Search - Anna Gourari :: Canto Oscuro

Anna Gourari is a young musician steeped in the venerable Russian piano school, its technical verities and Old World glamour. She has a very physical, even visceral quality to her music-making that conjures the sound of such golden-age figures as Horowitz and Cortot, declared Fanfare. With her ECM debut, Gourari offers a set of Canto Oscuro: dark songs. The pianist performs two of the most affecting of J.S. Bachs chorale preludes Ich ruf zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ and Nun komm der Heiden Heiland in arrangements of quiet sublimity by Ferrucio Busoni. Gourari also includes his iconic version of the gripping Chaconne from Bachs Partita No. 2 for solo violin. From her native Russia, she adds Alexander Silotis transcription of Bachs Prelude in B minor, as well as Sofia Gubaidulinas early Chaconne, a vessel for ghosts of the Baroque. The albums centrepiece is Hindemiths Suite 1922, a work influenced by both Baroque models and the Jazz Age; yet its Shimmy, Boston and Ragtime movements are given a dissonant, darkly ironic cast, and the Suite s Nachtstück is night music as haunted and haunting, a very much dark song.