From his time as a student at the Leningrad (today’s St Petersburg) Conservatory, Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) developed a strong connection with cinema, earning a living in the 1920s as a pianist for silent films. He would go on to write scores throughout his career for dozens of sound films, among them Aleksandr Faintsimmer’s The Gadfly (1955), beloved in the Soviet Union for its themes of revolution and atheism. The writing, with its highly diversified contours, combines in an extraordinary way severe accents and romantic outbursts of a purely Russian style with atmospheres of a Mediterranean character. Vadim Borisovsky’s viola and piano arrangement is based on the suite for orchestra prepared from Shostakovich’s score by Lev Atovmyan.

The late 1960s marked the beginning of the composer’s final, dark and penetrating stylistic period, and his Sonata for viola and piano was his last composition and the only piece he never heard, its premiere only coming several weeks after his death. Dedicated to Fyodor Druzhinin, violist of Moscow’s Beethoven Quartet, is one of the most unique and oft played sonatas in the viola repertoire. Written in three movements, there is no tonal centre or tonality.

Igor Stravinsky’s Suite italienne has its origins in the composer’s ballet score Pulcinella, based on music newly discovered at the time and believed to be from the pen of Italian composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (some of it was later discovered to be by other baroque composers such as Domenico Gallo and Carlo Monza).

The resulting “neoclassical” style afforded Stravinsky an objectivity and emotional detachment, far removed from late-Romantic sentimentality or the dramatic, allusive style in the music of his earlier Russian period. He prepared the Suite italienne for violin and piano from the Pulcinella ballet music with the help of his recital partner violinist Samuel Dushkin. In Leonardo Taio’s own viola arrangement, based on the 1947 Boosey & Hawkes edition (ed. Dushkin), the piano part remains unchanged while the viola part is adapted to exploit the instrument’s timbral potential.

At the turn of the 20th century Alexander Glazunov was widely regarded as the greatest living Russian composer. His Elégie in G minor, op.44, is an original viola and piano work, dedicated to his friend Franz Hildebrand.

In this delightful piece Glazunov successfully reconciles Russian nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Although he was the direct successor of Balakirev’s nationalism, he tended towards Borodin’s epic grandeur while absorbing a range of other influences that included Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral virtuosity, Tchaikovsky’s lyricism and Taneyev’s contrapuntal skill.

Duo Phoné:
- Leonardo Taio (viola)
- Sofia Adinolfi (piano)