I should admit something up front: I’ve been listening to Raíz y Recuerdo in a way that probably does it a disservice. I kept putting it on during work — emails, editing, the usual low-grade administrative suffering — and for the first two passes, it functioned beautifully as atmosphere. Warm piano, unhurried guitar, cello entering like a late guest who knows they’re welcome. Only on the third listen, headphones on, nothing else open, did I realize I’d been hearing the album without actually listening to it. And those are two very different experiences.

Jordi Forniés carries the kind of biography that makes you pay closer attention before you press play. A PhD in Chemistry. A visual art career spanning fifty-plus solo exhibitions across ten countries, with connections to the Venice Biennale and World Expo Dubai. Senior leadership at Meta. A former Decca Records US and Universal Music Classics artist with more than fifty releases to his name. Ten years of classical piano training at the Conservatori Professional de Música de Vila-seca. I list these because they genuinely raise a question I kept circling back to while listening: does this kind of cross-disciplinary life make the music more precise or more restless? On Raíz y Recuerdo, I think the answer is both, and I mean that as a compliment — though maybe not an uncomplicated one.

Recorded at the Auditori Josep Carreras in Vila-seca, Tarragona, and produced across Australia and Singapore, the album features Forniés on piano, Lucas González on classical guitar, and Štěpán Švestka on cello. Sixteen pieces. Three instruments. Everything acoustic, everything played. The mastering by Boris Milan — nine-time Grammy winner, which is a phrase I’ll never get tired of reading — gives everything a clear, unvarnished presence. You can hear the room. You can hear the physical weight of the piano’s lower register. The cover artwork, a pencil drawing of a hand holding a small shell by Japanese artist Chizuru Masumura, sets the tone honestly: something fragile, held carefully, studied at close range.

Here’s what I keep coming back to. The opening track, “Volví a Encontrar,” pairs Forniés’ piano with González’s guitar in a way that sounds, genuinely, like two people remembering the same moment from slightly different angles. There’s a synchronicity to it that still feels loose, alive — it breathes. The guitar meets the piano on equal footing, and both instruments seem to be arriving at the same place from different directions. I have a theory about this, probably wrong, but I think the emotional charge of this track comes from that sense of mutual discovery — two voices finding each other mid-phrase. When a piece opens an album this well, it creates a problem for everything that follows, and I’ll get to that.

“De Un Lugar Profundo” is where I’d tell someone to start if they wanted one track to decide whether this album is for them. It unfolds slowly — almost stubbornly slowly — and rewards that patience. The melody opens up in increments, each instrument taking on a weight that feels earned rather than assigned. There’s a passage about two-thirds through where the cello drops into something low and sustained while the piano carries a figure that keeps climbing, and the tension between those two gestures is genuinely dramatic. I played this track five times in a row on a Tuesday afternoon, which is either a recommendation or a confession about my Tuesday.

By contrast, I want to be transparent about “Antes De Ser Hablado.” It’s delicate work, and the harmonic shifts introduce a new color to the album’s palette — there’s a pivot point midway through where the melodic vocabulary changes noticeably, and I appreciate the ambition. But after the depth of “De Un Lugar Profundo,” it felt, on first listen, like the album was pulling back when I wanted it to press further. On later listens that impression softened. I lean toward thinking it serves the album’s larger arc, though I’m honestly still deciding whether it fully earns its position in the sequence or whether it’s a necessary breath the record needed to take before moving on. Sometimes a rest is structural. Sometimes it’s just a rest.

What I find most interesting about “En Silencio” is how it redefines the relationship between the three instruments. Where “Volví a Encontrar” was a dance — synchronized, romantic — “En Silencio” is a conversation. Švestka’s cello enters with a kind of gentle authority, and the dynamic shifts from unison to call-and-response. There’s a dreamy, almost suspended quality here, the sort of thing that makes you hold still and wait for what comes next. Forniés has talked about memory as the album’s emotional center, and this track is where that theme becomes audible rather than conceptual — you hear the act of remembering itself, hesitant and warm.

“En Sólo Dos Días” deserves its own paragraph for one reason: Forniés’ piano work here carries a specific emotional mixture — melancholy folded into doubt folded into something that might be hope — that the album reaches only here, and with this concentration. The melody moves through changes that feel consequential. Each phrase arrives with a sense of having traveled some distance to get there. I’d recommend this track to anyone, including people who rarely spend time with contemporary classical music, because the emotional logic is so clear it lands on its own terms. Whether that accessibility is a strength or a concession depends on what you want from a record like this. I think it’s a strength.

Several of the middle tracks — and with sixteen pieces, there is a substantial middle — work best understood as a single sustained mood rather than as individual statements. They share a vocabulary of gentle arpeggios, measured pacing, and melodic figures that circle rather than resolve. Taken together, they establish a kind of emotional continuity that the more distinct tracks can push against. Honestly, some of them held my attention more than others across multiple listens. But I also recognize that an album built around memory and return earns the right to let certain passages blur together. There’s something honest about allowing that.

The closing pair — “Con Tu Presencia” and “Más Cerca Que Nunca” — handles the ending well. “Con Tu Presencia” builds pace in a way that feels new for the album, its rhythm quickening toward something that almost feels urgent, a genuine climax that the record has been quietly preparing for. And then “Más Cerca Que Nunca” does what a final track should do: it lets everything go. The melody unwinds, the sound softens, and what remains is a particular kind of warmth that sits close to sadness without tipping into it. I finished the album and sat with it for a minute, which — I know this sounds like a cliché a music critic would say, so I’ll rephrase — I kept my headphones on and let the silence stay. That usually means something.

One structural detail worth noting: the sixteen Spanish titles, read in sequence, form a poetic sentence. Whether most listeners will notice or pursue this, I’m unsure — but it tells you something about how Forniés thinks. He’s composing in layers — musical, linguistic, visual — and the album rewards the kind of attention that moves between them. Whether you engage with that architecture or simply let the music do its work at surface level, Raíz y Recuerdo holds together either way. That’s a harder thing to achieve than it looks.

Forniés has described this music as an extension of himself, and I believe him — though I’d add that it’s an extension shaped by distance. He lives far from Spain, and the album is audibly the work of someone reaching back toward something rather than standing inside it. That gap between the person and the place, the present and the memory, gives Raíz y Recuerdo its particular gravity. The tension between roots and departure stays open at the end, deliberately so. The album holds both, and seems content to keep holding.

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