Duo della Luna: Mangetsu

A rare ensemble combination of voice and violin, Duo della Luna presents an album that is sonically beautiful and contextually adventurous. Mangetsu is dreamy and poetic yet cutting edge and experimental. The thread that connects a variety of compositions on this album is the unique ensemble sound throughout: deep, eloquent, potent. Susan Botti (voice/composer) and Airi Yoshioka (violin) venture into themes of life and creation, imagination, female power and love with a magical artistic rapport.

The album opens with Botti’s dreamlike multi-movement title work. The wordless sections (“mangetsu”) are nested in between the movements with poems describing the moon and the ethereal world of childhood (Shikibu, Yeats, de Saint-Exupéry). The result is music that is willowy and sensual, a luring mystery. Botti explores the possibilities of voice and violin interactions to a great degree but always in the service of the poetry. Yoshioka’s violin playing is simply gorgeous, the colours and the precision equally alluring.

The rest of the album consists of Botti’s innovative arrangements of selected Bartók Duos for Two Violins, followed by Kaija Saariaho’s intimate Changing Light. Linda Dusman’s Triptych of Gossips, incorporating a fancifully rhythmical poem by Serena Hilsinger, is a chamber of curiosities of extended techniques and a great sonic adventure.

There is a certain kind of magic that happens when the music is expressed in so few voices. The sound becomes unadorned and pure, and these two performers take full advantage of it.

— Ivana Popovic, 10.29.2021

The duo of Susan Botti and Airi Yoshioka, as Duo della Luna the pair match Botti’s sublime vocals with Yoshioka’s spellbinding violin acrobatics across a multi-lingual and intricately textured climate that spans powerful and rich to bare and intimate.

Botti’s “Mangetsu” opens the listen with emotive and soaring wordless vocals surrounding Yoshioka’s precisely manipulated strings that are bowed and plucked to emit the most amount of atmosphere, and Béla Bartók’s “44 Duos For 2 Violins” follows with a louder, firm presence of operatic singing alongside emotive and playful violin.

The back half of the listen doesn’t disappoint either, and includes the cautious and warm “Wayfaring Stranger”, where Botti’s arrangement puts much emphasis on mood, while Linda Dusman’s “Triptych Of Gossips” recruits screeching strings and bouts of ominous, even scary, moments amid the exploration.

“Two Italian Folk Songs” exits the listen, and presents much beauty as the delicate and robust singing aligns with the meticulous violin in the Northern Italy songs that retain much melody.

An absorbing listen in the area of contemporary classical sounds, Botti and Yoshioka bring a wealth of talent and experience to a project that’s as creative as it is timeless.

— Tom Haugen, 8.17.2021

From the blurb for this album:

As solo artists, Susan Botti (soprano/composer) and Airi Yoshioka (violin) have devoted their musical careers to new music. After performing together in various chamber settings, Airi commissioned Susan to write a work for just voice and violin, resulting in Botti’s Mangetsu. Realizing that there was a special spark when the music was stripped down to just their two voices intertwined, they formed Duo della Luna to explore this further. The duo has performed in the US, Canada and Italy.

And strange is the only word one can use to describe Mangetsu, a six-movement suite in which Botti’s mostly wordless vocals intertwine with and complement Yoshioki’s intense violin. One of the things that makes it interesting is that Botti’s voice is not lean and bright like the violin but warm and ambient, with a lot of overtones. It doesn’t sound like a large or powerful instrument, but she makes her presence felt in this intimate setting and she has good pitch, good diction in those passages when she sings words, and a decent upper range. She also doesn’t make it easy on herself by writing a vocal line that is essentially tonal and grateful to sing, but rather she sings mostly atonal lines, and by keeping the volume of her voice down (often singing in half voice), she is able to create an interesting ambience without ever overwhelming the violin, which has its own quite complex atonal lines to play against her. At times, the music toys with the contrast or blend of timbres as much as with the contrasting musical lines. Since they’ve worked together for a while now, they fully understand each other’s styles and performance methods.

Just as interesting, if not more so, is Botti’s arrangement of five pieces from Bela Bartók’s 44 Duos for 2 Violins for one violin and voice. There’s a certain strangeness that ensues from the transcription of the second violin part for a soprano that has to be heard to be fully appreciated.

My regular readers know what I’m not a big fan of Kaija Saariaho’s music, finding it more effect than substance, but Changing Light is a really fine piece with an interesting and well-developed structure that holds your attention. Perhaps its brevity (5:16) has something to do with that, but in any case it is one of the most gripping pieces on this disc.

