‘It’ll be over soon’.

Two weeks after I made it back to my teaching gig in Germany on one of the last flights from London, the world went silent. In a manner I’d always dreamt would be the ideal canvas to play the piano the way I’ve always felt is the most appropriate.

Quietly.

And so began my attempt to transform a nightmare into that dream.

‘It’ll be over soon’.

Two weeks after I made it back to my teaching gig in Germany on one of the last flights from London, the world went silent. In a manner I’d always dreamt would be the ideal canvas to play the piano the way I’ve always felt is the most appropriate.

Quietly.

And so began my attempt to transform a nightmare into that dream. Within the four walls of a century-plus-year-old Baroque building in the middle of Europe for four months. One that usually was home to a few hundred music students and staff.

As one tour after another got canceled, and the next opportunity to see my loved ones on one of my stops in the nomadic life between four countries I had gotten so used to felt like a prospect slipping away with every passing day, I found myself confronted with the heights and depths of aloneness I thought was impossible to reach. In a lifestyle where the lines between solitude and complete isolation had always been a blur.

What felt like well-practiced preparation for something like a pandemic threatened to start feeling like complete defeat.It took me five months before I was allowed to touch human skin again. And during the course of time, I felt the urge to explore the body of a piano in a manner I never had intended to consciously.

A manner where virtuosity and music theory felt utterly meaningless. And any glimpse of hope to feel anything besides fear, the only rudder to grab onto.

A decade of trauma conservative institutionalized education left on me took a very different league of the same to record my debut solo piano album.

I have very little memory of what I played. And looking back a part of me probably knew that was the way it was meant to be.

Vignette. Released 20.12.2021.