Giya Kancheli. 18 Miniatures
Theater and Cinema Music for Violin and Piano (clarinet transcriptions by Julian Milkis)
Melodiya releases a studio recording of the work of one of the major composers of the twentieth century Giya (Georgy Alexandrovich) Kancheli (1935–2019). The transcription of the work made as a cycle for violin and piano with the dedication to Gidon Kremer at the turn of the 1990s is performed by Julian Milkis and Polina Osetinskaya.
For more than forty years, Giya Kancheli actively collaborated with some of the best-known theater and movie directors, such as Rezo Gabriadze, Georgy Daneliya, Robert Sturua, Rezo Chkheidze, and Eldar Shengelaya. In total, he wrote music for more than fifty theater productions and about a hundred films. The composer’s theater and film music became one of the landmarks of the art of the 1960s through the 2000s, stepped over the borders of countries and continents, and became a truly world heritage. It is no less significant that it has always been in a single style complex with Kancheli’s large-scale works of Kancheli in the academic genres – orchestral, vocal, and instrumental ones. This further led to the possibility of forming various concert opuses on the basis of the scores that had an applied purpose. The Miniatures is one of the brightest examples of such a transfer. The cycle comprises music from the films, such as Don’s Grieve, When Almonds Blossomed, Mimino, Tears Were Falling, Kin-dza-dza, as well as the theater productions How Do You Like It, Mother Courage and Her Children, Khanuma, Sior Todero, Hamlet, King Lear, Waiting for Godot, and others.
The Miniatures are performed by Julian Milkis, an outstanding American academic and jazz clarinetist, graduate of the Juilliard and Manhattan music schools, the only student of Benny Goodman, and dedicatee of numerous works of the last decades, and Polina Osetinskaya, a pianist, student of Marina Wolf and Vera Gornostayeva, winner of many prestigious awards, and one of the brightest representatives of the domestic piano school.
The recording was made at Mosfilm Studio in 2020.
