Chiaroscuro

Description

The great Georgian composer Giya Kancheli is honored with the twelfth album on ECM New Series featuring the first recordings of two major works: Chiaroscuro for violin and chamber orchestra, and Twilight for two violins and chamber orchestra. Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica are long-time close interpreters of Kancheli's work. For Twilight, the reunion of Kremer and Patricia Kopatchinskaya, two of today's most expressive violinists, ensures a fascinating listening experience. The piece is an emotional meditation on mortality, written at a time when Giya Kancheli was recovering from an illness and saw in the leaves and branches of a poplar tree outside his window a metaphor for change and transformation. The piece Chiaroscuro, for its part, takes its title from the painting technique of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, whose concern for dramatic contrast between light and shadow corresponds well to the striking dynamics of Kancheli's writing, wonderfully rendered here by the Kremerata Baltica. Recorded in Vilnius, Lithuania, and produced by Manfred Eicher, this album represents a major contribution to the Kancheli catalog at ECM. It is released in the year of the composer's 80th anniversary.