La Fenice is the complete solo concert Keith Jarrett gave at the Gran Teatro La Fenice in Venice on 19 July 2006. Its core is an eight-part suite created on the spot, moving from the blues to atonality to aching ballads. A song from The Mikado is placed inside it, and three encores follow. The recording appeared in October 2018. That year the Venice Biennale's festival of contemporary music awarded Jarrett its Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.
It was the first time a jazz musician had received the award. In earlier decades it had gone to composers such as Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, György Kurtág and Steve Reich. By 2006 Jarrett had been making solo, largely improvised recordings for ECM for some thirty-five years. The Venice concert was produced locally by Giuseppe Mormile for Veneto Jazz and recorded by Martin Pearson. Jarrett produced the album, with Manfred Eicher as executive producer. It was mastered in Munich by Christoph Stickel and Eicher.
The first part, nearly eighteen minutes long, is dense and dissonant, chords piling up before breaking into contrapuntal lines. Later sections bring catchy tunes, deep reflection and a kind of boogie-woogie, while Part III returns to the rock-driven, major-key vamping heard in Jarrett's playing since The Köln Concert. After Part VI he turns to The Sun Whose Rays from Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta, played simply and tenderly. The encores are My Wild Irish Rose, a lively Stella by Starlight and his own Blossom. That tune was first heard on the 1974 quartet album Belonging.
Reviewers heard the whole range of his solo work in one evening. In The Observer Dave Gelly wrote that "the breadth of his musical understanding and his power to capture the emotions make him unique". Fred Kaplan in Slate called it "one of Jarrett's best piano solo albums ever", contrasting the knotty improvisations of the first disc with the ballads and covers of the second. In the NZZ am Sonntag Manfred Papst found it no less rewarding than La Scala, his solo concert from Milan's opera house in 1995. He singled out the Stella by Starlight encore.
Released by ECM Records in 2018 as a double CD, ECM 2601/02, in a slim double jewel case with a 12-page booklet.