Botti’s reimagined version of the old folk song Wayfaring Stranger is not only musically interesting but also deeply moving. In fact, there is something quite emotional going on in all of these pieces and performances, one might say a projection of deep feminine feelings. It is palpable but not very easy to put into words, but the sensitive listener will feel it. The sole exception to this, I felt, was Linda Dusman’s Triptych of Gossip, which seemed to me more of a tongue-in-cheek piece (with serious overtones) than one designed for emotional projection.

There is a certain feeling of timelessness about this recording, in two senses. First, the music itself, except for the Bartók pieces, seem to emerge from some timeless and unnamed ether in which is stored all the feelings of women throughout the centuries; and second, one feels as if time itself is suspended while listening to Duo della Luna. They give you something that no other musicians, not even any other voice-violin combination I’ve ever heard, can bring you. Their performances touch the heart as well as the mind, and not in the simpering, artificial manner in which classical radio stations play old-fashioned musical pap for your “heart, mind and spirit.” This is truly spiritual music in a way that I’ve seldom heard in my entire life. And the feelings they evoke are deep, sensual, and sometimes painful, but always profoundly human.

You really need to hear this recording. There’s nothing else like it in the entire world.

— Lynn René Bayley, 7.11.2021

https://www.wruu.org/broadcasts/27991

— Dave Lake, 9.15.2021

DUO DELLA LUNA, the remarkable pairing of vocalist/composer Susan Botti and violinist Airi Yoshioka, evolved after Yoshioka commissioned Botti to write a work for the two of them. The success of the resulting piece, which gives its name to this collection, led to their forming a duo ensemble—and to this unusually creative recording. Botti’s inventive, six-movement Mangetsu, which means “full moon” in Japanese, sets three lunar-related texts, interspersed with short vocalise movements. The opening wordless song is meditative and quietly lyrical, with double-stops on the violin creating three-part harmony with Botti’s solo voice. In the spare, pointillistic “From Darkness,” set to a few lines translated from The Diary of Izumi Shikibu, Botti delivers flighty melismas on the opening word “From” as Yoshioka plucks, slides and tremolos. Subsequently, the vocal line spins out hesitantly but reverently, as the violinsensitively shadows Botti’s excursions and subtly illuminates the text.

“The Stolen Child,” with text excerpted from the Yeats poem of the same name, has an aggressive beginning with dissonant arpeggios in the violin. Later, an ostinato pizzicato accompaniment leads into a subtly bluesy section that describes a couple’s nighttime romp on the beach. As the text gets more abstract, the melodic line becomes more angular and Botti’s delivery breathier, showing a wide range of dramatic expression. The ending movement, another vocalise, is reflective again, soaring briefly, and fading beautifully.

The next set is fascinating: Botti has taken five of the Bartók 44 Duos for 2 Violins and arranged them for voice and violin. For three, this involved going back to the original folk- song source material and restoring the words; for the other two, she uses wordless texts. At times Botti’s vocals sound like a mad incantation, almost frightening in her upper range. Especially in the wordless movements, her characterful, sometimes guttural, sometimes yelping syllabifications give the pieces a level of musical drama that takes them to a realm far beyond the original versions.

Kaija Saariaho’s profound, transfixing Changing Light, to a text by Rabbi Jules Harlow,explores the fragility of humankind and reveals Saariaho’s customary vivid imagination even as it hews close to D minor. Botti shows impressive control in her sotto voce delivery, all theway up to a delicate high B.

The other major work is Linda Dusman’s Triptych of Gossips, with a text by Serena Hilsinger. When Hilsinger calls it a triptych, she’s not kidding: her poem conjures trios of women from mythology and literature (“Euryale, Medusa, Stenno”; “Ligeia, Leukosia, Parthenope”) in three movements, each of which consists of three-line stanzas with three syllables per line. Both Botti and Yoshioka are cheerfully unhesitant about making ugly sounds when called for —Botti sliding, growling and hissing (occasionally sounding actually possessed), and Yoshioka grinding her bow uncomfortably close to the bridge. At times the piece sounds like a catalogue of extended techniques for both voice and violin, but Dusman has a compelling vision for Hilsinger’s boldly imaginative incantations, and the two warrior-like performers embrace it eagerly. At thirteen minutes, the piece is not always easy listening (nor, surely, is it intended as such), but it’s unfailingly imaginative and great fun as performance art.

Botti fills out the collection with her arrangements of “Wayfaring Stranger” (a bluesy rendition with improvised-sounding violin ornamentation and an intriguing non-cadence at the end) and two folk songs from Northern Italy that Botti dedicates to her grandparents. In these readily enjoyable pieces, as throughout the recording, the two opulently creative performers consistently bring out the best in each other.

— Joshua Rosenblum, 12.03.2021