Vers La Grande Porte De Kiev -- Live at Jermann Winery

"The late Keith Emerson, of prog rock supergroup Emerson, Lake & Palmer, once told a British journalist that in his early years he simply stole musical ideas - unacknowledged - from classical composers. “Later on”, he said, “I had to start giving them a bit of credit”. Perhaps the most famous of those credits was to Modest Musorgskij’s Pictures At An Exhibition, a piano cycle whose closing movement “The Great Gate Of Kiev” is the climax and title-track of this glorious duo performance by Michele Campanella and Javier Girotto. Rock and jazz musicians have always “stolen” from the classics, but sometimes too, they have attempted completely faithful versions of classical opuses, in which originality and self-expression are matters of texture and exact registration rather than the invention of new melodies or variations. Miles Davis famously did it with Rodrigo’s Concierto De Aranjuez; there have been two recent “jazz” versions of Quartet For The End Of Time by Olivier Messiaen, who famously thought that jazz a “voleur” – robber – that plundered other musics for all its “original” effects. Here is a performance that perhaps offers a respectful restitution. Campanella and Girotto play Stravinskij, Rachmaninov and Musorgskij with affection and high regard. They stay within the original score. They do not merely improvise on the “changes”. Is the music theirs, or that of the composers? In the end, surely, it belongs to all of us". (Brian Morton)

Recorded Live at Jermann Winery (Ruttars, Italy) on 9 June 2017 Recording engineer Stefano Amerio

Photos by Elisa Caldana