Kim Kashkashian & Lera Auerbach – Shostakovich & Auerbach: Arcanum (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 58:04 minutes | 937 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM New Series
Kim Kashkashian introduces a duo with Russian composer-pianist Lera Auerbach. Their first collaborative recording features Auerbach’s viola and piano version of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes op. 34, and Auerbach’s own, darker, sonata for viola and piano, Arcanum. The musicians first met at Switzerland’s Verbier Festival in 2010, although Auerbach had long been aware of Kashkashian’s recordings, and the “quality of life-or-death-intensity to her performing, which is rare and wonderful.” Arcanum, accordingly, was written for Kashkashian. Its title, the composer explained in a recent interview, “means ‘mysterious knowledge’: I was fascinated by the inner voice within each of us, some may call it perhaps intuition, some maybe guided meditation, but there is some knowledge that we have, which we may not necessarily verbalize or rationalize. This knowledge allows us to see the truth, to be guided, to seek answers.”
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Kim Kashkashian – Toru Takemitsu – Claude Debussy – Sofia Gubaidulina (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 52:07 minutes | 879 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM New Series
On this compelling first release it revolves around Debussy’s 1915 Sonata for flute, viola and harp and its influence, most directly felt in Takemitsu’s shimmering ‘And then I knew ‘twas wind’. Debussy himself had been profoundly moved by his encounter with music of the East and in his last works was emphasizing tone-colour, texture and timbre and a different kind of temporal flow. In this music, the elasticity of Debussy’s feeling for time (as Heinz Holliger observed) pointed far into the future and to the works of Boulez. And indeed to the music of Sofia Gubaidulina, whose ‘Garden of Joys and Sorrows’ makes its own reckoning with orient and occident. Gubaidulina has said that she considers herself “a daughter of two worlds, whose soul lives in the music of the East and the West”. Produced by Manfred Eicher in the Lugano Studio.
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Kim Kashkashian – J.S. Bach: Six Suites for Viola Solo (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:22:32 minutes | 2,58 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM New Series
The poetry and radiance of Bachs cello suites (BWV 1007-1012) are transfigured in these remarkable interpretations by Kim Kashkashian on viola, offering a different kind of somberness, a different kind of dazzlement as annotator Paul Griffiths observes. One of the most compelling performers of classical and new music, Kashkashian has been hailed by The San Francisco Chronicle as an artist who combines a probing, restless musical intellect with enormous beauty of tone. An ECM artist since 1985, she approaches Bach s music with the same commitment as revealed in her other solo recordings, the legendary Hindemith sonatas album and the widely acclaimed (and Grammy-winning) account of Kurtág and Ligeti.
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