Alexandre Tansman - Music for Violin & Piano (Klaidi Sahatçi; Giorgio Koukl)

Information

Composer: Alexandre Tansman

• (01) Romance
• (02) Violin Sonata No. 2
• (06) Sonata quasi una fantasia
• (10) Violin Sonatina No. 1
• (15) Violin Sonatina No. 2
• (18) Fantaisie for Violin and Piano

Klaidi Sahatçi, violin

Giorgio Koukl, piano

Date: 2022

Label: Naxos

https://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=8.573127

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Review

Putting one’s finger on the personality of Alexandre Tansman (1897-1986) can be bewildering and defeating. His core sensibility is elusive, his influences diverse and always shifting throughout his long creative life. So amid the many Tansman orchestral recordings of recent years, this chronologically wide-ranging disc of violin-and-piano works – starting in 1917 with music written before his fateful departure from his native Poland to Paris, and ending in 1963, still more than 20 years before his death – charts his progression in a consistent medium without requiring one to digest the massive sonorities that he sometimes favoured in larger-scale works.

Once past the earlier, parlour-ish works, which have a certain prettiness Tansman hung on to in various guises, the last four pieces on the disc are consistent indeed, not quite following similar templates but definitely returning to the similar modes of expression that were characteristic of French music of his time, namely Stravinsky’s neo-classicism, Poulenc’s cabaret rowdiness and Honegger’s musically mechanised portrayal of the machine age. Time and again, Tansman loves to put violin and piano in related but separate simultaneous universes, alternately battling each other from a distance and trying to bridge their gaps. These influences seem to synthesise more in the later sonatas, not unlike Martin≤, but the bigger point of Tansman’s musical progression is how each succeeding sonata becomes more concentrated and precise in what it wants to say. Why the 1941 Sonatina No 2 and the 1952 Fantaisie don’t turn up regularly on recital programmes is beyond me.

The performances here could hardly be better studied or more charismatic. Klaidi Sahatçi is the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra’s concertmaster and plays a fine-sounding Strad. Giorgio Koukl is old enough to have studied with many important figures from Tansman’s time, such as Jacques Février, and knows to fuel this music with a kind of headlong momentum. No false sense of contemplation here. It’s possible that minute study of Tansman may reveal more depths but this disc exists for more scintillating purposes.

-- David Patrick Stearns, Gramophone

More reviews:
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2015/Apr/Tansman_violin_8573127.htm

https://www.wtju.net/tansman-music-violin-piano-spans-career/

https://www.naxos.com/reviews/reviewslist.asp?catalogueid=8.573127&languageid=EN

https://www.amazon.com/Alexandre-Tansman-Works-Violin-Piano/dp/B00SCJIL6Q

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Alexandre Tansman (12 June 1897 – 15 November 1986) was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of Jewish origin. He spent his early years in his native Poland, but lived in France for most of his life, being granted French citizenship in 1938. His music is often said to be primarily neoclassical, drawing on his Polish Jewish heritage as well as his French musical influences. Tansman wrote more than 300 works, including 7 operas, 11 ballets, 6 oratorios, 80 orchestral pages (with 9 symphonies), and numerous works of chamber and piano music. Almost all his works have been now recorded on CDs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Tansman

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Violinist Klaidi Sahatçi was born in Albania and studied at the "Giuseppe Verdi" Conservatory in Milan, "Walter Stauffer" Academy in Cremona (with Salvatore Accardo), and with Boris Garlitzky in Lyon. Prior to joining the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich in 2009 as First Concertmaster, Sahatçi hold similar positions at the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, and La Scala Theatre Orchestra. He has also performed as a soloist and chamber musician, and is one of the founding members of Altus Trio. Since 2012 he has been a professor at the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano.

http://www.klaidisahatci.com/

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Giorgio Koukl (born 1953, Prague, Czechoslovakia) is a composer and pianist/harpsichordist. He studied with Rudolf Firkušný, Nikita Magaloff, Stanislav Neuhaus and Carlo Vidusso. Koukl is considered now as one of the major world specialists of Parisian music of the 1920s and of the "silver age" composers from Saint Petersburg. He has recorded the only existing complete set of solo piano music of Bohuslav Martinů for Naxos. He has also recorded the complete solo piano music of Alexander Tcherepnin, and several CDs dedicated to the music of Witold Lutoslawski, Alexandre Tansman, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Koukl

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