Prokofiev / Pärt / Schnittke
Duo Gazzana
Prokofiev / Pärt / Schnittke is the sixth ECM New Series album by Duo Gazzana — Italian sisters Natascia Gazzana (violin) and Raffaella Gazzana (piano) — released on 17 April 2026 under catalogue number ECM New Series 2854. The album was recorded in February 2025 at the Reitstadel in Neumarkt, engineered by Markus Heiland, mixed in September 2025 by Manfred Eicher and Michael Hinreiner, and produced by Eicher, who has overseen all of the duo's ECM recordings since their debut in 2011. Across 11 tracks running approximately 57 minutes, the programme presents Prokofiev's Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 in F minor, Op. 80 and his Five Melodies, Op. 35a, alongside Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel and Alfred Schnittke's Gratulationsrondo. The booklet essay by Stefano Carucci frames the programme around the three composers' shared confrontation with forms of sociopolitical constraint that threatened to silence them, presenting the album as a meditation on resilience across differing 20th-century trajectories.
The interpretive approach throughout is characterised by restraint, intimacy, and a resistance to spectacle. ECM Reviews described the duo's playing as "maintaining precision and vulnerability in balance," with phrases that feel "unencumbered by expectation" and seem to discover themselves in real time. The Prokofiev Sonata — the centrepiece of the programme — opens with the piano's lower-register murmurs and the violin's tremor creating what the review called "a fragile correspondence between distant selves," while the Allegro brusco draws out a "paradoxical separation" between the two instruments, as if communicating through walls. Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel is singled out for crystalline piano arpeggios and a violin line "hovering between presence and absence," while the Schnittke Gratulationsrondo — a relatively rare instance of the composer embracing celebratory idiom — is praised for revealing the work's "inner vulnerability." Deutsche Grammophon noted that Le Monde had written of the duo's previous album that they "reach the highest levels of instinctive expression," calling the present recording an even stronger realisation of that quality.
Prokofiev / Pärt / Schnittke
Duo Gazzana
Prokofiev / Pärt / Schnittke is the sixth ECM New Series album by Duo Gazzana — Italian sisters Natascia Gazzana (violin) and Raffaella Gazzana (piano) — released on 17 April 2026 under catalogue number ECM New Series 2854. The album was recorded in February 2025 at the Reitstadel in Neumarkt, engineered by Markus Heiland, mixed in September 2025 by Manfred Eicher and Michael Hinreiner, and produced by Eicher, who has overseen all of the duo's ECM recordings since their debut in 2011. Across 11 tracks running approximately 57 minutes, the programme presents Prokofiev's Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 in F minor, Op. 80 and his Five Melodies, Op. 35a, alongside Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel and Alfred Schnittke's Gratulationsrondo. The booklet essay by Stefano Carucci frames the programme around the three composers' shared confrontation with forms of sociopolitical constraint that threatened to silence them, presenting the album as a meditation on resilience across differing 20th-century trajectories.
The interpretive approach throughout is characterised by restraint, intimacy, and a resistance to spectacle. ECM Reviews described the duo's playing as "maintaining precision and vulnerability in balance," with phrases that feel "unencumbered by expectation" and seem to discover themselves in real time. The Prokofiev Sonata — the centrepiece of the programme — opens with the piano's lower-register murmurs and the violin's tremor creating what the review called "a fragile correspondence between distant selves," while the Allegro brusco draws out a "paradoxical separation" between the two instruments, as if communicating through walls. Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel is singled out for crystalline piano arpeggios and a violin line "hovering between presence and absence," while the Schnittke Gratulationsrondo — a relatively rare instance of the composer embracing celebratory idiom — is praised for revealing the work's "inner vulnerability." Deutsche Grammophon noted that Le Monde had written of the duo's previous album that they "reach the highest levels of instinctive expression," calling the present recording an even stronger realisation of that quality.