Rating:
Genre:
Avant Garde
Release Date: 03/25/2008
While the world's populace has made
Viggo Mortensen a household name for his portrayal of
Aragorn in
Peter Jackson's cinematic interpretation of the
Lord of the Rings trilogy, far fewer know him as a fine poet, photographer, and pianist and composer.
Mortensen has assembled quite a shelf of books and CDs. Most of his recorded work focuses on his collaborations with other musicians -- there are five albums' worth of collaborations with vanguard electric supernova guitarist
Buckethead just for starters -- but
Time Waits for Everyone is special in that it is a collections of 18 sound poems for solo piano. These small pieces, ranging in length from a minute to over five minutes, are deeply meditative pieces on place, memory, and even history.
"Treblinka Poem," near the very end of the recording, is unmistakable as an elegy with its deep, resonant tones, allowing each note its place of entry and subtle, natural disappearance as another is introduced, sometimes as the root note of a chord, at other times standing apart from the rest, but always enveloped eventually. The halting high middle-register notes of
"Warzawa Morning Poem" reflect the uncertainty of dislocation in waking to an emerging sunlight.
"Ashes" feels like anything but, its relatively quick -- for these pieces -- tempo gaiting along brightly in a series of majors and sevenths slipping around one another as in a slower minuet. Still others, such as
"München Morning Poem," are played in the highest register of the keyboard. Despite the bright selection of notes, the harshness and the edges in them -- as played by
Mortensen with a restrained percussive touch -- suggest something more ominous and disturbing, especially when compared to the lilting and languid
"Berlin Poem," which offers a series of interlocking harmonic chords that are, at their ends, distributed into something slightly angular and "off."
Time Waits for Everyone is the work of a musician who knows exactly what he's doing, but he allows whatever scene he's hearing a somewhat free rein inside his solos. It is a reflective music to be sure, but there is humor -- and darkness, loss, and love -- in virtually every piece on the recording.
Travis Dickerson's engineering and recording are spot-on, allowing the piano's natural tones their way to ring through, even when they seem a trifle out of place. In other words, this doesn't sound like a recording, but as if
Mortensen were playing, alone, in your parlor or living room and you are eavesdropping on his thoughts.
~Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
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