Elias Stemeseder & Thomas Morgan - Io Pur Respiro (2026) [Hi-Res]

Pianist Elias Stemeseder and bass player Thomas Morgan debut on Squama with ‘Io Pur Respiro’. Recorded live at Sala Vanni in Florence, the album shows a duo at the height of their craft with an unmistakable instinct for melody and balance.

Io Pur Respiro (“Yet I breathe”) is the title of an early 17th century madrigal by Italian renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo that’s also the harmonic basis for the album’s opening track Madrigal, Variation, Courante. With two standards from the 1930s (Love Came / I Have The Room Above Her) and two original compositions by Stemeseder there’s 400 years of melodic evolution enshrined in this record. Yet, the music sounds neither new, nor old giving the album a profound sense of timelessness that’s owed to the eternal force of melody and harmony.

Elias Stemeseder was born in rural Austria and started learning the piano from the age of 9. Since his late twenties he has been living in New York and Berlin working with the likes of John Zorn, Christian Lillinger, Anna Webber and Tim Lefebvre
Thomas Morgan grew up in California learning the cello and later switched to the bass. Since moving to New York in 1999, he has become a fixture of the scene, playing in the groups of artists such as Bill Frisell, Paul Motian and Jakob Bro.

Morgan and Stemeseder have known each other for over a decade and had played in various formations before, but never as a duo. The two share a high-risk approach to playing while projecting absolute confidence, being both a playful partner and a safe haven to each other. Their concert in Florence was the second to last of a few shows in Germany, Austria and Italy in the fall of 2024. The plan was to record with producer Martin Brugger and engineer Marco Pulidori the day after the show. Over the course of three hours, up until lunch time, the musicians recorded several takes of the 7 or 8 tracks from their repertoire, cut short at times by the church bell of the nearby Cappella Brancacci. They had taped the show the night before and after reviewing all recordings, decided to go with the live versions, despite the presence of a noisy air conditioning unit and the occasional cough from the audience.

“Playing a show is like telling a story”, says Stemeseder, explaining why these live recordings felt more coherent. “All songs on the setlist are in dialogue with each other and that changes the outcome”.

The spacious, sacral hall of Sala Vanni gives the duo’s music ample room to breathe and grow and dyes it in a distinctive colour. Located inside the monumental complex of Basilica di Santa Maria del Carmine in the Florentine centre, its rich history and aura felt becoming for a project that seeks to dissolve and condense time passed at the same time.