Eugenio Berra

This is the sound, the story, of the M’berra Ensemble, a collective of Malian musicians from the M’berra Refugee Camp in southeast Mauritania, and Italian producer and electro-shaman Khalab. In a sprawling tent city rising out of the desert, out of nothingness, at the border with Mali in West Africa, brought together by spirit and circumstance, the group’s Arab and Tuareg members — some unknown, some who have previously toured Europe — find solace and beauty in music and song.

This is the sound, the story, of the M’berra Ensemble, a collective of Malian musicians from the M’berra Refugee Camp in southeast Mauritania, and Italian producer and electro-shaman Khalab. In a sprawling tent city rising out of the desert, out of nothingness, at the border with Mali in West Africa, brought together by spirit and circumstance, the group’s Arab and Tuareg members — some unknown, some who have previously toured Europe — find solace and beauty in music and song.

The two Sonatas play a major role among Dmitri Shostakovich’s piano pieces. Given the great “historical awareness” shown by the composer right from the start and his inevitable respect for the sonata genre, they can rightly be considered as symbols of two distinct creative phases, from the comparison of which it is possible to appreciate the stylistic development of his language. Composed seventeen years apart from each other, the two sonatas seem to have developed with diametrically opposed premises and results: the first one is fierce, dense and atonal; the second one is meditative, rhetorical and calm.