MICHAEL HOPPE, MARTIN TILLMANN, TIM WHEATER
Afterglow
(p) (c) 1999 Hearts Of Space
13tks/47mins

Imagine: warm summer evening, it is drizzling, you are sitting on a verandah and recollect. What can appear in your memory in these minutes? Maybe you will remember yourself as a child near your parents, you feel the careful hands of mother or father, which support you and do not let you fall. Or, maybe you will see the pictures of your childish games with friends. And you feel yourself so good in this moment, and there is no past, and future does not have any sense. Or, maybe, you will remember your first love, your first kiss, yet very shy, and the eyes of your beloved, in which infinity is reflected… And you will recollect the pleasant moments of your life, you will feel how life will awake inside you with a new power.

I have began my story about the album Afterglow in this way not occasionally. Simply, a three talented musicians have come together. They allowed their emotions flow freely. And this music has preserved all the freedom and frankness of the expression. It is like a momentary photograph, which had rendered the picture of wonderful beauty. Cello by Martin Tillmann, flute by Tim Wheater and keyboards by Michael Hoppe communicate with each other, interlacing into one bonfire of burning emotions. This music contains passion, cordiality, and universal melancholy, and tenderness. And this music has one more paradoxical quality: being academic at the first sight, it nevertheless contains wildness and primitive nakedness. This is how can grieve an open, undefended heart of a loving person, waiting for his beloved. And this heart is longing, wandering and sweetly stops, in foretaste of the meeting… And even the breath disappears somewhere… It just stops… And there is no time… And there is nothing, but Love…

You need to hear this music. It contains many various feelings and shades. And also it is very whole. This album is one big song of Love and Tenderness. Uniting joy and sadness, the musicians invite their listener to open his heart and rise to another, invisible world, which is so Divinely beautiful…

Serge Kozlovsky