Piano

“This was my higher power putting me here. This needed to happen,” Armin van Buuren says of his new classical project. Piano is a collection of 15 short pieces for piano and strings, all composed, performed, and produced by van Buuren. Not that we needed confirmation of his musical powers, but van Buuren proves himself a pianist of considerable expressive talent, with a melodic instinct that draws simultaneously on his love of classical music and on his life as today’s foremost trance DJ. “Sonic Samba,” featuring cellist Gavriel Lipkind, has anthemic qualities, while the ambient “Clouded Window” blends classical grace and cutting-edge technology with its use of a mic’d drone. And in the waltz-like, bittersweet “Longing,” prompted by van Buuren’s time on the road away from his family, you can sense an artist whose classical journey has well and truly begun. Armin van Buuren’s classical calling came to him after a grueling promotional tour of America’s East Coast in early 2020 left him questioning his love of music. “The shows were amazing, they were all sold out, but I ran against a brick wall and a kind of a depression,” the Dutch DJ tells Apple Music Classical. “I was like, ‘OK, I’m not happy.’” van Buuren embarked on a course of therapy that challenged him to question his identity: “Who’s Armin van Buuren? Who do I want to be?” And then, just weeks later, Covid hit. “That period was kind of a savior for me,” he says. He quit drinking, announced to the world that he was taking a sabbatical, and set about rebuilding himself. “That’s when I found my real love for music again,” he reveals. “And right at the same time, my brother introduced me to Geronimo Snijtsheuvel, a piano teacher who’s trained in classical and jazz to conservatory level. We started playing Satie and Chopin, and it was great. But, in all honesty, when he came a week later, I hadn’t practiced because I was too busy in the studio.” Soon, however, instead of learning pieces van Buuren was using them as starting points for his own ideas, and piano lessons morphed into composition classes. “I’d come up with the basic ideas… but Geronimo helped me with his musical skill and knowledge, and he started explaining all the scales and chords to me, and how they could resolve.” With Snijtsheuvel as his mentor, van Buuren turned his ideas into 15 standalone pieces, and conceived the string parts as simple MIDI files, ready for translation onto manuscript. In January 2024, van Buuren made the bold decision to record each track in a single take at ConcertLab, Utrecht’s state-of-the-art recording studio. “Every day I would be in the gym, and then spend two, three hours rehearsing at the piano, trying to play the pieces flawlessly. Then I’d drive to ConcertLab. I had seven days and 15 pieces to record.” When van Buuren heard the strings alongside him for the first time, he experienced a catharsis. “I had tears rolling on my face and I couldn’t stop it,” he reveals. “I was like, ‘This is where I need to be.’” Indeed, some of Piano’s most touching tracks, including “Soaring Kite” and “Ballerina,” are scored in 3/4, the time signature of the waltz. “We have triplets in trance, but we don’t have waltzes. And I love waltzes—there’s something romantic about them, but you would never consider writing them in an electronic dance situation. I hope to maybe translate the waltz into a trance song one day.” Van Buuren’s interest in classical music has been bubbling on the surface since childhood when his father sowed early musical seeds. Joep van Buuren, now in his late seventies, still presents a weekly classical show on the Dutch radio station Studio Alphen. “He took me to the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam many times,” Armin van Buuren remembers; “my brother and I sometimes hated it, but I guess he did influence us in a very positive way, because I’ve always been open to classical music.” Joep’s musical influence on Armin, however, wasn’t confined to classical, crossing over into the realms of electronic music. “He used to listen to Klaus Schulze—he was really into experimental stuff. And there was a time in the ’90s when he used to listen a lot to Jean-Michel Jarre, which is early electronic music. I remember, too, that I’d come downstairs and my dad would be blasting Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and my brother would be blasting the Prodigy, and my dad would just rave to it. There was kind of a friendly musical competition in our house, and that has been hugely important to me. “I grew up listening to classical music, but the intention for doing this album wasn't to create classical music, nor to stay away from it,” continues van Buuren. “It was just making something, creating, which is something that comes from my gut. It’s the reason why I’ve been put on this planet, to create. When people come up to me say, ‘Oh, you saved my life with your music.’ I mean that’s… oh my God.”