Jazz
ACT Music · 28 August 2026
“Endless” was recorded live and without an audience at the Krzysztof Penderecki European Centre for Music in Lusławice, one of Poland’s major concert halls, used here as a studio. The decision shows: the recording is intimate, at times close to fragile, and the four players leave silence between phrase and answer instead of filling the room. Eleven tracks, and the longest doesn’t quite reach six and a half minutes.
Adam Bałdych’s quartet is European from four places at once: the Polish violinist, Italian Daniele di Bonaventura on bandoneon, Swedish Jacob Karlzon on piano and Michel Benita, French and born in Algeria, on double bass. Bałdych’s sound comes out of one specific technical decision. He alternates a standard violin with a replica Renaissance instrument tuned lower than the modern standard, which widens his range downwards: on the title track, in duet with the bandoneon, the violin ends up with the depth of a cello. Every piece is his except a “Gnossienne” by Satie. “Rainbow” is a folk-inflected lament with di Bonaventura underneath; “Shine” and “Horizon” are Karlzon’s territory, and the piano solo on the first is the album’s high point; and “Michalina”, three minutes eight, closes with violin and bass both pizzicato, which is an unusual way to leave.
With this material the quartet rarely plays as a quartet. The album is made almost entirely of duets (violin with bandoneon, violin with piano, violin with bass) and the four of them seldom carry a whole piece, so eleven tracks pass inside a single dynamic register with nothing to break it. That’s consistent with the room it was recorded in and with the repertoire, and it’s also the album’s ceiling: the Bałdych of the virtuoso attack isn’t here. It arrives nineteen months after “Portraits” (January 2025), also on ACT, with a line-up the label hadn’t recorded him with before.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Aina Torrents