Bach-Kodaly-Ligeti-Ronchetti -

A listening experience entirely dedicated to the sounds of the viola, from classical to contemporary. This is the new album by Luca Sanzo, a musician with an intense concert, recording, and teaching career, and professor of viola at the Santa Cecilia Con-servatory in Rome. A frequent guest at important venues and prestigious chamber music, contemporary, and electronic music festivals, Luca Sanzo has dedicated many compositions to him. The album opens with Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita in A minor for solo flute, BWV 1013, performed in a G minor transcription; it is followed by another Bach work, the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, BWV 903 for harpsichord, in the 1950 transcription for solo viola by Zoltan Kodaly, a Hungarian composer, ethnomusi-cologist, and teacher. The first edition was edited by violist William Primrose, who also distributed it. This fascinating and intense sonic journey through different compositional worlds continues in chronological order with Gyorgy Ligeti's Sonata for Viola Solo, composed between 1991 and 1994, in six movements, alternating between slow and fast movements. The program concludes with Lucia Ronchetti's Requiem for Viola Solo (1982), now dedicated to Michele Sanzo, brother of Luca Sanzo. As Lucia Ronchetti explains: "In the Requiem I tried to create a sonic labyrinth from which there seems to be no escape, making the performance a severe physical and mental test. In this sense, Beethoven's Great Fugue, Op. 133, seemed to me the most extreme and rigorous representation of a sonic prison and a search for liberation and elevation."