Pilgrimage - Dmytro Choni - Audio CD (Arrives in 50 days)

Trained in Kyiv, his hometown, then in Austria where he lives today, Dmytro Choni – Bronze Medalist at the 2022 Van Cliburn, Gold Medalist at the Santander Paloma O'Shea in 2018 – imagines for his recording debut with naïve an ingenious and mischievous dialogue between Paradise and Hell, in direct echo to the Divine Comedy of Dante Aligheri, the essential poet of the late Italian Middle Ages, who was a strong influence on a Romanticism that was looking for its roots. The luminous pieces, with soothing melodies, will embody Paradise. The first opus of his compatriot Valentyn Silvestrov, whose aesthetic recalls the quiet beauty of Kyiv, the calm Bagatelles open the present journey in elegiac tones, even if here and there, as in the moving Moderato médian, some beginnings of a coming anxiety emerge. The terrifying darkness will burst forth from the incipit of Après une lecture de Dante (Liszt), where Choni becomes the devil himself. In this fantasia quasi sonata, hell is a tragic whirlwind, and the passionate impulses transcribe the unhappy passion of Paolo and Francesca.

Label: Naive | Origin: Holland