Giorgio Gaslini

This disc documents a concert of piano music by Giorgio Gaslini given at the Conservatorio Niccolò Paganini in Genoa on 13 November 2008, with the composer himself among the performers. Best known as a jazz pianist, Gaslini (Milan 1929, Parma 2014) worked throughout his life as a composer of concert music too, aiming at a "musica totale" that joined twentieth-century compositional techniques to jazz improvisation. The programme runs to 77 minutes: three piano sonatas under the title Décollage, two large works for two pianos, and a set of Gaslini's own improvisations.

Alfonso Alberti plays the three sonatas. The second, in three parts, includes a Marilyn Décollage Song, and the third moves from Le rêve de l'artiste dans l'atelier to Exposition et promenade. The piano duo of Paola Biondi and Debora Brunialti plays Ritual, a work in six parts: La nascita di Lucy, Lucy scopre le stelle, Il cacciatore, La grande madre and three Eva nera dance sections. The duo returns with percussionist Maurizio Ben Omar for Peintres au Café-Sonnant, thirteen short sections portraying painters, Giacomo Balla, Antonio Ligabue, Lucio Fontana, Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, Joan Miró, Francis Bacon and Jean-Michel Basquiat, linked by a recurring café refrain and closed by Au peintre qui viendra!. Between them Gaslini sits at the piano for Interludio: Piano Improvisations, played as Africa libera and Cristalli. The composer Giacomo Manzoni wrote the programme notes.

La Bottega Discantica CD DISCANTICA 224, released in 2010, a live recording.