Pas de deux

Album review

This new recording “Pas de deux” presents many new pieces by composer friends - it’s a project that’s very close to our hearts. The great Sonata by Ravel is in a way our kaleidoscope, a looking glass that takes us both back and forward in time, and both of those simultaneously.
The journey of Daniel Rowland (violin) and Maja Bogdanović (cello) begins here with the slightest of pieces. Raindrops is a charming vignette by the 10-year old Sibelius, whose love of nature would a decade or so later of course give us some of the greatest works in the symphonic repertoire.
Deeply moved by the death of Pope John Paul II Penderecki in 2005 wrote the Ciaconna in memoriam Giovanni Paulo II, for string orchestra. His transcription of the piece is a self-contained, independent artistic statement: subtle and virtuosic, filled with emotions of a genuinely Romantic kind.

The Interior Castle by Peteris Vasks was composed after a text written by St. Teresa of Ávila, Spanish Carmelite nun and famed mystic, in 1577 as a guide for spiritual development through service and prayer. The Vask's work is conceived as a tryptich of pure, deeply felt, reverential music, interrupted my two frenetic, disturbing, dark passages. The love and belief conquers the dark forces.
Both musicians of this album asked their friend Craig White to arrange a Debussy piano prelude and he created for this album this beautiful version of the 9th piano prelude of Book 1 (La sérénade interrompue).

Sicilian cellist/composer Giovanni Sollima is one of the most colorful, eclectic, musical personalities of his generation, and his Heimat Terra is performed here ; the title is based on a beautiful text by the anthropologist Edgar Morin.
Marcelo Nisinman is one of the great tango artists of our time, a brilliant bandoneon virtuoso as well as a uniquely personal, eclectic composer of music that is deeply infused by the world of tango but very aware of classical avant-gardistic writing. Marcelo Nisinman got to know Astor Piazzolla as a child, when Piazzolla and his quintet used to come to rehearse at his parents apartment in central Buenos Aires. © Challenge Records