Duo Alterno - The Italian Contemporary Voice 4

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  Introduction to CD The Italian Contemporary Voice 4
Reviews on CD The Italian Contemporary Voice 4
 

CD Stradivarius (Milano, 2009) producted by Rive-Gauche Concerti with substain of Regione Piemonte and Fondazione CRT.

This is the forth CD of the serie dedicated to the Italian vocal chamber repertoire in XXth century.

Interpreters: Duo Alterno (Tiziana Scandaletti soprano, Riccardo Piacentini piano),
with the partecipation of Penderecki String Quartet.

Musicological notes by Quirino Principe.

The Duo Alterno recount...

Etymologically tradition means “a handing on”, “transmission”. This comes about, to use the terminology of the ethologist Richard Dawkins, in two ways: the “genes” and the “memes”, in the sense of the sum of information transmitted by culture. Apparently, or by studied recital, many of the composers who first began to work in the 1950s and ‘60s showed a strong propensity for making tabula rasa of the “memes” of the past. And we may also say that a frequent misunderstanding linked to the word “creative”, applied as a mark of guarantee to every artistic expression as of the early decades of the 1900s (cfr. Cor Blok in Feyerabend and Thomas [edited by] Arte e Scienza, It. transl. Milan 1989), contributed to ratify a close though unnecessary relationship between art and novelty, better still if desecrating.

The fourth volume of La voce contemporanea in Italia is dedicated to this illusory desecration, responsible indeed for the creation of remarkable masterpieces; the volume is conceived transversally from past to present, amidst the urgencies of today and the memories of a past as a distant voice – with an abundance of quotations of texts, even medieval ones, and of music by Debussy, Brahms, Schumann, Rossini, Mozart and beyond – a past which does not cease to be “memetically” alive and rich in suggestions.

The two emergent moments in this process of research which has captured the attention of the Duo Alterno are perhaps the, now historic, works by Sylvano Bussotti (Lachrimae) and by Franco Donatoni (…ed insieme bussarono). A coincidence perhaps, but both were written in 1978, which is the year immediately before the date in which one of the two halves of the Duo Alterno struck out along the path of “contemporary composition”, and did so on a path that crossed Bussotti’s own. This was 1979. A few years later and in 1983 there was the meeting with Donatoni, more than a meeting a real series of “close encounters” that continued without interruption for four years and then became far more rarefied. The Duo Alterno had not yet been founded, but in some way its foundations had already been laid.

Both Bussotti and Donatoni, though quite different, have (and for Donatoni unfortunately we must say had) exceptional historical awareness and a farreaching knowledge, at least as far as the western tradition is concerned. The “totality” with which Bussotti expressed himself, and still does today – from composition tout court, to painting, dance, literature, theatre – is for the Duo Alterno an example to be translated in every artistic performance, where the performer is amplified in the figure of the hermeneutist and creator who participates in the work and creates the work itself, in all possible declinations, no less than the composer can. Lachrimae, which the Duo Alterno prepared maintaining a constant link with Sylvano but preserving their own independence as interpreters, is in this sense an almost ineffable volcano of stimuli that catapults you into several dimensions from past to present: the texts are in four languages (early French, English, German, Italian often broken down into syllables and phonemes), the graphic signs that evoke suggestions of gesture are deliberately poly-vocal and hover between simpering dance motions and prosaic everydayness, the sequence of notes are in varying degrees secret and intimately expressive, variously similar to something déjà vu or, more precisely, déjà écouté. Immersing oneself in this creative frenzy, which in a single page ranges through centuries and centuries of history, is a unique, exciting adventure that can be renewed in a thousand different ways.

For …ed insieme bussarono what matters is the affection, the memory, the lessons of school and of life given to us by our teacher and friend Franco (this again is tradition!). We are talking about almost twenty years. Between 1980 and 1990 Donatoni would often refer to composers of the 18th and 19th centuries and frequently quoted Haydn, at times Beethoven, especially Bach, on whom he elaborated a 12-voice version of the counterpoints of The Art of the Fugue. But in later years he had taken up an attitude which, flying in the face of the structuralism which was still dear to him, approached a sort of “post-anarchism” in which the motto of Paul Feyerabend, and others, “anything goes” worked well. He left us with this image, and it is this image that Duo Alterno keeps of him, transferring into their reading of…ed insieme bussarono rigour and anarchy together.We feel that any “philologically correct” reading of Donatoni’s music shows how this is possible.

