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CD Feature/ Toros Can: "Purcell - Suites & Grounds"

  Tobias

There is no such thing as „old“ music. When we look at the development of the arts, we associate it with glancing back, but music didn’t walk in straight lines and it certainly isn’t aiming for “progress”. Rather, there are always different strings moving at different speeds and their goal is not the future, but completion. Or to put it differently: Music becomes art, when it connects with you, the listener and not when it sounds like a page from a history book or like a scientific laboratory.

Which is why this isn’t an “historic” album at all, despite the fact that its composer lived more than 300 years ago. Rather, it is the personal and emotional story of  Toros Can. In 1992, when he was just 19 years old, Can moved to settle in London, in order to continue his piano studies. What seeemed like a fascinating journey to a vibrant and scintilating metropolis quickly turned into a period of solitude and reflection. His colleague Ozgur Aydin became his only companion, the CDs he bought his solace and Monteverdi and Purcell turned into soul companions. In hours and hours of playing, he got ever closer to these pieces and to the solution of his dilemma as a pianist: “How can you play Purcell on this instrument in the composer’s style?” Maybe the painful loneliness of his first months in London was even necessary to solve this paradox: Allow the piano to take you by the hand and lead you to the answer. Which simply meant to not try and emulate the sound of a harpsichord, but find a suitable translation of what Purcell had intended. And it translated into the most intricate, immersing and tip-toeing renditions of some of the most tender and etherically romantic pieces you’ll ever encounter: 35 tracks on the verge of silence, on the verge of falling apart, but always just keeping their head up.

It was only later that Can discovered the 20th century and went on to become an expert in the field of “modern” music. But it is this, as he himself admits, sentimental journey, that started it all. Many will think of baroque courts, of pompously clad princesses, lords and noblemen when hearing the name Purcell. But we have a different association: Toros’ empty room, the clock ticking away the hours ever so slowly and him playing these pieces over and over again, with a new meaning each time. That’s where this record is taking you.

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