This unusually imaginative violin recital juxtaposes music of Italy and America and of the 18th and 20th centuries, before ending up in the 14th. But ingenuity of this sort is to be expected from
Michelle Makarski, whose debut album,
Caoine, brought Bach and Biber together with Stephen Hartke and George Rochberg. Acting as a sort of refrain on this album is
Giuseppe Tartini's Sonata No. 7 in A Minor for unaccompanied violin, as portions of its Theme and Variations movement are distributed among the other works on the program. It's a tribute to Makarski's diverse talents and her superb musicianship that the album works so well as a whole; transitions between one piece and the next are stimulating, not jarring. At several points, if you're not following the track list closely, you may find yourself in a different time and place without at first realizing it. For example, the excerpts from
George Rochberg's
Caprice Variations seem a natural extension of Tartini's own variations. The other 20th-century pieces, by
Luigi Dallapiccolla and
Luciano Berio (both accompanied by piano), and
Goffredo Petrassi and
Elliott Carter (both for solo violin) all sound more identifiably modern than the Rochberg does, but all also have links to the past, as well as to each other. Berio's
Due Pezzi was written under the instruction of Dallapiccolla, whose
Due Studi invokes the baroque rhythms of the sarabande. Petrassi's timbrally rich
Elogio per un'ombra gives the album its title, and Carter's no less virtuosic
Riconoscenza per Goffredo Petrassi was an 80th birthday gift to that composer. In closing, the medieval
Lamento di Tristano provides a muted, melancholy return to an earlier time of Italian lyricism. Makarski has crafted a haunting program here, in which the beauty of each element is only enhanced by its resonant setting amid the others.
