I’m not saying that Five Days in Krakow wouldn’t be as powerful a song without the great accompanying visuals but sometimes such a pairing, a beautiful song and engaging images, makes both more than the sum of their parts. It is certainly the case here. Five Days in Krakow is a love letter to a city, and although recorded half a world away, in Brasilia during the recent lockdown, Tiago Ianuck captures the cool crisp vibe and lingering beauty of the place, a place that he clearly adores.
A gentle piano piece but with a wonderful understated energy, it is both deft and sparing yet vibrant, it is emotive and transient yet structured and full of life. And like all instrumental music it conveys all of this through the notes being played, and perhaps through those not being played too, through the sounds which rise from the keyboard. And such emotional communication is perhaps the most honest, the most powerful. Lyrics can often lead the listener astray, causing them to draw conclusions that the composers has led them to rather than ones born purely from their contact with the music.
Because of this Five Days in Krakow is also everyone’s love letter to something, to somewhere or perhaps someone, each listener able to bring their own meaning to this delicate and delicious piece of music. That’s the great thing about instrumental music, the lyrics, the meanings, the hidden depths, the connections and the context are all formed in the mind of the receiver meaning that such music gets to live, to be reinvented, to be imbued with new meaning every time it is heard. And that is a beautiful thing.
