Canto Oscuro, dark song, is the ECM debut of the Russian pianist Anna Gourari. The recital is built around Johann Sebastian Bach, heard through the piano transcriptions of Ferruccio Busoni and Alexander Siloti. Between them stand two twentieth-century works that look back to Baroque forms, Sofia Gubaidulina's Chaconne and Paul Hindemith's Suite 1922. The common thread is the buried melodic line, the song that runs in the dark inside polyphonic writing, which Gourari brings to the surface.
Gourari is a product of the Russian piano school, and in 1994 she won the Clara Schumann competition in Düsseldorf. She recorded this programme in May 2011 at the Historischer Reitstadel in Neumarkt. Manfred Eicher produced, Stephan Schellmann was the Tonmeister, and the booklet essay is by Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich.
Two of Bach's chorale preludes in Busoni's arrangements, Ich ruf' zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ and Nun komm' der Heiden Heiland, act as hinges in the sequence. Gubaidulina's Chaconne of 1962 is an early work, angular and dissonant, that takes the old variation form apart around a B minor triad. Hindemith's suite, the centre of the album, sets a march, a shimmy, a Boston and a ragtime around a slow Nachtstück. The dances of the Jazz Age are given a sardonic, dissonant edge, and the night piece is the darkest song of all. The recital then turns to Busoni's large-scale version of the Chaconne from Bach's Partita No. 2 for solo violin, which at over sixteen minutes is the longest track. Busoni fills out the single violin line with chords and gives it an elastic breadth. Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews heard real inner depth in Gourari's reading of it. The programme ends quietly, with Siloti's transcription of a small B minor prelude from the Clavier-Büchlein for Wilhelm Friedemann Bach.
Christopher Breunig in Hi-Fi News found Gubaidulina's piece very compelling and praised the presence of the recording. Alessandro Cassin wrote in The Brooklyn Rail that "never sentimental, Gourari's playing has the transcendent quality of prayer". Grillo, writing in 2013, called the album "a benchmark recording", made by a pianist with a firm command of, and passion for, the material.
CD edition of ECM New Series 2255, first released on 28 September 2012.
