Winter Moonlight represents a gorgeous full-circle for Russian pianist and composer Evgeny Grinko. Across these ten songs, Grinko pushes his melodic sensibilities to the absolute zenith with a patient elegance and little accentuation beyond the glassy figures he’s crafted here. Recalling the emotional potency of Max Richter’s piano-based reveries as well as the filmic drama of Philip Glass’ score work, Winter Moonlight is the latest achievement in what’s already been an incredible career for Grinko.Grinko’s latest is another brilliant step forward in this chapter of his musical career, which started in earnest with his study of guitar while absorbing the sounds of pop culture in his native Zukhovsky. “I loved music in the movies,” he recalls, while also citing iconoclastic artists like Frank Zappa, the Chemical Brothers, and the Prodigy as early founts of inspiration. After time hitting the skins in various noise and rock bands—including an ensemble that counted late Can godhead Damo Suzuki as a member—Grinko started tickling the ivories by his lonesome in earnest around 2007. “I was alone and just playing my piano,” he recalls. “It felt quite natural.”After years of toiling away, Grinko had a breakthrough in visibility with his 2010 composition “Valse,” which went massively viral after uploading a video of himself performing the song on Facebook. The success of “Valse” led to demands for live performances; during his inaugural gig in Istanbul, he was asked to perform “Valse” a whopping three times. “I was a bit nervous, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to perform as a solo artist,” he chuckles while regarding his beginnings. “It's much safer to be a musician in a band. When you’re the main person it's a bit more pressure.”If there’s nerves present, Grinko certainly doesn’t show it: His body of work has unfurled over the last decade and a half in impressive form, a series of releases that have led to Winter Moonlight—a spiritual successor to his 2011 EP Winter Sunshine that is meant to showcase just how far he’s come since first pulling up the bench. “I wanted to show how my path evolved,” he explains. “It's still a reference to that imaginary world that Winter Sunshine evoked, but it's darker. I just wanted to create something beautiful and have the music speak for itself.”Many of these compositions date back to the period of time—2008 to 2009, to be exact—that Grinko was recording Winter Sunshine; thematically, its sweep captures the thawing that takes place during seasonal transition, from the chilling melancholia of “Glare of Us” to the sunburst theatrics of “Ticket to the Rome.” The accompaniments are sparse but deeply felt; a touch of synthesizer underneath the searching “Evening Bell,” a trio of violas fluttering around the central melody of “Melting.” For the quiet glow of “Mr. Squirrel” (its name borrowed from one of Grinko’s late pets), he enlisted American vocalist SVRCINA to add lovely swells of wordless melody to its framework.“The idea to add wordless vocals came after the composition had been finished,” he explains while talking about the song’s composition. “I’d never worked with vocals in my music before and the inspiration simply came to me one day to do it with this track. I was excited to see the results. Initially, I’d planned to include both a male and female voice, but SVRCINA did such an incredible job with both parts that it was clear no further work was needed.”Such discovery continues to drive Grinko, who now splits time between Istanbul and Berlin after having to leave Russia in 2022 following an arrest for taking part in protesting the invasion of Ukraine—and Winter Moonlight stands as a pure encapsulation of what he’s accomplished thus far while leaving the playing field wide open for what he’ll do next. “I look at this project as mirroring the arc of my career thus far,” he explains while reflecting on his artistic journey. “From my humble beginnings as a post-punk drummer, to unexpected stardom in a neoclassical world I still do not feel I fully belong in, and amidst great life change in the process, I look at Winter Moonlight as a perfect representation of myself at this moment in time.”
