Duo Gazzana RAVEL - FRANCK - LIGETI - MESSIAEN

The third ECM New Series recording by Italian sisters Natascia and Raffaella Gazzana focuses primarily on French music, by César Franck, Maurice Ravel and Olivier Messiaen, and also pays tribute to Hungary’s György Ligeti, with a premiere recording of his Duo for violin and piano.

Where 20th and 21st century music was explored on their two previous discs – the first with music of Takemitsu, Hindemith, Janáček and Silvestrov and the second with Poulenc, Walton, Dallapiccola, Schnittke and, again, Silvestrov – this time Duo Gazzana also reaches back a little further in music history. The album begins with two pieces composed at the end of the 19th century, Ravel’s Sonate posthume, written in 1897, and César Franck’s monumental A-major Sonata for piano and violin of 1886.

“If you speak of French music, the first association is probably with music where atmosphere and mood are emphasized,” the Gazzana sisters note. “But the Franck sonata is something really solid as well as beautiful, and it has influenced so many other composers.” As Wolfgang Sandner remarks in the CD booklet essay, “The sonata is a test of interpretation. In particular, it requires a command of its architecture, built through successive cycles, of its expressive intensity, product of a formal clarity maintained through harmonic boldness, enharmonic ambiguities and modulations to distant keys, and not least the dialogue that develops between the two instruments.”

Studying and playing the Franck sonata was Duo Gazzana’s starting point for the repertoire of the present disc. “And then we tried, as we always do in our programmes, to find links and interconnections, musically and historically.”

Three of the featured pieces are early works. Maurice Ravel was just 22 when he wrote the Sonata posthume (which remained unpublished until 1975), Olivier Messiaen composed his Thème et variations at 24, and György Ligeti wrote his Duo (dedicated to his good friend György Kurtág) aged 23. The Gazzana sisters, who gave eloquent voice to early William Walton on their last ECM album, are fascinated by the transitional character and the promise of such pieces: “In them, you can already hear and sense the next steps that these composers will make in their musical language.” Early potential is also embodied in the Franck A major sonata: completed when its author was in his mid-60s, it was built upon a work he had sketched some three decades earlier.

The Franck, Ravel and Messiaen pieces reflect upon their authors’ close relationships with great violinists. Franck dedicated his sonata to a fellow composer, the virtuoso violinist Eugène Ysaӱe. Ravel’s 1897 sonata is said to have been inspired by the playing of his friend George Enescu, when both musicians were members of Fauré’s composition class in Paris. And Messiaen’s Thème et variations is dedicated to his first wife Claire Delbos, who gave the premiere performance. The profound keyboard skills of César Franck and Olivier Messiaen are however not to be gainsaid, and both had reputations as outstanding organists and improvisers. Raffaella Gazzana: “In some of the demanding counterpoint of the 4th movement of his sonata, especially, one can imagine Franck thinking also of the foot pedals of the organ.”

Messiaen and Ligeti were universes unto themselves: “Neither of them can really be classified in terms of any school.” Regarding the inclusion of the György Ligeti piece here, the duo says, “we like Ligeti’s music very much, but he didn’t publish music for our instrumentation. After doing some research we found a mention of the early Duo, and went in search of the piece.” In contradistinction to the Franck piece, where any new interpretation must take into account many distinguished recorded performances, “it was interesting and challenging to play the Ligeti with no other reference than the notes on the newly-printed Schott score.”

Paul Griffiths’s commentary on Duo Gazzana’s 2011 debut can serve equally as a summary here: “The programme as a whole is typical of the duo’s inquiring and sensitive approach to repertory. What we hear here is a vital freshness.”

Like its predecessors, the album was recorded at Lugano’s Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, and produced by Manfred Eicher. (ECM Records)