Ontvluchtingen, the new album by Bulgarian-Luxembourgish composer Albena Petrovic (b.1965), unfolds gradually. With a concerto, four miniatures, The Invisible Window and two exotic dances, the program appears as a loose collection, but anyone who dismisses the title too quickly as a programmatic indication does the album a disservice: this is not light salon music for four hands, but a richly layered universe in which escape is not flight, but a way to explore another reality.
I discovered Petrovic's music several years ago through Bruggen van Liefde, on which pianist Plamena Mangova takes on her piano works. That CD left me wanting more; Ontvluchtingen effortlessly fulfills that promise and adds a series of compelling works to that picture.
Petrovic, born in Sofia and resident in Luxembourg since 1996, presents this idea herself as the common thread of the album. The break with the East European system in the nineties brought not only a geographical distance from her native country, but also — as she describes it — the loss of the taken-for-granted anchor of cultural identity. In her own words, the fragments of her memories feel "more like fiction than my real life". This alienation, the awareness that the self must constantly reinvent itself, runs as a common thread through the works on this CD. The music supports this reading convincingly: not as comfort music, but as an attempt to step into another reality, that of dream, fantasy, and dark beauty.
The Together with Fournel, she forms a dynamic duo: "In a duo concerto there is both dialogue and fusion." She feels with Fournel a natural breath and musical sensitivity that align perfectly: "There is something effortless in our communication." — originally written in 2019 for piano and orchestra and reworked after the pandemic silence for two pianos when the planned premiere was postponed — opens the album from a consistently implemented tonal perspective. Petrovic builds her harmonies from tense sonorities that continuously clash, without ever becoming harsh or aggressive. Especially in the opening pages, a tension emerges that does not resolve but gradually develops its own logic, without the composer losing sight of the beauty of sound.
When you then hear Zand van Vergetelheid and The Invisible Window , you discover Petrovic's most distinctive signature: the piano as an expanded percussion instrument. Tibetan singing bowls, tambourines, glissandi across the strings, and palms striking the instrument's case give the sound image a dark, tangible presence. Musicologist Iliya Gramatikov described this approach as "expansive reductivism" — with a limited arsenal of interventions, without extensive instrumentation or complex harmonic language, Petrovic manages to build a remarkably rich and layered sound palette. In The Invisible Window, originally written for piano and harp, a harmonic ambiguity and play with silence echo Debussy, but filtered through a pronounced introspective sensitivity and without simply imitating Debussy's impressionistic sound world.
The title cycle Ontvluchtingen — four miniatures that gradually evolve from one hand to four hands, supplemented with two singing bowls and two tambourines — forms the heart of the album. In the final section, the pianists must operate both keyboard and percussion simultaneously. It delivers a skillful example of musical choreography that never gives the impression of mere effect-seeking. To conclude, two of the five Exotische Dansen op. 264, a mature counterpart to Petrovic's youthful work for young pianists. Their playful character provides a welcome breath of air after so much introspection. After the sonorous darkness that preceded it, this lightness sounds almost like a liberation, though these dances linger less than the more layered works that sustain the album.
For this repertoire, Romain Nosbaum and Florin Mantale prove to be a convincing duo. Nosbaum, a pianist with a sensitive, romantically trained touch, has already recorded Petrovic's complete piano works for GEGA New and thus knows her musical language from within. Mantale, trained under Naum Grubert at the Amsterdam Conservatory and renowned for his luminous, inwardly expressive playing, has formed a piano duo with Nosbaum since 2025. They make music as if this were not their first but their tenth joint recording: in the Concerto , both voices seamlessly switch between leading and accompanying roles, and in the percussive passages of the title cycle, the strikes of singing bowl and key align so precisely that the rhythmic framework never becomes detached from the melodic line. They seek out the percussive fragility of Petrovic's sound world without losing sight of the lyrical undercurrent.
The recording, made in the Salle de Musique de Chambre at the Philharmonie Luxembourg, places both pianos clearly beside each other in the stereo image, with the singing bowls resonating above the sound picture with tangible presence.
Ontvluchtingen is not an album for casual listening. It demands a listener willing to immerse themselves in Petrovic's sonic world, but rewards that attention generously. The music ultimately convinces not because it illustrates a story, but because it possesses its own logic and expressive power: sometimes unruly, often enchanting, and always with a distinctive, recognizable voice. Nosbaum and Mantale give that world an effortless sense of conviction and transform Ontvluchtingen not a flight from reality, but an invitation to hear it differently: an escape that, in sound, ultimately proves to be an arrival.
