{"id":115664,"date":"2024-02-20T15:35:34","date_gmt":"2024-02-20T20:35:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/panm360.com\/?post_type=records&p=115664"},"modified":"2024-02-20T15:39:17","modified_gmt":"2024-02-20T20:39:17","slug":"hannah-hurwitz-colin-stokes-daniel-pesca-the-night-shall-break-neuma-records","status":"publish","type":"records","link":"https:\/\/panm360.com\/en\/records\/hannah-hurwitz-colin-stokes-daniel-pesca-the-night-shall-break-neuma-records\/","title":{"rendered":"Hannah Hurwitz\/Colin Stokes\/Daniel Pesca – The Night Shall Break"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

If the night eventually breaks, as the title of this fine chamber music album suggests, it won’t be before it has bewitched us. The Night Shall Break <\/em>offers a programme as beautiful as it is superbly rendered by Hannah Hurwitz on violin, Colin Stokes on cello and Daniel Pesca on piano. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Florence Price’s romantic, Afro-American expressive power (Fantasy No. 1 for Violin and Piano)<\/em> kicks off the programme, followed by Rebecca Clarke’s brilliant Piano Trio<\/em>, a masterpiece with a post-Debussy feel, and whose final movement explodes into a country dance that would not have displeased Prokofiev. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is followed by a delightful but short Sonatina for violin and piano<\/em> by Carlos Chavez, bathed in Stravinskian neoclassicism, in which the Mexican composer inserts discreet but refined allusions to the folklore of his homeland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Olivier Messiaen is represented by his magnificent Th\u00e8me et Variations for violin and piano<\/em>, written in 1932. Here we can recognise, sketched out, the harmonies that were to become the indelible signature of his mature music. Here, they still orbit around a modern chromatic tonality, that of a post-impressionism mixed with atonal temptations. This Theme and Variation <\/em>is like the expression of a magic hour, a kind of premonitory and stylistic dawn before the explosion of exotic multicoloured flashes that were to become the French composer’s future scores.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Martinu, one of the most famous neo classicists, is ironically rather ambiguous in his Duo No. 1 for violin and cello H 157<\/em>. The angular, sinuous harmonies and contrapuntal density almost make this a neo-Baroque piece rather than a neo-classical one. The writing is as finely chiselled as ever, that said, and the vigorous momentum of the final Rondo <\/em>adds a welcome touch of truculence to the whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Very fine, accurate performances from the three artists involved, Colin Stokes, Daniel Pesca and Hannah Hurwitz. For the record, Hurwitz is the sister of Justin Hurwitz, a film composer closely associated with director Damien Chazelle, for whom he wrote, among other things, the score for the Oscar-winning La La Land.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n