Keith Jarrett

★★★★ La Fenice ECM. CD

Entrancing concert from jazz’s pre-eminent pianist. In 2006, Keith Jarrett sat down at a grand piano in the opulent surroundings of Gran Teatro La Fenice, one of Venice’s hallowed classical music venues, and proceeded to enthral an audience of 1,100 people with a 97-minute recital that, for many of its attendees, affirmed his genius as an improviser. After languishing in the archives, that legendary concert is finally liberated from ECM’s vaults and released as a 2-CD set. It’s dominated by a titular eight-part suite, a free-flowing torrent of extemporisation which stylistically runs the gamut from shimmering blues ballads and folk-tinged reveries to mesmerising exercises in atonality. Noteworthy, too, is Jarrett’s jaunty rendering of the jazz standard, Stella By Starlight. With its panoply of moods, La Fenice not only underlines Jarrett’s supreme technical ability but also, more importantly, highlights his gift for sonic storytelling.