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Amazon.co.uk Review
Having done more than anyone, over the last three decades, to put Nikos Skalkottas (1904-49) back on the musical map, BIS take a break from their excellent series of orchestral discs, giving us the major part of the music for his own instrument. Although it was only when studying in Berlin that the young composer decided to focus on composition, its impossible to describe his 1925 Solo Violin Sonata as the work of beginner: this is music of a technical and expressive clarity to die for! So in the Violin Sonatinas written in pairs in 1929 and 1935; the latter two are products of a mature musical outlook, with any stylistic debts absorbed into a strikingly personal vision. If the Third Sonatina is the best proportioned, the lengthy slow movement of No. 4 is a highpoint in Skalkottas's output--intense and deeply communicative. Georgios Demertzis's expressive and highly charged playing goes to the heart of this music, and he's imaginatively accompanied by Maria Asteriadou. They get maximum variety from the shorter pieces which round off the disc: scintillating miniatures made for encores. Absorbing music, superbly realised--do try it! Richard Whitehouse
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An accessible way in to a neglected major composer,
This review is from: Skalkottas/Music for Violin and Piano (Audio CD)
Skalkottas is a very important and scandalously neglected composer, as the textbooks will tell you; he is also a great composer, and that is only confirmed by listening to his music. His potential listeners should not be deterred by the sorts of anoraky discussions of his use of multiple tone rows successively in works, or of other technical innovations (which some of Schoenberg's staider pupils found a tad scandalous!); Schoenberg himself was always insistent that his music was to be listened to as music, and this disc of solo violin and violin and piano music by a man for whom a claim has been advanced to his being the most significant of his pupils, is accessible at the straightforward level of a first hearing. Much on this disc is as accessible as Berg.Strangely there is much more on this CD than the Amazon catalogue indicates; not just the 3 sonatinas, but a solo violin sonata, the Little Chorale and Fugue, and several very brief pieces, miracles of serialist compression. Nothing is very long, but several pieces are very big, and everything richly repays repeated hearing. The performances are by and large of admirable clarity, perhaps breathing more dedication than passion, as though responsibility towards Skalkottas and his reputation were weighing somewhat. It would be good to have a comparison performance. But there is also something which seems to me to be deeply idiomatic in what is offered here, something that other performances will have, for me, to measure up to. This is thought-through music, but it really lives. I'm no great judge of recording, but apart from one or two places where I wondered about the balance between the instruments, and the violin seemed to recede, I thought it a good recording of some fascinating and very eloquent and powerful works, and a very good way into a composer who can in some of his denser works be more forbidding.
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