Wolfgang Rihm (1952-)
Am Horizont, pour bayan, violon et violoncelle

Ivan Fedele (1953-)
Deystiviya, pour bayan et quatuor à cordes

Sofia Gubaidulina (1931-)
Silenzio, pour bayan, violon et violoncelle
in croce, pour bayan et violoncelle

Toshio Hosokawa (1955-)
In Die Tiefe Der Zeit, pour bayan et clarinette

Germano Scurti, bayan
Francesco Dillon, violoncelle
Gareth Davis, clarinette
Ensemble Ex Novo
Filippo Perocco, direction

The bayan is an acoustic instrument of more recent invention: in its present form it was born in Russia towards the end of the nineteenth century and patented in 1907. It takes its name from Bojan, a singer, poet and a legendary figure in medieval traditional Russian literature. Such an important figure was he in Slavonic culture that he was considered a patron saint of music, of poetry and the arts in general. The instrument at this time was still unknown for anagraphic reasons in Romantic Chamber Music (in the West, accordions were still almost exclusively diatonic, hardly suitable for a refined repertoire) but it continued to be so for the first half of the twentieth century, since it was ostracized due to the generally held view that it was a popular music instrument. Now that it has joined the realms of European refined music, the bayan in many respects can been seen as a worthy replacement for the piano in serious European music (despite its being so very different). [...] The CD in its variegated remixing of the ensembles, piece after piece, reveals the new faces contemporary composers have bestowed upon the bayan and on the other instruments in the light of how they interact with each other.