We stumbled across the first composition, “Cents, panorama de Clausen au coucher du soleil” (above), on the Luxembourg subreddit. Taken aback by the beauty of his music, we reached out to see if Paolo would be interested in sharing it with the Today audience - and perhaps agree to an interview. We got a yes on both accounts.
Aged 36, Paolo moved to Luxembourg around eleven years ago. Like many others, he says, he arrived to the Grand Duchy to find work in the financial sector.. but music has always been a big interest. As a teenager he played the bass guitar, but in 2015 he started pursuing his passion for the piano.
In fact, he only really started playing after moving to Luxembourg: “after I sat at a public piano with some friends here in Luxembourg, during one of the My Urban Piano events that occur more of less regularly in the summer months.” Fitting, then, that his original compositions are inspired by the city that led him to pursue his passion for the instrument!
Composition isn’t entirely novel to Paolo, though, as he dabbled with songwriting in his youth - but his ideas mainly remained on paper, he says. It was only some three years ago that he first decided to take his composition more seriously, and he recorded his first solo piano piece, “Little Study on Broken Chords.”
While the City itself serves as his main inspiration, the final push came due to the pandemic. “While some of the heaviest restrictions were in place, there wasn’t much to do in the city except going out for a walk,” says Paolo, “and that was a great opportunity to discover new places in the city (and re-discover old ones.”
“One day, walking up from the Grund towards Cents, I found this spot I had never seen before, where I could enjoy a fantastic view of Clausen from above. In that moment, a melody popped up in my mind out of nowhere. In the following days other musical ideas were coming to me during further explorations, like while I was strolling in the city center or walking around the park in Cessange. Finally I decided to sit down at my piano and simply improvise over the few ideas that I could retain, while recording everything. The audio files of those improvisations have just been laying there in my computer for quite a while, and only recently I decided to arrange this music in an orderly manner, write it down and produce a decent recording of it.”
For this particular suite, Paolo says his motivation stems mainly from the sights and landscapes of the city, “but also the feelings, the thoughts and situations experienced while seeing those landscapes.”
We’ve shared the first two compositions in this article, but Paolo assures us there is more to follow: “There will be eight pieces in total. Two are already published, and I hope to complete all the others in the next month or two. The third piece will be dark and heavy-paced while the following ones will be either romantic or more upbeat.”
Paolo can be found through social media under the pseudonym Kalos Piano. He mainly publishes his music through YouTube, but also on Soundcloud and Instagram - and says most of his music can be downloaded for free on his IMSLP page.
All of the links for these can be found below.
YouTube: Kalos Piano
Soundcloud: Kalos Piano
Instagram: Kalos Piano
IMSLP: Paolo Caliò
