The two pieces here are played by Dutch pianists Reinier van Houdt and Dante Boon- and both players approaching Frey's compositions with extreme care, a very delicate & controlled touch, and great patience. With the seemingly 2019 live record captured with wonderful clarity and depth. This most certainly is music for a quiet space, so you can fully take in both the carefully & nuanced playing, and Frey often extremely fragile compositions.

So first up we have 2019’s Toucher L’air( touch the air)- the piece is broken up into seven parts, with each part running between one and eight minutes- though due to the spaced quality of the composition it does just feel like one long piece. The piece is built around a series of very slow-moving patterns, which at times hint at been both harmonically felt & forlorn mood, yet more often than not they never fully fulfil their promise, as we shift to another pattern. So as a result there is a feeling of lulling jarring-ness about the piece, yet it never sounds awkward or angular- been more lightly fraught & slightly lost. For the first six tracks, this very spaced & stark feel carries on, with fleeting moments where the two players meet. The final track of the piece certainly starts off much more rapid & even pacey, compared with what went before- with the pair weaving together more formal & defined melody lines, but as we go on this once again starts to drift & break, as each player slows his pace & note weave.

Lastly, we of course have Entre Les Deux l’instant(Between the two moments) from 2017/2018- and this is presented as a single thirty three minute track. This composition is based around two key elements ‘Melody’ and ‘List of Sounds’, and a set of rules.
The melody starts with the first pianist, then continues with the second, going back and forth between two pianists through-out the pieces unfold. When one pianist is playing the melody, the second plays notes from List of Sounds- which is given in order in the score. The pianists are allowed to add in extra notes to the original melody, or double these notes.  The two elements are played simultaneously by two pianists but the timings are flexible & up to each pianist to decide. So as you’d expect with such a set-up, the composition feels like a very languid game of slightly harmonic chess, as we get the drifting structure of the melody meeting with the more pattern-based list of sounds. It’s very much a work you have to concentrate on- listening for both the shape of the melody, its subtle changes, and how/ what the pair add into the changing structure of the whole thing.  On paper the idea of this composition is quite intriguing, and some of this certainly does come into the music it’s self. But personally I felt neither the melody, or the list of sound elements where very rewarding.  So you have none of the hypnotic & atmospheric patterns or tones of say someone like Morton Feldman. But instead, we get an often quite slow jarring structure, which in its self is quite rewarding- it just didn't stand up over a thirty-three-minute composition.

It’s certainly nice to see more of Jürg Frey piano compositions been released, and both Houdt and Boon do a splendid job at playing both works here. I very much enjoyed the first piece, but was less sold by the second- but did admire the concept behind it.