Goffredo Petrassi, Elliott Carter, Michelle Makarski, Thomas Larcher

Elogio per un'ombra is the second ECM New Series recital by the American violinist Michelle Makarski, and its running order is as carefully composed as the music in it. Movements from Giuseppe Tartini's Sonata No. 7 in A minor return like a refrain between works by Luigi Dallapiccola, Goffredo Petrassi, Luciano Berio, Elliott Carter and George Rochberg. An anonymous fourteenth-century Lamento di Tristano closes the disc, so that Italian modernism and two American friends of Italy are heard through a Baroque and a medieval lens.

Makarski, an American of Italian descent, recorded the programme in May 1999 at Studio 1 of Schweizer Radio DRS in Zürich. Thomas Larcher joins her at the piano for Dallapiccola's Due studi and Berio's Due pezzi, while everything else is for violin alone. Manfred Eicher produced the session, Stephan Schellmann engineered it, and the composer Stephen Hartke wrote the booklet essay. The four Rochberg pieces continue a thread from her ECM debut Caoine, which included eleven of his Caprice Variations.

Petrassi's title work, written in 1971 and dedicated to Alfredo Casella, sits at the centre of the programme and lasts over fourteen minutes. Hartke calls it "shadowy and mercurial", and it moves from a gentle opening into long, agitated passages that pass through most of the violin's range of colour. Carter's Riconoscenza per Goffredo Petrassi, written for the Italian composer's eightieth birthday, answers it a few tracks later. Dallapiccola, the first Italian to adopt twelve-tone technique, is heard in a Sarabanda and a Fanfara e fuga that keep the method lyrical. The closing Lamento is a two-minute pianissimo miniature.

The disc was widely reviewed in Europe. In The Strad, Julian Haylock called it "one of the most compelling albums I have heard in a long time" and praised Makarski's "infinitely flexible, silvery sound". Fabrice Fitch in Gramophone noted a variety that a stylistically uniform programme would struggle to match, and Paul Driver of The Sunday Times described the sequence as cross-cultural. Writing on ECM Reviews in 2011, Tyran Grillo found her especially persuasive in Tartini and in Rochberg's Caprice Variations.

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1712, first released in October 2000, with liner notes in English, German and Italian.