Turkish Music for Violin & Piano

Turkey has produced several performers who were trained in Europe and went on to international renown, but this is one of very few album releases devoted to Turkish composers. Violinist Selim Giray is a professor at Pittsburg State University in Kansas. He has written on the composer Ahmed Adnan Saygun, whose career began in the 1930s, and the bulk of the disc is devoted to Saygun's music. Saygun worked with both the aging Vincent d'Indy (as a student) and Béla Bartók (as a collaborator in research), and the music recorded ... Read More

Turkey has produced several performers who were trained in Europe and went on to international renown, but this is one of very few album releases devoted to Turkish composers. Violinist Selim Giray is a professor at Pittsburg State University in Kansas. He has written on the composer Ahmed Adnan Saygun, whose career began in the 1930s, and the bulk of the disc is devoted to Saygun's music. Saygun worked with both the aging Vincent d'Indy (as a student) and Béla Bartók (as a collaborator in research), and the music recorded here effectively grafts Turkish tonal content onto rather traditional French textures and forms. The sonata and suite recorded here contrast complex fusions of this kind with movements in fast dance rhythms and slower pieces that perhaps display the melancholy so eloquently described by novelist Orhan Pamuk in his book on Istanbul. Both are engaging works, but the real find here is Saygun Inci's Book, a group of short pedagogical pieces for solo piano that owes much to Bartók's... Read Less