Borah Bergman, Roscoe Mitchell

The Italian Concert is a duo album by pianist Borah Bergman and saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, on alto and soprano, released by Soul Note in 2002. Despite the title it joins two sessions. The first four tracks were recorded live in Bolzano on 30 June 1995, the last two six months earlier, on 19 December 1994, at Seltzer Sound in New York. All six pieces are credited to the two players together, and Art Lange wrote the liner notes, dated January 2000.

The concert opens with At Any Given Moment, seventeen minutes long, followed by Riding The Crest, When The Night Turns Around and Grab It. The two studio pieces, First Piece and Tides, last four and six minutes. Fabrizio Dall'Oca, Jon Rosenberg and Paul Geluso engineered the recordings, Flavio Bonandrini produced, and the cover uses a work by Alain Kirili. Chris Kelsey wrote about two of the tracks for Jazz.com. In At Any Given Moment he heard Mitchell, a good foil for Bergman, creating an illusion of space with long sustained tones often more than an octave apart. The piece builds slowly and rises to several smaller climaxes rather than one big one, "thrown into relief by the surrounding quiet". Riding The Crest goes the other way: Bergman plays fast, convoluted lines in each hand, often against each other, while Mitchell on soprano uses circular breathing, and Kelsey called the result "a tempest of swirling textures without pause".

This is the original Soul Note CD 121342-2, released in 2002.