O’Halloran’s ability to write a composition with strings in mind as he’s perfectly capable of doing that effectively (as evidenced by “Quartet N.2”), but over the course of an album (even at just forty-three minutes) he doesn’t quite hit the mark enough times to make Lumiere something exceptional. O’Halloran’s move to include strings was to be expected somewhere along the line as his personal style on piano seemed to be becoming distinctly individual but also limiting. But with other instruments behind him he loses that personal touch and can’t quite command them to continuously give out that strange ineffable feeling the likes of Max Richter can, or even create a dignified rushing bombast someone like Ludovico Einaudi can (although that is a somewhat unfair comparison as they generally work with a different kind of style). Nonetheless, Lumiere is a promising step forward and I still am curious as to see what O’Halloran can do when he doesn’t paint near enough the whole canvas.
