Cristofori's Dream

David Lanz's "Cristofori's Dream" is an homage — to Bartolomeo Cristofori, the Italian instrument maker credited with inventing the piano — and it carries all the weight of that tribute in its opening bars, which feel like an entrance into a very old, very beautiful building. The piece begins with a simple motif that spirals outward in both hands, gradually revealing itself as something grander than it first appeared. The production is lush by new age standards: the piano recording is warm and resonant, the lower register carrying real depth, and subtle orchestral textures eventually emerge beneath the keyboard writing, giving the piece a cinematic quality without tipping into kitsch. Lanz plays with genuine technique, and the arpeggiated figures in the right hand have velocity and shape — this is not background music that asks nothing of the listener. Emotionally, the piece moves through wonder, melancholy, and something like reverence for the long chain of human ingenuity and craft that leads from a seventeenth-century Florentine workshop to a modern recording studio. It imagines the inventor hearing his creation for the first time, the impossible surprise of it. Released in 1988, it found its audience in people for whom instrumental piano music offered a form of emotional articulation that words could not provide — and it still serves that function, best encountered through good headphones, eyes closed, with time enough to let it complete its arc.