Highly attractive recording debut album of gifted Italian sisters Natascia and Raffaella Gazzana in a programme of 20th and 21st century pieces for violin and piano. This recital of Takemitsu, Hindemith, Janáček and Silvestrov is distinguished by its sensitivity and thoughtfulness and by the refined and insightful playing of the award-winning Duo Gazzana.

The album is titled after the “Five Pieces for Violin and Piano” by Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov which conclude the disc. These works, written in 2004, receive their first international release here in a context combining the familiar and the far-flung, which finds creative affinities between the music of four very different composers.

Hindemith’s Sonata in E travels from pastoral beginnings to harmonic complexity, the Janáček Violin Sonata balances lyrical flow and expressive gestures, while Silvestrov - as ever - artfully addresses the ghosts and shadows of history in his gently-undulating music of memories. Toru Takemitsu’s ‘Distance de fée’ (from 1951) was amongst the first pieces written by the Japanese composer at a time when he was still influenced by Messiaen and Debussy. Duo Gazzana has a special relationship to Japan and the Far East, and has toured there. (Five Pieces is issued simultaneously with “Landscapes” (4763938), another recording with music by a major Japanese composer, Toshio Hosokawa.)

Natascia and Raffaella Gazzana were born in Sora, near Rome. Their first ‘official’ concerts as Duo Gazzana were in the mid 1990s, but they have been playing together from the beginning of their musical education. Their parallel musical backgrounds – after attending Italian conservatoires, both studied in Lausanne and have won major scholarships and awards, at home and abroad – and love of chamber music has enabled the musicians to develop their shared sensed of harmony.