Album: Ronny Graupe's Szelest - Newfoundland Tristesse

In this new album, three top-flight musicians based in Berlin, guitarist Ronny Graupe, Lucia Cadotsch (voice) and Kit Downes (piano) work collaboratively, superbly, as a real team. The music, some well-known tunes which Cadotsch sings hauntingly, and some original tunes by Graupe – it’s hard to tell them apart – just flows superbly.

I can’t help musing, incidentally, that we are a long way here from the typical set-up in classical music, where pianists who accompany singers can often suffer death by adjectives such as “supportive” or “sensitive”. (I even remember one pianist getting getting so antsy about being that, he felt compelled to invented a hashtag: “#iamnotunderwear”).

Graupe, Cadotsch and Downes set out here to do something which is more or less the opposite. The ethos of this group is all about disturbance and disruption. At this level of collaborative music making, and with these mid-career musicians who know each other well – Cadotsch and Graupe have known each other for most of fifteen years, and formed a duo to work on songs from fresh without reference to pre-existing versions – the inventiveness and the interest never flag. Furthermore, the “now-make-a-mistake” ethos as taught by the late great pianist John Taylor reaches a wonderful new fruition in this album, which was recorded at Budapest Music Center in January 2023.

Graupe has used the German word “Störgröße” to describe the principle at work here. This scientific term means is a degree of disturbance that is measurable – and which the guitarist says he wants to be omnipresent, both structurally and emotionally. In his excellent sleeve-note Richard Williams describes the concept as “tantalizingly oblique”. Perhaps the clarity of Graupe’s aim has got lost in translation into English as “a general disturbance variable”, but in any event ‘disturbance’ is indeed the fascinating aesthetic which governs the whole album. The wilfully jagged interjections into Legrand/Mercer’s “Once Upon a Summertime” are just one of many fine demonstrations of this principle in action.

Lucia Cadotsch as a singer has the same level of rhythmic authority, serenity, security and a propensity to challenge which, say, Gretchen Parlato and Sara Serpa also bring to their work with great instrumentalists. But what singles out Lucia Cadotsch is the presence of a whole song form – perhaps it is something special to the Germanophone world – and that is what gives the instrumentalists something particularly strong and present to "disrupt" against. The track “Szelest” (a Polish word meaning "rustling") is a good demonstration of that.

Guitarist Ronny Graupe has a natural authority, which – to be over-simplistic – is reinforced by the way he brings the seventh (bass) string of the guitar into play. Kit Downes’s profile has – deservedly – risen dramatically since his move to Berlin in early 2022, and the range of projects he is involved in is spectacular. Here, the subtle way he leads the pacing and the rhythmic games of the song “At a 2^nd Glance” are worth hearing again and again.

Do albums as deep, as subtle, and constantly engaging as this one win prizes? They should.

• Newfoundland Tristesse is on the Hungarian label BMC 
• Ronny Graupe's Szelest is touring in autumn/winter 2025 and spring 2026
• More new music reviews on theartsdesk