movie review

Romantic Sonatina Murad Kazhlayev (b. 1931) Ernest So, piano Recorded live on February 25, 2012 Hong Kong City Hall Recital Hall There are unfortunately very little information about this composer from Azerbaijan, except that he was born in 1931 in Baku, the capital city, and that he was active as a composer and conductor in the surrounding regions. He earned his fame not only in his home country but also in Moscow, where he became the conductor for the Orchestra of State Television and Radio. Even though the sound and culture of Eurasia has escaped the attention of most classical listeners, the cultural richness of this region is beyond what we could imagine. At the confluence of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, its music carries a distinctive oriental exoticism while confining (almost strictly) to a backbone of European musical tradition. The Romantic Sonatina is one of Kazhlayev’s earliest published works. Written in 1952 when he was barely 20 years old, it demonstrates at once the impulsive rhythms of a young man, coupled with strikingly exotic melodies and harmonies, all laid out in strict form of a Sonata. From this early work one can see the technical foundation a composer built on: no matter what musical language one converses in, it is the form that gives it structure and coherence. The lucidity of its rhetoric still depends upon the classically established form of a Sonata, without which none of the musical ideas could articulate and convey the message it …