Julia Trintschuk

On The Next Door Julia Hülsmann returns with the quartet from 2019’s Not Far From Here, and presents her unique pianistic voice in a varied programme of almost exclusively original music, composed by herself and her colleagues – tenor saxophonist Uli Kempendorff, Marc Muellbauer on double bass and drummer Heinrich Köbberling. A deep respect for the jazz tradition, as cultivated in the post-bop and modal jazz of the 60s, permeates this session and, with the quartet’s modern twist, sets the stage for highly expressive soloing and profound interplay.

When the composer Sergey Akhunov discovered the ground-breaking book of 1947, “Jazz”, by Henri Matisse – a collection of prints of his colourful cut-paper collages – he was struck by its almost surreal nature, and he conceived the idea of composing music with the title “Jazz”, but which, like Matisse’s book, has nothing to do with jazz. That inspiration finally took shape when Julia Igonina and Maxim Emelyanychev commissioned him to compose a work for them. The result was Jazz, a cycle for violin and piano: fifteen miniatures, bearing titles taken from the prints in Matisse’s book. On this new recording, those pieces are brought together with two French masterpieces of the 1940s by Messiaen and Poulenc (whose favourite painter was Matisse), performed by Julia Igonina and Maxim Emelyanychev on period instruments – violin with gut strings and a magnificent 1908 Blüthner piano (part of the collection of the Piano Museum in Rybinsk).