Movement lies at the heart of Magic Square, French pianist and composer Melaine Dalibert’s new suite of piano pieces. Movement in this case is not necessarily physical. In fact, given the history of the world for the past couple of years, movement and travel remain, for many, distant dreams.
The travel exhibited in Magic Square is instead that of a different kind: It is the imagination drifting off whilst looking through a window, past the roofs and telephone wires, to a blue sky studded with distant clouds. Soundtracking our brief lapses in attention to reality, our longings for something unreachable, this is music born of and designed for dreaming.
From the bold tenderness of ‘Choral’ — five minutes of slow chords richly ringing with pathos — to ‘Prélude’ and its undulating motif resonating with simplicity, Magic Square is scattered with gentle, soothing music. Balance is achieved with kinetic motion-led pieces, however, such as ‘Perpetuum Mobile’, which bounces and cavorts full of life, and the pop-like structure of ‘Five’, while ‘A Song’, the most melodic piece on Magic Square, is washed with nostalgia.
The album’s title itself, referring to the mathematical game of the same name, points to Dalibert’s past of using mathematical concepts to create music. Throughout, shards of this logical order and repetition can be heard as much as emotion, for example in the seven-beat cycle of ‘Ritornello’, sounding like a restless lullaby.
Moving through what Dalibert himself calls a “fantasy journey”, the landscape of Magic Square is tinged with melancholy. ‘More or Less’ clings to the hope of a faraway vision, space between its undecorated melody providing time to think. It’s the title track, which closes the suite, that brings listeners back to the real world, as rain streams down the window that was, all too briefly, a portal to another world.
