If I Say Çesk Zadeja, I Also Mean Dhurata Lazo — Eda Zari

Inspiration drawn from traditional music and archaic tonalities never reduced the work of Prof. Çesk Zadeja to simple folklorism. In his compositions — including the Piano Concerto in E-flat major of 1968 — one senses, as with many composers of that period, a search for a tonal language that might mark a new beginning beyond Romanticism without denying tradition.

Zadeja had little interest in twelve-tone music. Alongside pentatonic and diatonic writing, he also used bitonality and placed strong emphasis on rhythmic diversity, which at moments reminds me of Stravinsky. Orchestras of his time initially encountered real difficulty with these non-classical rhythmic structures, especially when layered with a pianistic language that again drew from traditional music.

If I say Çesk Zadeja, I also mean Dhurata Lazo.

There are works one longs to hear almost ceremonially through a particular interpreter. For me, Maestra Lazo is the ethereal world of Prof. Çesk’s score, just as Alfred Brendel embodies for me the musical fluidity of Brahms, Mussorgsky, Busoni or Haydn.

That is why I chose this recording by the artist, made with the RTSH Orchestra under conductor Ermir Krantja. The recording reveals the musical fruit of the composer in a reinterpretation that would surely have pleased his artistic pride.

Through the world of her sound and her pianistic articulation, Dhurata Lazo gives the work new timbral horizons. She catapults the piano from a conventional melodic instrument into an instrument of rhythm, colour and newly blended sonorities.

At the same time her performance remains lucid and elegant. It never disturbs the balance between orchestra and soloist; rather, it serves the work and opens it emotionally to the audience.

It is as though Lazo moves across the keyboard under the motto: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

Danke, Dhurata Lazo.