The conceit is simple enough to state and difficult enough to pull off: take twelve Polish folk motifs, strip them of their communal, dancing-in-the-village-square origins, and let them breathe as solitary piano pieces. The lead single, “Across My Garth,” is the clearest demonstration of the method. Built from the old tune “W moim ogr\u00f3decku,” it trades the original’s skip and lilt for something closer to a held breath. A garth, we’re reminded, is an enclosed garden \u2014 private, walled, unhurried \u2014 and Sanakiewicz treats the piano the same way, as an enclosure in which a single note can be left to hang until it fades on its own terms rather than being pushed along by the next.<\/p>
Listeners who’ve spent time with Hania Rani, Nils Frahm or Lubomyr Melnyk will recognise the terrain immediately: the pedal work that blurs harmonic edges, the tempo that refuses to hurry, the sense that silence is doing as much compositional labour as any chord. But where Frahm often builds toward accumulation \u2014 layers stacking until the room feels full \u2014 Sanakiewicz seems more interested in subtraction. Each phrase on “Across My Garth” sounds like it’s been sanded down from something busier, the folk tune’s original ornamentation quietly filed away until only its skeleton, lovely and a little melancholy, remains.<\/span><\/p> What’s most persuasive about the piece, and presumably the album it introduces, is the sheer confidence of its restraint. Solo piano records built on national folk material can tip easily into either kitsch nostalgia or academic dryness. This one avoids both traps by refusing to treat the source melody as a museum piece. Sanakiewicz doesn’t preserve “W moim ogr\u00f3decku” so much as interrogate it, turning it over in his hands until its familiar shape gives way to something more private and considerably stranger. Maciej Wo\u017anica’s mastering keeps the recording close and intimate \u2014 you can hear the mechanics of the instrument, the felt on the hammers, the room itself \u2014 which suits music this reliant on nuance rather than volume.<\/span><\/p> Sanakiewicz has described this as the quietest record of his career, and after decades spent serving other musicians’ visions, that quietness reads less like modesty and more like a considered artistic choice. Accompanists learn to listen before they play; on the evidence of “Across My Garth,” Sanakiewicz has simply turned that listening inward. If the rest of *Unfolked Piano* holds to this single’s standard \u2014 spacious, unshowy, faithful to its folk bones while quietly rearranging them \u2014 Polish traditional music may have found an unexpected and rather elegant new home: not in the village square, but in the enclosed garden of a solo piano, late at night, with the windows open.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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