 Pour son premier enregistrement, Gaia Sokoli évite les sentiers battus des programmes « carte de visite » et nous offre, sauf erreur de ma part, la première réunion au disque des trois sonates de Fanny Hensel, née Mendelssohn. Astucieusement, les œuvres sont présentées en ordre chronologique inverse : on est bien en peine de deviner au départ l’auteur de la « tardive » sonate en sol mineur, débordante d’inventivité. C’est en remontant le temps jusqu’aux œuvres composées aux environs de ses vingt ans qu’on voit apparaître les liens avec la musique de son frère. Il a d’ailleurs fallu attendre 2010 pour que l’étude du manuscrit de la sonate « de Pâques » permette de rendre à Fanny ce qu’on attribuait jusque-là à Félix. Que de talent dans ces œuvres largement sous-estimées et d’autant plus attachantes qu’elles devaient naître dans l’incrédulité (pour ne pas dire pire) familiale et générale ! Engagée, mécaniquement impeccable mais avec un son peut-être encore un peu vert, Gaia Sokoli semble faire siens le romantisme et les frémissements de cette musique, le côté mutin des scherzos, les oppositions de climats des allegros… C’est très réussi, face à une discographie plutôt maigre par ailleurs. J’attends une suite avec impatience, en espérant que le « Quod me nutrit me destruit » qui semble tatoué sur l’avant-bras gauche de la pianiste (« ce qui me nourrit me détruit », faisant habituellement référence à tout autre chose), ne s’applique pas à la musique ! (Olivier Eterradossi) The first album to bring together all of Fanny Mendelssohn’s four piano sonatas, written over the course of almost 20 years, and including the ‘Easter Sonata’ rediscovered in 2010. Born in 1998 to Albanian parents, the Italian pianist Gaia Sokoli has won rave reviews as well as a string of competition awards in her home country. She took first prize in the Bradshaw and Buono Competition held annually in New York, and made a Carnegie Hall debut at the age of 13. Gaia Sokoli was giving concerts as a young child: ‘Making music came naturally to me and I felt I had to do it.’ Gaia Sokoli’s repertoire ranges from Bach to Ligeti, but she has a particularly strong feeling for the late-Classical and early-Romantic piano composers from Beethoven to Chopin and Schumann. She has formed a regular chamber-music partnership with the violinist Giulia Gambaro, and she now studies with Roberto Prosseda, who has contributed the booklet essay to her debut recording, discussing Fanny Mendelssohn’s sonata writing in the context of a culture which saw her compositional activity as little more than the talented exercise of a hobby when set alongside her brother Felix’s pre-eminent genius. Gaia Sokoli is well placed to bring out all the ardour and pianistic sophistication of Fanny Hensel’s piano writing, which in its smaller and lighter forms – the songs without words and nocturnes so beloved of salon audiences – has received plenty of attention on record before now. But Hensel was no less accomplished at disciplining her melodic imagination on the grander scale of the sonata. Two years a standalone sonata movement composed at the age of 17, she wrote a three-movement work in the Romantically resonant key of C minor, with an insistent rhythmic tag in the finale which her brother ‘borrowed’ for a Vivace movement of his own two years later. From six years later, the year before her marriage to Wilhelm Hensel which drastically curtailed her creative output, comes the ‘Easter Sonata’ so excitingly rediscovered in modern times. The name derives from the Easter Monday when she completed the sonata’s first movement, but the four movements generate a sense of momentous drama through to a tormented A minor finale in which an Easter chorale finally bestows serenity. After this powerfully original work, the G minor Sonata of 1843 raises the dramatic stakes still further with a headstrong opening movement worthy of any piano work by more celebrated male contemporaries. Unstable harmonies as well as Fanny’s trademark melodic charm propel the sonata forwards towards a surprisingly carefree finale.
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