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“ Anmut, Klarheit, Sehnsucht, Emotion und Harmonie prägen ihre Interpretationen. “

[SR 2]

“ Un album alto et piano qui gravite autour du cœur lunaire qu’est l’opus 147 de Chostakovitch, et qui démontre qu’une haute musicalité et une production discographique de qualité peuvent se développer à l’écart des circuits établis. ”

[Jean-Christophe Le Toquin RESMUSICA]

“ This is an impressive recital from a violist who deserves to be widely heard and appreciated. Very good recorded sound and informative program notes, despite the consistently dodgy translation. “

[Huntley Dent FANFARE]

“Charm and intimacy together, yearning and clarity, emotion and harmony”, in short, “all the challenges posed by music of the Romantic era”, as Jörg Loskill put it; and the young Italian pianist Gabriele Leporatti rose to all these challenges in the first CD of his new series Etera last year. To combine Schumann’s Fantasie op. 17 and Gesänge der Frühe op. 133 with Respighi’s piano sonata was in itself an unusual choice to make, and its realization earned the former student of the legendary Maria Tipo a plethora of warm acclamations.

For his second Etera album (and his fourth production in total) Gabriele Leporatti has found in Yuri Bondarev, leading viola in the Düsseldorfer Symphoniker, a worthy partner. He too is clearly a romantic with the perfect ear for those ineffable subtleties that find a way past confrontations of apparently irreconcilable opposites and make it possible to combine four composers of apparently totally diverse world views in such a way that what might at first glance look like musical visiting cards (“Look at us, here we are!”) ends up seeming inevitably right. Hindemith’s viola sonata op. 11 no. 4 next to Nino Rota’s Intermezzo and Shostakovich’s final work, with Rachmaninov’s Margaritki (“Daisies”) as an effective bonus -  it would seem, musically speaking, that the contrasts between all these ought to jar, unless the performers were to approach the works with a laxity that would level down any potential conflict.

But the Bondarev-Leporatti duo has found a third way and looked at these four composers under the aspect of their “romantic soul”. The result is as astonishing as the encounter between Schumann and Respighi. Once the whole collection has been listened to, the impressionistic idiom of the Fantasie with which Hindemith begins his sonata has the effect of an echo of the Margaritki, while Rota’s lyrically buoyant Intermezzo blends effortlessly into Shostakovich’s sparse Pizzicati, and the life that ended with this homage to the Moonlight Sonata (though without any sense of resignation) finds its resurrection in the little song by the great Sergei. Etera or Eterna? that is the question….

                                                               Eckhardt van den Hoogen