Kashkashian, Magen & Piccinini: ‘Tre Voci’

Kim Kashkashian, Sivan Magen, Marina Piccinini, ‘Tre Voci’

ECM New Series

The three “voices” on this transfixingly beautiful recording — violist Kim Kashkashian, harpist Sivan Magen, and flutist Marina Piccinini — met at Marlboro Music in summer 2010, and their effortless interplay is typical of the musical rapport that festival often produces. The trio’s unusual instrumentation made its debut in Debussy’s mysteriously beautiful sonata, the middle work on this release, which contains some of the composer’s most imaginative chamber textures along with a furtive sense of melancholy. Takemitsu, for whom Debussy’s works were critical, extended the French composer’s innovations in “And then I knew ’twas Wind.” Here the surfaces become more sinuous and less tangible, time is extended, and the piece plays like a series of enigmatic images. Even sparer and more restrained are the rustlings in Sofia Gubaidulina’s “Garden of Joys and Sorrows,” which balances a series of pitches from the natural harmonic series against the stabbing dissonances of minor intervals. The performances are all superb — precisely calibrated despite the dreamlike cast of the program as a whole.

DAVID WEININGER

Kim Kashkashian, Sivan Magen, and Marina Piccinini perform Debussy’s Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp with Musicians from Marlboro at the Gardner Museum on Oct. 19.
www.gardnermuseum.org