LEO Blanco had an unusual question ahead of the UK tour that brings the Venezuelan piano virtuoso to Scotland for five solo concerts at the end of June.

Would any of the venues, Blanco wanted to know, have a belfry nearby?

Blanco's concern wasn't for possible interruptions to his concentration. Since he recorded his beautiful new album, Pianoforte, he has been contemplating a repeat of the opportunity that presented itself during Pianoforte's live recording sessions: collaborating with church bells – real live ones rather than the digitally recorded, available at the flick of a switch alternative.

Blanco's experience with the bells that appear on Pianoforte came about when he returned to his home town, Merida in Andean Venezuela, with the idea of recording a solo piano album. He was pretty sure he'd find plenty of inspiration in the city where he grew up playing piano and also violin in the youth orchestra; he just needed to find the best piano Merida had to offer.

"We found the ideal instrument and the perfect venue in Teatro Cesar Rengifo, a lovely theatre with quite a lot of character in the centre of town," says Blanco, who is the proud holder of a Bank of Scotland Herald Angel, earned for his outstanding performances on the Edinburgh Fringe in 2006. "It's quite close to the cathedral but no-one had ever noticed the cathedral bells encroaching on any performances there and so we set up, ready to record two nights, one in private, the other in front of an audience." And it was during the first night that the bells made their first impact. Undaunted, Blanco incorporated their tolling into one of his piano pieces, playing gorgeously sympathetic chords. Then, on the second night, after the audience had left and he and some friends had met up for a beer, he returned to the theatre to capture the tolling of midnight and work it into what has become Pianoforte's final track, Haiku For Midnight Bells And Piano.

And there the story of the bells might have ended but for the slightly embarrassing information coming to light that the bells in question didn't belong to the cathedral. They were much closer than that.

"It turns out that Teatro Cesar Rengifo began life as a seminary back in the 1780s and after the religious order moved into different premises in another part of town, it eventually became part of the university," he says. "In the old days its bells were the most important indication of the time of day for people in Merida, and they've recently been renovated and reactivated. But we didn't know that."

There was something else in the theatre's history that, as it were, chimed with Blanco's modus operandi. Between its use as a seminary and a concert hall, it had been the cinema that housed only the sixth projector in the world made by the Edison Company. As someone who often visualises movies in his head as he improvises, Blanco finds this quite apt, although it wasn't until Pianoforte had been completed that the theatre's history became known to him.

"I'm not sure that having that knowledge at the time would have changed anything," says Blanco, who is professor of piano at Berklee School of Music in Boston. "I do tend to picture scenes as I'm playing and I can work up soundtracks to quite involved screenplays spontaneously. Sometimes an improvisation will lead me into an established composition. Other times, I'll create something completely new. There's one track on Pianoforte that was entirely improvised and someone said it goes as far as introducing a big movie ballad, a sort of Up Where We Belong moment. I wasn't really conscious of doing that at the time but to get that sort of response shows that I must be communicating at least some of these images through the music to the listener."

Leo Blanco's UK tour opens at the Forge, London, on Monday, June 24, then plays City Halls, Glasgow, Wednesday 26; Blue Lamp, Aberdeen, Thursday 27; Queen's Hall, Edinburgh, Friday 28; Eden Court, Inverness, Saturday 29; and Carnegie Hall, Dunfermline, Sunday, 30.

Music