The Lockdown

With their concerts celebrating the anniversaries of Piazzolla and Prokofiev in 2021 cancelled due to Covid, violinists Maya Levy and Hrachya Avenesyan decided to put their time in Lockdown to good use by recording a program of works by both composers and turning their Brussels apartment into a recording studio. The result is this striking and dramatic album. The music of both composers contains emotions that many of us will have experienced over the past year. Fear, tension, despair, hope, joy - the emotional range explored by the works on this recording is wide ranging but overall, the mood is of hope triumphing. Prokofiev composed his sonatas under Soviet repression, and Piazzolla's tangos have the unmistakable bitter-sweet melancholy of the Argentinian soul underlying the sultry and sensual tango.