«The Hidden Music of Sofia G.» tells a mysterious musical story that began as a happy accident. By sheer accident, Swedish violinist Eva Lindal, known from bass player Filip Auguston’s Viva Black Trio, stumbled in 2012 across two hand-written music scores for violin and piano hidden in an old violin case, signed «Sofia G. 1935». These scores included some unusual graphic and eccentric symbols – arrows, curves, jagged lines, black squares, circles, interspersed among conventional notation. The violin case also contained a leather identification tag that read «Sofia Ganeshian, Locarno, Svizzera.»
Lindal and American jazz pianist Virg Dzurinko detected a box of notebooks, ephemera, and additional scores of Ganeshian. They concluded that Ganeshian was born in Yerevan, Armenia, in 1899. Her father was a school teacher and an amateur folk musician, and her mother was a seamstress. In 1914, with trouble looming on the horizon, Ganeshian’s parents sent her to stay with relatives in Switzerland. Ganeshian lived with her aunt and uncle in Locarno until the late 1920s, at which point she moved to Italy for a number of years. She had learned to play the violin in Yerevan, and entries in her early notebooks mention both piano and violin lessons in Locarno. She apparently continued her musical education in Milano, studying composition sporadically. After WWII She immigrated to the Greek island Corfu, where she remained for the rest of her life. Ganeshian died there in 1967.
Lindal and Dzurinko do not know if Ganeshian composed music for its own sake or if her music ever performed. «The Hidden Music of Sofia G.» is the first-ever recording of Ganeshian’s daring and mysterious compositions. The album offers seven of her pieces for piano and violin, the earliest of which dates from the early 1930s and the latest from the mid-1950s. Lindal and Dzurinko tell the story of a fellow female groundbreaking musician-composer with grace and elegance. Ganeshian’s compositions are subtle and introspective but are full of surprises and despite their intimate, chamber and often ascetic atmosphere leave enough room for personal interpretation and free improvisation, The brief «Salamandra» and the longer «Sirene» suggest a series of playful and capricious games. These compositions demand an inventive approach that calls for exquisite extended technique and all sound fresh and adventurous, even today.
Eyal Hareuveni
Eva Lindal (vio) Virg Dzurinko (p)
