The Great War Centenary

Michael Foyle & Maksim Stsura

Regular: £13.99

Sale
Regular: £13.99

Unavailable

Unit Price: per

Cat No: CC72786

Format Details:

Release Date: 09 November 2018

Label: Challenge Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 0608917278620

Genres: Classical Chamber Music

Description

The Foyle-Stsura Duo play three sonatas, composed during WWI, to commemorate the centennial of its end. The two late masterpieces from Debussy and Janacek, paired with the sonata from the young Respighi, show the very different ways in which the composers reflected on and protested against the War.

'Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and yet cannot remain silent', wrote Victor Hugo in 1864. Half a century later, his words had never felt more pertinent. Every composer writing during World War I found a unique way, through their music, to describe and protest against the horrors that were tearing civilization apart.

Created in the depth of morbidity, Debussy's parting musical gift is a subtle, dignified and heroic celebration of youth and joie de vivre. A sense of patriotism in the war years links Debussy with the foremost Moravian composer of the day, Leos Janacek. Ottorino Respighi was only in his thirties
when the war broke out. His 1917 Sonata for violin and piano is a work of Romance written in the time of hate, a reminder that the past and the future remain beacons of hope in desperate times.
Commissioned for this recital programme to reflect on the centenary of The Great War from our own times, Kenneth Hesketh's Inscrizione, derivata, subtitled 'A lie to the Dying', is a quasi-meditation on the dying man, his anxious thoughts and the spasms of his failing heart being weaved
conspicuously into a narrative of disquieting melancholy.

Foyle-Stsura Duo, praised for 'playing of compelling conviction' (The Daily Telegraph) and 'astonishing mutual feeling, understanding and responsiveness' (Seen and Heard International), won the Beethoven Piano Society of Europe Duo Competition and the Salieri-Zinetti International Chamber Music Competition in 2015.
Tracklisting