Lorna Cbr

A much-recorded and lauded Italian pianist joins an exciting young multilingual soprano for an extensive collection of Debussy’s songs: a significant recorded contribution to the celebrations of the composer’s centenary.

Lorna Windsor’s selection of eight 20th and 21st-century composers highlights how the voice incarnates different expressive forms more than any instrument. Left naked in its primeval state, the voice leads each composer to rediscover his personal voice, unfettered by convention. Six of the eight composers represented here were born within the same five years, from 1926 (Kurtág and Feldman) to 1931 (Bussotti, Kagel), in 1929 Pousseur, in 1930 De Pablo.

Alfredo Casella certainly was the most ‘European’ composer of the famous “eighties generation”: he arrived in Paris as a piano student then as a concert artist, then he fully lived the varied cultural movement that filled the French capital in the early twentieth century where music, painting, dance and poetry represented the main trends of the continent. The songs for voice and piano constitute one of the most sensitive means of showing how Casella managed to deal with a culture that placed the mélodie in the forefront, by surrounding it with the subtle reverberation emitted by the intertwining of music and poetry, over the background of a social custom that resounded with precious literary streaks. The voice of Lorna Windsor, accompanied by the piano by Raffaele Cortesi, reveals in all its nuances these compositions, belonging to the period when Casella was staying in the stimulating cultural forge of a Paris at the top of its social and artistic importance.

Alessandro Solbiati writes: “To discuss in chronological order the pieces on the album dedicated to the 37-year-old Iranian composer Mehdi Khayami represents for me both a thrill and an enrichment. Why a thrill? Because I have had the joy of sharing with him much of his Italian journey: he arrived in Italy in 2006, having already obtained his diploma of composition in Iran. ”