Choose artist...
Stories   >   Ola Gjeilo's 'Dawn,' a piano aesthetic with an emphasis on the most resonant part of the keyboard / BBC Music Magazine

Stories for December 07, 2024

Top 10 for Dec

More Albums with Ola Gjeilo

Ola Gjeilo's 'Dawn,' a piano aesthetic with an emphasis on the most resonant part of the keyboard / BBC Music Magazine

Posted: September 9, 2022

Dawn is the follow-up to Ola Gjeilo’s hugely successful 2020 album Night. Released by Decca Classics 
 
Gjeilo is best known for his compositions for choir and is one of the most frequently performed choral composers alive. That success has quickly translated to his work for solo piano. Dawn is the natural successor to 2020’s Night which was inspired by the twilight hours of his hometown of New York and has amassed over 50 million streams to date.  
 
Raised listening to an eclectic mix of classical, jazz, pop and folk, and classically trained at The Julliard School and the Royal College of Music London, Gjeilo’s distinctive soundworld is often described as cinematic and evocative, lush and harmonious.
 
Improvisation has long been at the core of Gjeilo’s composition and performance, and that is clearly heard in his meditative, soothing work for solo piano.
 
As the release of Dawn is announced, Gjeilo says, "I'm excited to share my new piano album with you. It was written across a year on the West Coast and is inspired by the peaceful light and stillness at dawn."

BBC Music Magazine's Claire Jackson writes……Over the past five years there has been an explosion of easy-listening solo piano recordings. Rippling broken chords, repetitive melodies, simple structures – these are to 21st-century peace-seekers what whale music was to the 1990s. While some pianist-composers such as Ludovico Einaudi can attract enormous in-person audiences, most of this music thrives online, where artists such as Ola Gjeilo notch up millions of streams. The Norwegian pianist-composer’s latest album, Dawn – the follow-up to 2020’s Night – exemplifies the pop-classical piano aesthetic (Stephan Moccio; Yiruma, Olivia Belli et al) with gently pulsing shapes and an emphasis on the middle, most resonant, part of the keyboard. Like Belli and Einaudi’s albums, many of the pieces have titles alluding to the natural world (Sun Prelude, First Light, Manhattan Sunrise). Gjeilo studied at Juilliard and the Royal College of Music and his technical abilities elevate the quality of the performance above some of his contemporaries. However, there’s not much within the music itself that’s distinctive: there’s some nice voice-leading in Shine, but Blue is a rather aimless meander; pieces like Origin and Homebound seem ripe for further development.

SEE THE BBC Music Magazine PAGE