The River is the first duo album by the Norwegian pianist Ketil Bjørnstad and the American cellist David Darling, released by ECM in 1997. Bjørnstad took the melodic clarity of William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons as a point of departure, and the two musicians improvised outward from it. The result is twelve numbered parts that play as one unbroken piece of chamber music.
The idea came during the sessions for Bjørnstad's quartet album The Sea, from what ECM describes as "an untypically calm duo sequence" between piano and cello. The River was recorded in May 1995 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, with Jan Erik Kongshaug engineering and Manfred Eicher producing. ECM points to the grounding in classical and 20th-century music the two share. Bjørnstad put it plainly: "David has a historic knowledge of music." He also wrote the liner notes, and had been studying late Renaissance music. In the studio he found that a single Byrd piece set the course: "Then the music began to flow." By then film directors, Michael Mann among them, had used Darling's cello improvisations. Music by both players is heard in Godard's For Ever Mozart.
Byrd is credited with the first and third parts, Gibbons with the brief twelfth that closes the album, so the record opens and ends inside Renaissance material. The other nine are by Bjørnstad, one of them shared with Darling. Most of the pieces run between three and six minutes, and the longest, the seventh, reaches seven and a half. ECM describes the album as steadier and more intimate than The Sea, and the tempo rarely rises above a walk.
The Sydney Morning Herald called the album "an unforgettable listening experience". It also wrote that "the boundaries between composition and improvisation are blurred beyond recognition." ECM later counted it among the runaway successes of its 1997 programme. The duo returned to Byrd and Gibbons on Epigraphs, and both players also continued with Bjørnstad's quartet on The Sea II.
This is the CD edition, ECM 1593, first released in 1997, in a jewel case with O-card and a cover by Mayo Bucher.
