This is the recording debut of Italian sisters Natascia and Raffaella Gazzana, named for the “Five Pieces” for violin and piano by Valentin Silvestrov which conclude the album. These works – a gently-pulsing elegy, a serenade, an intermezzo, a barcarole, a ghostly nocturne – receive their international release here in a context which combines the familiar and the far-flung, as Duo Gazzana finds creative affinities between the music of four very different composers. “The programme as a whole is typical of the duo’s inquiring and sensitive approach to repertory”, writes Paul Griffiths in the liner notes. “What we hear here is a vital freshness”.
Five Pieces - Takemitsu / Hindemith / Janáček / Silvestrov
Duo Gazzana
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06:22 - Sonata in E (1935)
- 2Ruhig bewegt03:32
- 3Langsam - Sehr lebhaft05:50
- Sonata
- 4Con moto05:05
- 5Ballada. Con moto04:21
- 6Allegretto02:25
- 7Adagio04:09
- Five Pieces (2004)
- 8Elegie. Andante larghetto02:59
- 9Serenade. Moderato03:08
- 10Intermezzo. Moderato02:38
- 11Barcarole. Andantino03:13
- 12Nocturne. Larghetto03:08
Unorthodox perspectives inform both the programme and the duo’s approach to it. The album begins with Tōru Takemitsu’s “Distance de fée”, written in 1951 when the composer, as yet in pursuit of a stylistic identity, was still strongly influenced by Messiaen and Debussy, Europeans who themselves were looking eastward for inspiration. Distance and proximity are underlying themes here. Two worlds, Wolfgang Sandner suggests, are combined yet not reconciled in “Distance de fée”, which nonetheless anticipates the haiku-like vividness of later Takemitsu, the composer who would say, “I’d like to produce sounds that are as intense as silence.”
Paul Hindemith’s 1935 Sonata in E, travelling from pastoral beginnings to harmonic complexity, offers challenges to which the Duo Gazzana respond adroitly, likewise the Janáček Violin Sonata with its balance of lyrical flow and expressive gestures. One historical connection between the two works is that Hindemith gave the international premiere of the Janáček piece in Frankfurt in 1923. Janáček had begun the Sonata in 1914 as the First World War was erupting (“I could just about hear the sound of the steel clashing in my troubled head”, he would later write), and continued to revise the music over the next several years. It is one of his most concentrated chamber pieces, packing a wealth of detail into its four movements, and also amongst his most impassioned music, juxtaposing dense writing in the piano and expansive thematic material in the violin. Contrasts are explored, also with conflicting elements, as in the final movement where – as critic John Tyrell has remarked – ‘interruption motifs’ from the violin, tiny repetitive fragments, challenge the broad-arched melodies of the piano.
The album “Five Pieces” was recorded in March 2011 in Auditorio Radiotelevisione Svizzera, Lugano.
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