Nat Bartsch: Hope
ABC Music

How do I love Nat Bartsch's music? Start with sincerity, honesty, and authenticity, and then consider her uncanny ability to connect directly through her music to the listener. Attending to the Australian pianist's latest lyrical collection, Hope, you feel as if she's opening her heart and speaking via the keyboard to you personally. Not a single note is false, and you come away from the experience replenished and grateful that music of such beauty is still being created in this world.

She's that rare artist whose work resists being slotted exclusively into classical or jazz; instead, it both unfolds with the natural fluidity of a live jazz performance and exemplifies the formal sophistication of a classical composition. It makes sense that her music would straddle genres so naturally: while she has studied with pianists Tord Gustavsen and Nik Bärtsch and led a jazz piano trio for many years, she's also studied composition at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music.

Many of the qualities that distinguished her 2020 album Forever More remain in place on the new collection. But whereas the earlier one featured a jazz sextet re-interpreting lullabies from 2018's Forever, and No Time At All, Hope emphasizes her classical side a bit more, with the pianist joined by string players on many pieces (violinists Kyla Matsuura-Miller and Madeleine Jevons, violist William Clark, cellist James Morley). Hope is also a more intimate album in featuring Bartsch's piano prominently and sometimes unaccompanied.

Track titles reflect some of the real-world experiences that occurred during the writing. When bushfires decimated parts of Australia in early 2020, Bartsch wrote “For the Koalas,” “The End of the Decade,” and “Searching for the Map” with the smell of smoke reaching her home from hundreds of kilometres away. Whereas “Fight Not Flight” was birthed as awareness of the pandemic's onset became undeniable, she wrote “Emerging” as Melbourne's second lockdown was being slowly lifted.

Subtle applications of ambient-electronic sweetening do sometimes surface (see “Prologue” and “Fight Not Flight”), but for the most part Hope hews to an acoustically pure presentation. As a representative piece such as “For Now” shows, Bartsch plays with unerring refinement and fastidious attention to note selection. Her playing isn't minimal, yet it's not overly dense either. On an album of many such moments, one of the more transfixing is “The End of the Decade” for its air of quiet elation. Though she plays alone here, nothing more than the resonant chime of her piano is needed to captivate.

A dignified solemnity informs “For the Koalas,” with strings joining the piano to amplify the music's ache; as melancholy as it generally is, however, it also rises triumphantly in its middle section. A similarly positive emotional terrain is mapped in “Brightness in the Hills” when yearning and optimism flow from its rhapsodic expression in equal measure. Though she's physically absent on “Over the River,” the string quartet brings her composer's voice resonantly to life in this celebratory setting.

It's worth noting her clarification about the album title. Hope, she says, “is not just those four letters. It's ‘hope' as an abbreviation of both hopefulness and hopelessness, and this music explores the space between.” Consistent with that, the twelve pieces reflect the tumult of the past year, with some alluding to bleak moments and others emphasizing resilience and determination in the face of adversity. If shadows do sometimes creep into her music, it ultimately more inspires with its life-affirming message.

May 2021