[TR24][OF] Alice Sara Ott and Francesco Tristano - Scandale (Ravel, Римский-Корсаков / Rimsky-Korsakov, Schlimé, Стравинский / Stravinsky) - 2014 (Classical, Piano)

A dream team
For her new recording rising star Alice Sara Ott teams up with Francesco Tristano, who is a guarantor for highly innovative projects. Fascinated from the idea of Ballets Russes their challenging programme for two pianos centers upon Stravinsky’s extremely rhythmic and avant-garde score of “The rite of spring”, the crowning success de scandale of Ballets Russes and includes the catchy tune of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade”.
The album features an exciting new composition by Francesco Tristano himself 'A soft shell groove', which has never been recorded before.
No ballet company influenced the 20th-century intellectual world as did Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with its signature conceptualization of dance, music and the fine arts as equal partners in a unified art form.
Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes became one of the most influential ballet companies of the 20th century, in part because of its ground-breaking artistic collaboration among contemporary choreographers, composers, artists, and dancers.

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Individually, Alice Sara Ott and Francesco Tristano are two of their generation’s brightest young stars. Together, they are a pianistic dream team.
While their choice of title is an allusion to the Russian impresario Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev (1872–1929), they have no desire to view him or his era through a retrospective, idealistic haze. Scandale is a pianistic conversation between two artists set against the varied backdrop of the music they love.
The music they have chosen is bold and big: orchestral epics rendered on two pianos. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was transcribed for piano duo by the composer himself. Heard on keyboards, its primal harmonies and rhythms are all the more sinewy and visceral, the melodies rendered in high definition, and it’s an athletic showpiece for the pianists.
When Alice Sara Ott and Francesco Tristano come together to play the works on this album, pieces that have been performed a thousand times before, something miraculous happens. Watch them give a whole new meaning to "piano duets."