In Russian musicologist Henry Orlov’s book Tree of Music, a chapter titled “A River Without Banks” details a throughline between several types of sacred music, including Gregorian chants, Indian ragas, African drumming, and Indonesian gamelan. Orlov argues that art allows people to become participants in a “higher reality” and experience “symbolically significant change.” Leo Svirsky first learned about music’s transcendent qualities from his childhood piano teacher Irena Orlov, Henry Orlov’s wife. Following her death last year, Svirsky affectionately wrote that she taught him “how music is alive, how when we play music we tell someone’s story.” Dedicated to Irena and borrowing its title from Henry’s writing, River Without Banks is a minimalistic piano record that’s informed by the Orlovs’ grand musical philosophy—Svirsky’s monument to the importance of their teachings.
River Without Banks establishes its overarching mood within the first few seconds. Stately piano notes reverberate, their fluid melodies creating a hypnotic rhythm amplified by simple delay effects. The atmosphere is simultaneously dreamy and homey; the opening track’s title, “Field of Reeds,” refers to the paradisiacal location that ancient Egyptians believed they would travel to in the afterlife. Periodically, sounds that draw attention to Svirsky’s presence (most notably, the thump of the pedals) contribute to the arresting intimacy of the composition and its performance; these quotidian noises ground the sublime piece with a needed sense of humanness, bridging the gap between the earthly and celestial.
Svirsky’s River Without Banks is far more melodic than his previous output. His duo with Katt Hernandez relished in exuberant atonality and a brash style of playing. Heights in Depths, on the other hand, explored static drones and their associated psychoacoustic phenomena. River Without Banks most recalls a mixture of other artists’ works: the relentless piano minimalism of Charlemagne Palestine or Lubomyr Melnyk, the tenderness of Erik Satie’s compositions, the resplendence of new age. It’s all shrouded in a telestic aura, contemplative and heartening and unpretentious. In “Trembling Instants,” cascading piano melodies are enveloped in a cloud of ambience, their continual playing less like rigid latticework than impressionistic filigrees. Equally soothing is the more modest “Fanfare (after Jeromos Kamphuis),” where sparse, delicate chords evoke a sense of serenity. Like Svirsky, the titular Kamphuis also lives in the Hague and has studied under composer Antoine Beuger; the track feels like a small but heartfelt celebration of their friendship.
The majority of the album is characterized by Svirsky’s piano, with other instruments—many of which are played by other musicians—rounding out each track. On “Rain, Rivers, Forest, Corn, Wind, Sand,” the interwoven sounds of double bass, wind gong, and trumpet create layered but cohesive drones. Their unobtrusiveness allows for the piano to freely traverse different rhythms and moods. From expressive tone clusters to a whimsical frolic to a more percussive staccato style, Svirsky’s piano conjures a picturesque view of nature’s wondrous breadth. On the title track, the wavering rhythm mirrors the winding path of a river, while the countless notes feel like the bevy of different microorganisms that thrive therein. The song becomes more robust in its final third when double bass and a Tibetan singing bowl transform the piece into a lush musical tapestry fit for spiritual meditation.
It’s not always easy to tell when River Without Banks’ songs begin and end: The album’s six tracks aren’t considerably different from each other, neither musically nor emotionally. But this uniformity is what makes the album so immersive; it’s easy to become lost in its ruminative tone. In The Tree of Music, Henry Orlov noted that for people who are attuned to a particular type of sacred music—“to whom the music is his breath and movement”—their experience is heightened. They become “one with its flow,” and River Without Banks grants opportunities for just that. Svirsky’s album evokes a mystical sensation Orlov described as an “ever-lasting and therefore timeless now.”
