Cellist Santiago Canon Valencia, just 21, has had a remarkable career - very much sparked off by studies with James Tennant - when the young Colombian enrolled at Waikato University in 2007.
Valencia now plays the world concert circuit, after winning a slew of major awards including the 2010 Beijing International Competition. He made an outstanding debut on disc in 2013 with a brilliant album of solo works by Ligeti, Kodaly, Casado and Ginastera.
Two attractive new releases feature Valencia, alongside Katherine Austin, mining the repertoire for cello and piano, both substantial and stocking-filler.
The first disc of sonatas features the mighty Russian troika of Shostakovich, Schnittke and Prokofiev and how well Valencia and Austin ignite those very Slavic passions, never far below the surface in these works.
With Shostakovich's 1934 Sonata, the pair extracts extraordinary colours from a compulsively dancing Allegro and, in a soul-searching Largo, find the stoic melancholy that the politically harassed composer portrayed so well.
