“My secret love affair”: That’s how Efrat Alony describes her relationship with the work of Baroque composer Georg Friedrich Händel

The singer, born in Haifa (Israel), who was awarded the 2022 German Jazz Prize for her previous album “Hollywood isn’t Calling” as the best vocal album of the year, has approached Handel’s classical material almost entirely through the lens of jazz—her true musical home. This cross-genre collaboration resulted in a remarkable album, for which Efrat Alony received the OPUS Klassik award last year in the “Classical Without Borders” category.

Originally composed for a quartet featuring vocals and a piano trio, Efrat Alony presents her very personal take on Handel here in a minimalist setting with Philipp Nykrin on piano, with the duo expanding the album’s originally purely acoustic music to include strategically placed electronic sound elements.

“A true supergroup made in Austria. Word artist (and exceptional singer!) Christian Reiner, drummer Herbert Pirker, and guitar god Karl Ritter make pop, rock, soul, and spontaneous literature. Intense, compelling, spontaneous, with chorus melodies for which some would sell their souls. The fact that they shoot from the hip makes it all the more exciting. ‘A squirrel actually has quite a lot to say here in the forest.’ Brilliant, I say.”

This remarkably incisive description of the white walls by Andreas Russ in *Kurier* (June 2009) gives us a glimpse of what to expect when one of the most distinctive ensembles in the world of improvised music takes the stage—here expanded to include the sonic spectrum of the Porgy & Bess Hammond C3 and various synthesizers, played by Philipp Nykrin. A set of purely improvised music. Hop on board—see you at the finish line!