Piano Essays * 2020
(Porto, Portugal)

After nine years performing nightly as a jazz pianist in a downtown Porto (2009-2018), António Baía Reis stepped away from public playing and entered a deliberate interval of silence, an inward practice of playing only for himself at home. From that retreat emerged Piano Essays (2020): a suite of intimate piano essays that treat composition as self-listening, memory-work, and speculative reflection.

 

The series moves between original pieces, such as A Garden on an Island, Notes on Futurism, and Remembrance (Chapters I & II), and works shaped in dialogue with admired lineages, from the spectral lyricism of Ryuichi Sakamoto to a personal re-encounter with Portuguese modernism through a variation on “Acordai” by António Lopes-Graça.

 

Rather than concert repertoire, these are “essays” in the literal sense: intimate forms where touch, resonance, and restraint become a kind of thinking.​