Piana / Pompa-Baldi - Popmpa-Baldi Plays Roberto Piana - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Elizabeth Hainen - Harp Concertos [COMPACT DISCS] Jewel Case Packaging date 05/10/2011

Following up on two well-received Steinway & Sons albums, Napoli and The Rascal and the Sparrow, the collaboration between pianist Antonio Pompa-Baldi and composer/pianist Roberto Piana continues with Opera Fantasies on a Steinway. Piana's grand operatic fantasies on two masterpieces, Bizet's Carmenand Puccini's La bohème, are world premiere recordings. InchPiana knows how to craft virtuoso writing that draws maximum effect from the piano, and Pompa-Baldi has the chops and musical sensitivity to make every track irresistible.Inch (Pasatiempo)

The music on this album was recorded in the studio the day after Uitti and Fanous spent 10 minutes improvising together in concert, in a first meeting. It represents bidirectional ideas in music often and erroneously thought to be opposites western vs. Eastern, improvised vs. #through-composed. In this recording they are stood on their head, examined, dissected, tortured, and ultimately reconciled. Fanous says InchMusically, Frances and I came from two distinct sets of emphases. In my case, these were non-western music, as well as chromaticism in both it's contemporary classical and free jazz expressions, all funneled through the techniques of classical and flamenco guitar. In Frances' case, it was a lifelong devotion to and mastery of parallel directions improvisation, as well as contemporary composition at the highest level. Both were made infinitely more powerful by the deployment of ingenious extended techniques, including her revolutionary two-bow methods. Our backgrounds contained enough shared common experience to allow for a tentacular interdigitation of our improvisational languages, which was effortless and natural.Inch The session began with bouzouki-cello duets, in which drones played a central role, calling up a middle-eastern sound-world. Fanous writes InchAs the pieces evolved, they gradually became unmoored and reverted to who they really were, but together. This process of feeling one's way through the darkness was like navigating towards some unknown endpoint, the way the ancients used the astrolabe to navigate using the positions of the stars - Negoum in Arabic.Inch