Francis Poulenc, William Walton, Luigi Dallapiccola, Alfred Schnittke, Valentin Silvestrov, Duo Gazzana

The second ECM New Series album by the Italian sisters of Duo Gazzana gathers five twentieth and twenty-first century works for violin and piano that look back to older forms. Music by Alfred Schnittke, Francis Poulenc, Valentin Silvestrov, William Walton and Luigi Dallapiccola is heard through the prism of the Baroque, across borders of country and idiom. It is a carefully built programme with a clear narrative line.

Natascia Gazzana plays violin and Raffaella Gazzana piano. They had made their ECM debut in 2011 with Five Pieces, named after a Silvestrov work. This follow-up was recorded in June 2013 at the Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera in Lugano, with Markus Heiland as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer. Wolfgang Schreiber wrote the liner notes. According to Classical CD Reviews, Natascia had been studying Walton's Toccata for a dissertation, using sources at the Walton foundation on Ischia.

Schnittke's Suite im alten Stil (1972) opens the disc, its five short movements reflecting on Bach and Scarlatti, from a Pastorale to a fragile closing Pantomime. Poulenc's Sonata, written in occupied France in 1942-43 and revised in 1949, is dedicated to the memory of the murdered poet Federico García Lorca and ends in a Presto tragico. Walton's Toccata (1922-23), a rarely heard work from his youth, is full of ideas, with cadenzas that invite improvisation and rhythms drawn from jazz. Between them sit Silvestrov's quiet Hommage à J.S.B. (2009) and Dallapiccola's canonic Tartiniana seconda (1956), a divertimento on themes of Giuseppe Tartini. The Silvestrov, three short slow movements originally written for Gidon Kremer, holds time in suspension, while the Dallapiccola is the most intricate construction on the album.

Christopher Dingle in BBC Music Magazine called it "a clever and largely engaging collection" played "with wit, poise and graceful affection". Gavin Dixon of Classical CD Reviews found the duo ideal for the ECM aesthetic, "all big, round sounds and emphatic articulation, but with plenty of nuance". Hrayr Attarian, writing for All About Jazz, read the record as a celebration of neoclassicism and judged it as engaging as their first.

CD, ECM New Series 2356, first released on 4 April 2014.