Justina Auškelyte - 10 Ten (Ten Composers Ten Compositions Violin and Piano Music) (2019)

The number 10 flaunts on the cover of our album and intertwines throughout the entire album project. But why is our new album focused on this number? Celebrating our first decennial together as a duo, we decided to give ourselves a little homage – a new album. Being 2019 our 10th year of collaboration and friendship, we took 10 violin and piano masterpieces by 10 different composers and put them into one album. Symbolically, each composition recorded on this album represents one year of our work together. Looking back since 2009, there have been way more than 10 days of rehearsals, endless travels, concerts, musical confrontations, intense work, discussions or laughter to tears. 10 years of friendship that binds us deeply and enriches us more and more every day.
Notes by Justina Auškelytė & Cesare Pezzi

The magic of the numbers is deeply inscribed in the human thought, and while the various cultures have associated different meanings to different quantities, some kind of numerical symbolism is found practically throughout the human history and geography. One of the numbers which has marked not only the history of mathematics, but also the very form we use for our daily thinking is doubtlessly the number ten. And the reason for this is obvious: the number ten is inscribed in our very body, in our fingers (and indeed the word “digit” comes from the Latin for “finger”), so that the simple act of counting on one’s fingers starts to coincide with counting tout court, and with our ideas about the countability of the quantities around us.

As is equally well known, music is not only the art of emotions, but also a very mathematical art. Numbers are found everywhere in music: from the proportions among pitches which make our tuning systems to the rhythms and tempi (frequently indicated by metronome numbers in turn), from the bar numbers (which not only are a practical help for the rehearsals, but more importantly establish meaningful proportions between a piece’s sections) to the chords indicated by strings of numbers… But even though music can hardly be thought of without numbers, the digits most frequently noted on the scores are… the fingerings. Indicating each finger by a number, teachers and performers frequently clutter their scores with numbers, which ultimately facilitate the learning process.

However, even this is not as straightforward as may seem. For example, “1” will indicate one of the two thumbs for a pianist, while for a violinist it will always represent the left hand’s index finger. And so on.

Notwithstanding these intricacies, it is fascinating and meaningful that we, as humans, started counting by using our fingers, shaped our mathematics on base ten for that reason, made music in a mathematical fashion, and use numbers to identify the fingers when playing. Our bodily reality (our fingers), our most abstract activity (mathematics) and our emotions (music) are thus intertwined in a sophisticated and refined game, which unifies all of our cognitive, sensitive and physical faculties.

Unsurprisingly, the number ten is frequently found in Western music (though, to be honest, less often than some simpler quantities such as one, two, three and four: but the sum of these four numbers… is once more ten). For example, it structures Bach’s masterly Goldberg Variations, thirty pieces making ten groups of three each (the numbers three and ten are similarly employed in Dante’s Commedia, for example). After Beethoven, many composers sought – in vain – to break the glass ceiling of the ten symphonies: as Arnold Schönberg put it, “It seems that the Ninth is a limit. He who wants to go beyond it must pass away. It seems as if something might be imparted to us in the Tenth which we ought not yet to know, for which we are not ready. Those who have written a Ninth stood too close to the hereafter”.

For Christian and Jewish musicians, moreover, ten stands for the Commandments; and Johann Sebastian Bach was keen to underpin this concept, evoking God’s Laws through his works, especially when the “rules” of music had to be followed more strictly, as in the canonic forms.

The musical programme on this CD, therefore, by simply using the number “10” as its title, evokes a whole universe of symbols, ideas and associations; it is a meaningful choice, as it is also intended to be a homage to the duo’s decade-long cooperation. Indeed, the performing musicians stated their intentions by these words: “For our new album, we chose a simple, minimalist and unusual name, 10. Ten is the number of completeness and unity; it represents the completion of a cycle; the ancients used to consider it as a divine number, as a symbol for the universe and for human knowledge”. Inspired by these concepts, they collected ten pieces for violin and piano, symbolizing the whole compass of the human affections: “Among the infinite facets of classical music, we gathered some of its properties in this album”, they explain.

Brahms’ Scherzo from the FAE Sonata, written as part of a multi-authored work honouring a common friend, is aptly chosen by the performing musicians as a symbol for passion, for that enthralling feeling which excites and ensnares the listeners. This piece’s powerful physical dimension is contrasted with Zvaigzdute by Balys Dvarionas, arranged by Jurgis Dvarionas and Justina Auskelyte, here elected as a symbol for dreaming – that realm of undefined feelings, of enchanting sensations which, at one and the same time, betrays and empowers our rational powers.

Another piece, by Nino Rota (who is mostly known for his film music, but who has also composed some masterpieces both in the instrumental and in the vocal repertoire), is titled Improvviso. “Un diavolo sentimentale”. This “sentimental devil”, which alludes to the virtuoso and yet touching violin music of the preceding decades and centuries, is linked to a “diabolic passion” in the words of the performing musicians. A totally different atmosphere (“melancholic nostalgia”, in the players’ view) is found in yet another work, by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, whose music breathes the very air of infinity and nature. This Berceuse, op. 79 n. 6, is a fine example of his lyrical tone and of his intimate, and yet expressive, melodic vein.

A “dramatic impetus”, again in the performers’ words, marks Schumann’s Sonata no. 1, op. 105, which is indeed a powerful, majestic, and generously scaled masterpiece. Its technical complexity is in the service of an almost ecstatic discourse, full of heroism and of pathos. Grandiosity, and a majestic style, is what the musicians find in Prokofev’s Dance of the knights, arranged by P. Petrov after the symphonic original found in the ballet Romeo and Juliet. Indeed, the noble and yet fantastic style of this music perfectly matches the atmospheres of Shakespeare’s play, and the arrangement for violin and piano manages to maintain its union of the magniloquent with the robust and solid.

An entirely different mood is found in another Russian composer’s work, i.e. in Čajkovskij’s Melodie, from Souvenir d’un lieu cher, op. 42. Here, the performers find a “sweet and harmonious cantabile”, a singing tune which gives free rein to the expansive and warm tone of the violin. A similar feeling is evoked, for them, by the Ydill by Tor Aulin, excerpted from the 4 Aqvareller for violin and piano. This Swedish composer, roughly a contemporary of Sibelius, writes a piece full of an almost otherworldly beauty and charm.

Theatricality is what the musicians find in Maurice Ravel’s Tzigane: indeed, gipsy violinists had been admired for generations before Ravel, and their tunes and style were cited or evoked in countless compositions. Ravel, with his taste for exoticism and the distance coming from his ironic and detached perspective, manages to create a piece which enthuses at first hearing, and amuses when its strategies are revealed (and these strategies are very theatrical indeed).

Last but not least, Aram Khachaturjan’s Sabre Dance, in the arrangement by Jascha Heifetz, is as famous as it is exciting; for the musicians, it represents a “wild and furious folly”, with its obsessive rhythms and whirling sonorities.

This journey through ten pieces, ten moods, (two times) ten fingers, ten composers and ten styles is therefore a delightful reminder of how the time of a recording can encompass a whole universe of feelings, emotions and imaginations.

Album Notes by Chiara Bertoglio