Duo Gazzana

The Gazzana sisters, violinist Natascia and pianist Raffaella, have performed as a unit since childhood and have issued multiple recordings on the ECM imprint. Born in Sora, Italy, south of Rome, the siblings are not twins despite their strong physical resemblance, and they first collaborated musically while still young. Natascia earned an artist’s diploma from the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome at age 17, then pursued additional training in Geneva and at the Lausanne Conservatory in Switzerland, where Pierre Amoyal guided her to a Diploma of Virtuosity; she also participated in master classes led by Yehudi Menuhin and Ruggiero Ricci, among others. Raffaella obtained her own artist’s diploma from the Refice Conservatory in Frosinone and likewise relocated to Switzerland for lessons in Lausanne with Daniel Spielberg and Frédéric Rapin; there she encountered pianist Bruno Canino, who became her chief instructor and mentor. Their educational routes eventually merged when both sisters enrolled in chamber-music courses at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, at the Lausanne Conservatory, and in Fiesole with the Trio di Milano. They next attended La Sapienza in Rome, where Natascia concentrated on visual arts while Raffaella studied musicology and completed a dissertation on William Walton. The pair established Duo Gazzana in the mid-1990s.

The duo has toured extensively throughout Europe as well as in Asia, Africa, and Oceania, maintaining particularly close ties to East Asian nations such as Japan, Vietnam, South Korea, and Singapore, where performances have been supplemented by master classes. Their programs and discs have centered on twentieth-century repertoire, and composers including Valentin Silvestrov, Đặng Hữu Phúc, Fabio Maffei, Tõnu Kõrvits, and Canino have written new pieces for them. The sisters became the first Italian chamber ensemble to record for ECM, releasing the album Five Pieces on the label in 2011 with works by Takemitsu, Hindemith, Janáček, and Silvestrov; they returned to the label for a further disc in 2022 containing music by Kõrvits, Schumann, and Grieg.