Fabio – Miguel De La Wiest (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Is it possible to tell a story without using words? Of course, it is the challenge that the classical world, not to mention, in more recent times, the soundtrack composers have faced since they first put pen to musical paper.

But the thing with allowing the music to do the talking is that it speaks in more vague and broad ways than words do, conjuring mood and emotion, tugging on heartstrings, evoking pathos, and rising and falling to create feelings of joy and hope or contemplation and nostalgia, as required. If lyrics bring you directly to the artist’s intended conclusion, instrumental pieces can only have broader conversations.

This means there is room within such music for the listener, not the artist, to decide what the piece is about, make the music as much about their listening experience as the composer’s intentions, and reflect on their own lives. And that is what makes such music so great.

Fabio is Miguel De La Wiest allowing us to do precisely that. Although these nine pieces are like chapters, this is our book, too. Each chapter is a deft and delicate creation, driven by his graceful and gorgeous piano, sometimes augmented by strings and percussion, often left deliberately understated and beautifully sparse.

For every track like “All Good Things,” which sees Wiest using only his piano to set the tone, we find more ornate pieces such as “Of Roses and Stars,” which employs larger orchestral layers, enabling it to rise and fall majestically across a bigger sonic canvas.

Tracks such as “Dawning of a New Day” are brilliantly uplifting, the piece’s lilting and lovely style almost pushing into the realms of classical pop, while “Star Waltz” is a modern take on the grandeur and elegance of the Viennese ballroom.

And then, by contrast, you have “Thinks About You All the Time,” whose glitchy sonics and groovesome beats push things into the realms of the modern, clubland dance floor. “Waiting,” the album’s swansong, returns us to the grace and restraint with which we began, a resolution born of piano and strings dancing dexterously together.

Modern classical music, as this album proves, is the sound of even the most established musical forms moving with the times. It is able to ebb and flow at will between tradition and adventure, established forms and experimental modernity, and it reminds us, via such cross-over songs as “Thinks About You All the Time,” that such music was always the pop and dance music of the day. Nothing changes that much.