On The River of Anyder the Italian pianist Stefano Battaglia leads his trio through ten new pieces, each named after an imaginary or legendary place. The title river runs through Thomas More's Utopia of 1516, where it brings pure water to the island's capital. Battaglia set out to write songs and dances untouched by the sophistication of contemporary musical language, pieces that, in his words, "might have been played on archaic instruments a thousand years ago".
Born in Milan in 1965 and trained as a classical pianist, Battaglia first played baroque and 20th-century repertoire before turning to improvisation. His ECM output began with the double album Raccolto and continued with Re: Pasolini, on which bassist Salvatore Maiore and drummer Roberto Dani also appear. The three recorded this album in November 2009 at the Auditorio Radiotelevisione Svizzera in Lugano, in collaboration with RSI Rete Due. Stefano Amerio was the engineer and Manfred Eicher produced. The booklet pairs the pieces with texts by More, Francis Bacon, Rumi, Rimbaud, Hildegard von Bingen and Black Elk.
The places are drawn from very different books. Minas Tirith, the opening track, is the capital of Gondor in Tolkien, and it unfolds over rising piano arpeggios shared with Maiore's bass. In Ararat Dance Maiore opens with a bass line that recalls a sitar, before the piano takes the lead above Dani's crashing cymbals. Bensalem and Return to Bensalem refer to the island of Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. The fifteen-minute Sham-bha-lah, linked in the booklet to Hildegard, works on a slow, droning pulse. The record closes with the miniature Anywhere Song, which takes its cue from a vision of Black Elk.
In All About Jazz, John Kelman heard a lyricism that recalled ECM's 1970s pianists and called it "one of the year's most beautiful piano recordings". Stuart Nicholson wrote in Jazzwise that it was "easily Battaglia's best album to date", with a darkness at the heart of its quietly probing music. Fred Grand of Jazz Journal found it more direct and accessible than his earlier, riskier ECM work.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2151, first released on 26 August 2011.
