Vakhtang Kakhidze: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra I Amazons, Symphonic suite from the Ballet I Conjugations by CugateClassics (CD)

This album gives a perfect insight into a versatile musical fatherson relationship. Djansug Kakhidze, the nestor of the Georgian classical music scene is assisting his son Vakhtang, who long since is an autonomous musician in his own right: creative as a composer, masterly as a pianist and eventually a relentless perfectionist as a conductor. There are three talents in one – which are imperatively to be discovered. Three talents – three proofs, and it starts with a smashing one. Vakhtang Kakhidze wrote his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in 1980. The piece immediately had prompted the jury of the USSR Young Composer’s Competition to award the first price to the composition. The piece follows the classical three movement form but will be played nonstop. Its fundamental building material is the C major scale, which constitutes the dramaturgy of the composition by changing consistently its modality, facture, rhythm and style. Percussive elements are alternating with high and low speed scales, seemingly free improvisatory parts are absorbed by formal structures – everything is nonstop under way, fully on purpose crossing borders between Classical Music and Jazz elements. On our recording Vakhtang plays the piano, his father Djansug is conducting. „Composing the music for the ballet Amazons was the turning point in my life,“ recollects Vakhtang Kakhidze, „since in this score I showed everything I was able to. For the first time I composed from a conductor’s point of view, I wrote the music as if I stood on the rostrum myself.“ In 1998 Vakhtang Kakhidze extracted 13 pieces from the complete ballet and compiled the Symphonic Suite in the present form. And this version shows the whole range of the composer’s talent: coherent depiction of the different characters by expressive musical means, tension-filled development of the musical material over and above the opposing movements, elaborating motifs and themes by assigning them to all orchestral sections which eventually is rounded by a colourful orchestration thus allowing a large late romantic symphony orchestra almost unlimited opportunities. Here Vakhtang himself conducts the Tbilisi Symphony Orchestra. The fundamental idea of Conjugations is an attempt to combine and, at the same time, to oppose different musical instruments and sections of the orchestra. Is it possible to combine whilst opposing and vice versa? This key question gave the impetus to the composer to write Conjugations. The piece explores the borders of tonality, yet remains tonal. It contrasts clusters in the brass section with seemingly simple melodies, it arranges polyrhythmic structures put in layers one upon the other, separating and combining them, playing with this discrepancy. At the same time the composer adds typical Georgian musical ingredients such as figural ostinato phrases and extended organ points. Just like in linguistics the musical material in Conjugations is elaborated in all its facets. Here Djansug Kakhidze is conducting. The recording is carefully mastered by the prestigious Grammy award-winning b-sharp studio Berlin.

released December 6, 2019

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