Toru Takemitsu, Paul Hindemith, Leoš Janáček, Valentin Silvestrov, Duo Gazzana

Five Pieces is the recording debut of the Italian sisters Natascia Gazzana (violin) and Raffaella Gazzana (piano), who play as Duo Gazzana. It takes its name from the Five Pieces for violin and piano by Valentin Silvestrov that close the album, heard here in their first international release. Around them the duo places three 20th-century works by Takemitsu, Hindemith and Janáček, a programme that Paul Griffiths, in the liner notes, calls typical of the duo's "inquiring and sensitive approach to repertory".

The album was recorded in March 2011 at the Auditorio of Radiotelevisione svizzera in Lugano, in collaboration with RSI Rete Due, with Manfred Eicher producing and Markus Heiland as engineer. Speaking to Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews, the sisters said they spent almost a year shaping the programme. Eicher encouraged their focus on music of the 20th and 21st centuries, and it was through ECM recordings he suggested that they came to know Silvestrov. The Hindemith and Janáček sonatas were already part of their concert repertoire. Besides their musical training, both studied at La Sapienza in Rome, Natascia visual arts and Raffaella literature and musicology.

Toru Takemitsu's Distance de fée (1951), an early work after a poem by Shuzo Takiguchi, opens the disc in a hushed, Messiaen-tinged light. Paul Hindemith's Sonata in E (1935) is a compact diptych, a gently moving first movement followed by a slow section that breaks into a lively close. Leoš Janáček's Sonata (1914, revised 1921) is more turbulent, with a Ballada at its heart. Silvestrov's pieces from 2004, dedicated to Gidon Kremer, are five miniatures, an elegy, a serenade, an intermezzo, a barcarole and a ghostly nocturne, written in the quiet, consonant manner of his later music.

Jonathan Woolf, in MusicWeb International in 2012, praised the duo's rhythmic impetus in the Hindemith and its restraint in the Janáček, and called the Silvestrov "sensitive, very beautiful miniatures", the Barcarole above all. Riccardo Lenzi in L'Espresso noted the range of the playing, from "Takemitsu's crepuscular 'Distance de fée'" to the "structured symmetries of Hindemith's Sonate in E". PopMatters was cooler, finding the album too reserved.

CD edition of ECM New Series 2238, released on 23 September 2011, the first of several Duo Gazzana albums in the series. The booklet includes notes by Paul Griffiths and Wolfgang Sandner.