Hiromi Kikuchi (violin) & Petra Hoffmann (soprano)
Ensemble Recherch
CD
$18.00
Usually despatched in 3 - 4 working days.
The Chapter Four of the collection that Stradivarius, in collaboration with RAI Radio 3, dedicates to the prestigious Milano Musica Festival, one of the most important Italian festival devoted to Contemporary Classical Music.
Dedicated to the violinist Hiromi Kikuchi, its first interpreter in Berlin in 2005, the ample Hipartita by Kurtág is a collection of eight different pieces not always originally for the violin – the first was for the flute, the fifth for the voice – re-elaborated and ideally forming a collection in a single Score.
The short Henry James novel The Aspern Papers relates to the attempts made by an American art critic to come into possession of the letters of the deceased Jeffrey Aspern, a poet venerated by him more than any other. Sciarrino wrote the music for the staging Aspern in Singspiel form in 1978, later bringing it together in a Suite. We recognise in this music some of the premises of the novel, but taken to the extreme. The opera is pervaded by the presence of Mozart’s Nozze di Figaro, but this is not a case of transcriptions or of citations: the figure of Mozart does not appear in its physical nature, with the overwhelming weight of its historical dimension, as happens in many experiences of the modernity contemporary to the composition of Aspern. Rather, it is seen from a distance, touched by the memory.
19th January 2012
*****
“somehow Kurtág's special intensity welds the sequence into a compelling unity...[Sciarrino's] skittering sound world of breathy, fugitive whistles and trills, into which a solo soprano inserts a fragmentary text, is instantly identifiable; even in this form Sciarrino's music packs a real dramatic punch.”
16th December 2011
***
“Hipartita was dedicated to violinist Hiromi Kikuchi, who performs it with aspects ranging from sombre to inquisitive, as the individual sections demand. By turns weightily rigorous and gossamer light, its debt to Ligeti is apparent...It's hard to imagine another ensemble that could make such dissonance sound so normal.”
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