Her First Dance is a programme of solos, duos and one trio by the Ukrainian-born, Oslo-based pianist Misha Alperin, released by ECM in February 2008. It was his first new recording in about a decade, after Night and At Home, both recorded in 1998. Alperin's writing sits between chamber jazz, improvisation and folk melody, and the album places it with two partners who know it closely.
The German cellist Anja Lechner, of the Rosamunde Quartett, had played on Night. The Russian horn player Arkady Shilkloper, here on French horn and flugelhorn, had been Alperin's partner since their duo album Wave of Sorrow in 1990. The session took place in July 2006 at the Auditorio of Radio Svizzera in Lugano, in collaboration with RSI Rete Due. Stefano Amerio was the engineer and Manfred Eicher produced.
Nine of the ten pieces are Alperin's, and several are for piano alone. The opening Vayan sets quick, buzzing figures in the right hand over slow countermelodies, and Jump moves between coquettish and frenzied. The title track is a duo for piano and flugelhorn built on a gentle, child-like dance figure. Tiflis is the only trio, and in The Russian Song, Shilkloper's one composition, horn and cello play without piano. Lechner joins the piano in duo on A New Day and Frozen Tears. The album closes with Via Dolorosa, at over seven minutes the longest piece, for piano alone. Many themes sound like half-remembered folk tunes, often left to hang in silence.
Reviewers in Britain and the United States heard the compositions as the core of the record. John Fordham in The Guardian admired the album's keyboard virtuosity and wrote that Tiflis "displays a horn sound you could warm your hands on". Thomas Conrad of JazzTimes concluded that "Alperin touches the piano, and gets a ringing sound from it, like no one in jazz". In Jazzpodium, Heribert Ickerott called it music that is not jazz and yet part of it, romantic and contemplative at once. Ray Comiskey of The Irish Times heard compositions that belong fully to neither jazz nor classical music.
This is the CD edition, ECM 1995, first released on 12 February 2008.
