Buy CD on-line Hear some clips 1. S. Rachmaninov - Sonata for cello and piano in G minor Primo movimento: Lento – Allegro moderato (Mp3) 2. S. Rachmaninov - Sonata for cello and piano in G minor Secondo movimento: Allegro scherzando (Mp3) 3. S. Rachmaninov - Sonata for cello and piano in G minor Secondo movimento: Andante (Mp3) 4. S. Rachmaninov - Sonata for cello and piano in G minor Secondo movimento: Allegro mosso (Mp3) 5. G. Gershwin Someone to watch over me (Mp3) 6. G. Gershwin The man I love (rielaborazioni di Gianni Ferrio) (Mp3) 7. G.Ferrio Piccolissima serenata (Mp3)

Rachmaninov and Gershwin: Two Skies

Sergej Rachmaninov and George Gershwin: the firstone quintessence of the late romantic sentimentalism, and the other emblem of the rogue world of the New York musical comedies, perennially in the balance between light music, jazz and classic tradition. “The public” image of these two great composers of the '900 is intrinsic of common places, render them very distant from each other, and they seem sometimes even in an open contrast. But the musical visions of Rachmaninov and Gershwin are nearer, in reality, and those that might seem, in appearance, like two separated skies, they are multiform aspects of the same sky.
Even if belonging to two different generations, Gershwin (1898 - 1937) and Rachmaninov (1873 - 1943) in fact have lived a part of the same historical period, in a crossed existential route and, at the same time, parallel. Coming from a family of Russian immigrants of Jewish origins, Gershwin (his true name is Jacob Gershovitz) then began the study of the pianoforte with several teachers, beginning to collaborate with a musical publishing house, emerging a short time after as author of songs and then of successful musical comedies. Rachmaninov was born in Russia, near Novgorod, he belonged instead to an ancient aristocratic music loving family, that guaranteed him a solid musical formation; he were asserted as a pianist, composer and director of orchestra, after taking several tourneys in Europe and the United States, in the year 1918 he settled down definitively in Beverly Hills, becoming an American citizen.

Even if with differences of style, in both survives the attachment to a classic conception of the music and to the harmony that, in opposition to the progressives tendencies of the European musical language matured from the beginning of XX century, find in the taste for the singing ability and in the effevtive instrumental impact some essential characteristics.
Characteristics that we punctually find in the Rachmaninovs Sonata in sol minore op. 19 for violoncello and pianoforte. Composed during 1900, the Sonata confirms the return to creativity of the composer after a period of inactivity due to a state of depression, from which he got cured only after months of hypnotherapy sitting.
For as much belonging to his “juvenile works”, the Sonata in sol is a very ambitious work, in which is obvious the will to become part of the great tradition of the sonata, with its references, Beethoven and Brahms. A formal wide conception that finds its complete expression in the four difficult movements that composes the Sonata. On the surface of a vague lyrics, a short introduction (Lento) anticipates the Allegro moderato, very strong in its two main ideas, that make very clear the dialectic nature of the two instruments (the more impetuous violoncello and the more relaxed and easy to follow and to sing with - the pianoforte; in the respective thematic initiatives) in the writing that includes all the Sonata. Emphasized from the pinched of the violoncello, the tension catches up the apex in the development section, just before calming down into a lyric oasis before the resumption. The second part (Allegro scherzando) is a joke of a fantastic character, in which the thematic contrasts still dominate, darkened from a “witched” and insinuating pianoforte. But the true heart of the Sonata is the “Andante”, in which the two instruments looses the precedence contrasts, in order to melt in an only and intimate song filled of romantic nostalgia. The exuberant returns in the long and complex conclusive movement (Allegro mosso), in the sonata form and therefore newly entrusted to the lyric contrast/movement of the theme.
The main instrument for Gershwin was always and only the pianoforte. He composed symphonic melodies and pieces like “Rhapsody in Blue” or “An American in Paris”, on the keyboard, he composed his immortal themes, delegating gladly the instrumentation to profession arrangers. That the songs of Gershwin have become normality, giving place to many versions in the ways and in the various drafts, is because, in a certain sense, of the nature of these extraordinary melodically inventions. The version for violoncello and pianoforte of Someone to Watch Over Me (1926) and The Man i Love (1924), two song among the more famous gershwinians, elaborated by Gianni Ferrio, constitutes therefore once more a transformation, beyond the circumstances and the musical comedies for which they were conceived. A metamorphosis that elaborates creatively the musical possibilities inborn in original, reverberating, in echoes of jazziest matrix, the harmonically digression of a Bill Evans and classical suggestions in which they find place, not certainly by accident, also the counter-point plots of a Rachmaninov in filigree. And the circle is closed.
Rachmaninov and Gershwin: two authors, two musical worlds, two skies, people used to say. But the sky is always one the same and what changes, at the end, is only the observation point.
Almost as something extra and special, the conclusion of this Cd is entrusted to a real “jewel”: “Piccolissima seranata”, a most famous song that Gianni Ferrio wrote in 1957 with the text of Antonio Amurri, brought to success by Teddy Reno and then finally to almost languages of the world. A deep motive, thanks perhaps because of the imaginary work, very much the way of Vittorio Mascheroni, that Ferrio with irony (and auto irony) is amused to smash and to recompose under harmonic nuances always changing, in a refined amazing game of winkings not alien to the debussinian and stravinskian references.

Giovanni D’Alò

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