Search - Duo Gazzana :: Five Pieces

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". Unorthodox perspectives inform both the programme and the duo's approach to it. The album begins with T?ru 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 Janá?ek 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 Janá?ek piece in Frankfurt in 1923. Janá?ek 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 must 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. * The first Italian chamber musicians to record for ECM New Series, Duo Gazzana is formed by sisters Natascia and Raffaella Gazzana. Both were born in Sora, near Rome. Although their first `official' concerts as Duo Gazzana dates back to the mid 1990s, they have been playing together from the beginning of their musical educations, their parallel musical experience and a love of chamber music enabling them to develop their shared sensed of harmony. It may be equally significant that their cultural background is more than just musical, both of them having graduated from Sapienza, the University of Rome, in arts subjects: Natascia in visual arts, Raffaella in Italian literature.