Piano Meditations: Music for Relaxation and Wellbeing

You have to love a composer who offers a piece entitled “Ocean of Relaxation”!

Syversen is a well-known Norwegian New Age keyboardist and composer with CDs in the Top Ten category over many years.  His music is relaxing, healing, meditative, healthful, stress-reducing and peaceful. His typical genre description is ambient/melodic, but I’d include “romantic.”

This 2-disc set features the original versions on disc 1 and multiple radio edits on disc 2.

The tracks on disk 1 run from 9:24 to 20:11 minutes. “Ocean of Relaxation” features singer Helene Edler Lorentzen, who supplies a wordless vocal melody line. This song is quite lovely, reminiscent of some of the soundtrack pieces from “Lord of the Rings” or 19th century romantic piano works by Liszt and his contemporaries. The accompaniment is piano surrounded with rich synthesizer chords. The piano plays a lovely counterpoint to the vocal melody.

“A Peaceful Path to Forever” is over 19 minutes. Syversen has plenty of time to explore and expand on his initial melodic and harmonic statements.  “Golden Forest” is over 20 minutes, so again there is a lengthy exposition on the opening thematic statement. “Inner Journey” is the final piece (13 minutes) and it begins with a quietly contained theme. The song builds up texture and energy as it goes along. The development is more complex than the previous tracks.

Disc 2 provides shorter versions of these four tracks. There are two versions of “Inner Journey”, one of “Ocean of Relaxation”, three of varying lengths of “A Peaceful Path to Forever”, and three of “Golden Forest.” These are quite useful for people preparing rituals or playlists for events and wish to use the briefer cuts of these songs.

Syversen creates piano melodies and chordal progressions that are strongly reminiscent of late romantic piano literature, but free of the Germanic angst and pathos that is often found in classical music. Clearly the composer is striving to offer calm, peaceful, beautiful music to listeners to enjoy without experiencing or evoking a lot of complicated, uncomfortable emotions or memories.

Gorgeous, romantic music! Recommended.

~review by Elizabeth Hazel

Artist: Tron Syversen
TK Music Production, 2012
2 discs.
www.tronmusic.com