Sollima: Chamber Music Ensemble Kinari

• Eliodoro Sollima (1926 - 2000):
• 1 Sollima: Sonata for Cello and Piano: I. Lento - Allegro viva 07:20
• 2 Sollima: Sonata: II. Andante molto espressivo 03:55
• 3 Sollima: Sonata: III. Perpetuum mobile - Allegro con spirito 01:57
• Studi for Violin and Clarinet:
• 4 Sollima: Studi for Violin and Clarinet: I. Allegro ritmico 01:27
• 5 Sollima: Studi for Violin and Clarinet: II. Lento 02:42
• 6 Sollima: Studi for Violin and Clarinet: III. Presto 01:02
• Tre movimenti for Piano, Violin and Cello:
• 7 Sollima: Tre movimenti for Piano, Violin and Cello: I. Allegro 03:19
• 8 Sollima: Tre movimenti for Piano, Violin and Cello: II. Andante sostenuto 05:23
• 9 Sollima: Tre movimenti for Piano, Violin and Cello: III. Vivace 02:26
• Eliodoro Sollima:
• 10 Sollima: Evoluziona No. 5 09:03
• 11 Sollima: Quartetto No. 3 "la leggenda di San Damiano 14:09
• 12 Sollima: Aria for Piano, Violin, Viola and 2 Cellos 03:18
• Total Runtime 56:01

Info for Sollima: Chamber Music

Eliodoro Sollima (1926-2000) was a Sicilian musician raised in the town of Marsala, where the concert hall is dedicated to his memory. From 1954 to 1991 he taught composition at the conservatoire in Palermo, where he was also the institution’s director for 16 years. This is the only album dedicated to his music: new recordings made by a young contemporary music ensemble, who are joined by the composer’s son, Giovanni Sollima, a cellist and composer in his own right who has made several previous albums for Brilliant Classics.

Sollima studied piano with Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, and he wrote for his instrument with a thorough grasp of its range as a Romantic instrument – Italian TV broadcasts preserve some unfussily accomplished performances of Liszt – which courses through his best-known piece, the Toccata of 1951. However, his idiom embraced a Bartokian toughness of rhythm, most vividly demonstrated here by the three movements for piano trio (for which Sollima received compliments from Isaac Stern). In 1968 he wrote a powerful concerto for string orchestra in memory of Bobby Kennedy, and the tortured harmonies of this piece carry over into both the contemporaneous piano trio and the later ‘Evoluziona No.5’ for violin and piano.

However, the album surveys the full range of Sollima’s oeuvre, from the brief and touching Aria he composed for a chamber quintet as a 19-year-old, to a compact Cello Sonata written at the age of 22 in 1948. From almost half a century later dates the ‘Legend of St Damiano’, a single-movement piano quartet that effectively synthesises the evolution of the composer’s music.

Luciano Tarantino recorded Giovanni Sollima’s own music on a ‘Cello Solo Journey’ released in 2019 by Brilliant Classics (95964). His own playing can also be enjoyed on a 2014 album of Offenbach’s cello duets (94475).

Eliodoro Sollima was a remarkable Italian composer, teacher and pianist. He perfected his piano playing at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena with Guido Agosti and in Arezzo with Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, who selected him in May 1954 for the first Italian performance of Alban Berg's Kammerkonzert at the Teatro Nuovo in Milan. In 1965 he founded the Trio di Palermo.

His personal style combines contemporary harmonies with poignant and passionate, almost late-romantic phrases. He is a man, a musician at one with his land and the multi-ethnicity of musical roots that it offers, and an innovative experimenter of every current of musical thought of his time, without ever being exclusively linked to any of them.

This new recording presents a selection of Sollima’s chamber music: a Cello Sonata, Tre Movimenti for piano trio, and a Quartetto for piano quartet.

Played by the Kinari Ensemble (violin, cello, viola, piano) and cellist Giovanni Sollima, the composer’s son and one of the most outstanding cellists of his generation.

Ensemble Kinari
Giovanni Sollima, cello

Giovanni Sollima
is an internationally renowned cellist and the Italian composer whose works are most performed the world. He has collaborated with Riccardo Muti, Yo-Yo Ma, Ivan Fischer, Viktoria Mullova, Ruggero Raimondi, Mario Brunello, Kathryn Stott, Giuseppe Andaloro, Toni Florio, Yuri Bashmet, Katia and Marielle Labeque, Giovanni Antonini, Ottavio Dantone, Patti Smith, Stefano Bollani, Paolo Fresu, Antonio Albanese and with orchestras such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Manchester Camerata, Liverpool Philharmonic (Artist in Residence 2015), Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Moscow Soloists, Berlin Konzerthausorchester, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Il Giardino armonico, Cappella Neapolitana, Accademia Bizantina, Holland Baroque Society, Budapest Festival Orchestra.

He has composed music for Peter Greenaway, John Turturro, Bob Wilson, Carlos Saura, Marco Tullio Giordana, Peter Stein, Lasse Gjertsen, Anatolij Vasiliev, Karole Armitage and Carolyn Carlson.

Sollima has performed at Alice Tully Hall, Knitting Factory, Carnegie Hall (New York), Wigmore Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall (London), Salle Gaveau (Paris), Teatro alla Scala (Milan), Opera House (Sidney), Suntory Hall (Tokyo).

Since 2010 he has been teaching at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, where he was awarded the title of Academic.

In 2012, together with Enrico Melozzi, he founded the 100 Cellos.

In 2015 he composed the sound logo of Expo in Milan and inaugurated the new museum space of Michelangelo’s Pietà Rondanini.

Giovanni explores different genres using ancient, oriental, electric and inventive instruments, playing in the Sahara desert, underwater, and with an Ice Cello.

His discography started up in 1998 with a CD produced by Philip Glass for Point Music which was followed by eleven albums for Sony, Egea and Decca.

He has brought to light the 18th century musician, Giovanni Battista Costanzi, of whom he has recorded the Sonatas and Symphonies for cello and basso continuo for the Glossa label.

In October 2018 he received the Anner Bijlsma Award at the Cello Biennale in Amsterdam.

Giovanni Sollima plays a cello by Francesco Ruggieri (Cremona, 1679)

Booklet for Sollima: Chamber Music