The CD includes, to tell the truth, another work now acquired historically and of undoubted merit: this is the highly gestual Stripsody by Cathy Berberian, of 1996, which we have tried at least a couple of times, though without success, to have Luciano Berio listen to during our meetings in Florence and Rome; Berio preferred to listen to other pieces and probably felt that this piece should remain among the masters recorded by Cathy and by her alone.We, like other performers, have desecrated this taboo, working on the one hand on the sign contained in the score and on the other on Berberian’s recordings. Here again the result is a mixture of past and present, not merely because the score holds quotations from Brahms to the Beatles, but because Tiziana’s temperament grafts itself without any false modesty, here and now, onto pre-existent materials assumed as the fulcrum for further investigation. Certainly it was problematic and at the same time highly intriguing to have the physical gestuality of the piece transferred with studied enchantment onto a rigid, indeed digital, optical support.

The gestual adventure, this time with a declared link to that most famous of barbers, Rossini’s, continues with the equivocation, though not excessively so, Ma se mi toccano […] by Marcello Abbado, a work dedicated specifically to us, which gives us a version brought up to date and … “contestualised” (given that the Duo Alterno is a duo even beyond its artistic activity) of the wiles of the character of Rosina. Here the theatrical in its traditional understanding and contemporary gestuality are blended, with generous use of extended techniques both from the piano and the voice, now sighing, now lamenting, now excited and shrill, in a delightful game of titillation in progress that suit the works of Bussotti and Berberian so well. Tradition could not be better respected, and, at the same time, betrayed.

Smiling, and moreover the most post-modern, the Mozart piece that the Duo Alterno has prepared for this CD together with the Penderecki String Quartet. We tried it out live three times before recording it: at the SoundaXis Festival in Toronto, at the Mozart Festival in Rovereto (with the Kernel Quartet) and at the Musiche in mostra season at the GAM in Turin. The work does not, however, seek to be desecrating in itself, far less towards Mozart, but (only?) to use the melodic materials of two Mozart Lieder whose titles begin with An setting them in counterpoint using today’s codes that are variously cryptic. Presented like this it might seem an aesthetic operation of purely mechanical nature, but a rich presence of photo-sounds (that is acoustic reports in this instance gathered in Graz and Vienna and on the strings on a splendid Grotrian- Steinweg piano) linked to the modular characteristics of the work (which can be performed by quartet alone, or by quartet with photo-sounds, or again by quartet, photo-sounds, soprano and piano) with a mischievous voice that minces and recomposes the Mozart quintessences, communicates a curious, rather destabilising mobility of perspectives, like a game of boxes which slip more or less unpredictably one over the other, and, in the version with voice, the voice somehow pilots them and puts everything back in place. The voice is the true guardian of this piece, the “stunt” that transforms their sense with a click.

More serious, though certainly not frowning, the references to a post-impressionism tempered by Viennese motions (genuine quotations of style) in the two pieces in German by Mauro Bortolotti. To this composer, formerly a pupil of Petrassi who died shortly after the publication of our third volume of La voce contemporanea, we have chosen to dedicated double space. Mauro always wished these two little Lieder to be performed together, though, judging by the score, there is no obligation for this to be done. As well as presenting them on several occasions in public, we have performed them face-to-face in his studio and discovered that they required a central-European rather than a French interpretation. We also performed one of the works, the second, in his presence in Rome just a few months before he died. It was a truly interesting experience. At first Bortolotti was upset because the work was not performed with the other (where is it written that it must be?), but then the applause of the public for that single Lied, so brief and lightning-fast, were so convinced and convincing that he soon changed his mind. This is why we would like to invite you to listen to these two Lieder both separately and together, almost a diptych whose parts are perfectly independent, confirming that both types of listening will work and obviously with different results. Another example of “multiple perspectives”.

Finally the work that Gilberto Bosco has recently dedicated to us links up with Schumann; when it was just written we performed it in Berlin, Wolfsburg, Munich and Cologne. The voice moves in spirals of strong emotional impact on the impassioned verses of Heine, which Schumann had used for his unforgettable Dichterliebe opus 48. The “memic” qualities are translated here into a deep identification by the composer in the famous text Ich grolle nicht and in a type of reading that is very similar to Schumann’s, though projected into a sensibility closer to today. Immersion in tradition is complete, the piano reproposes restruck notes similar to those of the Schumann Lied, the voice is expressively tense from the very start and grows, grows…The weft is basically the same and, for this very reason, the “betrayal” is implicit, no less than sincere.

Musicological notes by Quirino Principe

Following the voice we keep coming back to the capital question which Giovan Battista Marino first expressed with a clarity equal to nostalgic regret for a time transformed into an archetype, and thus rendered myth: “Music and poetry are two sisters / restorers of the afflicted” (Adone, VII, 1623). As we return, we are aware of the sense of dialectic unease felt in the preface that Giulio Strozzi wrote in 1639 for his drama La Delia: “Music is sister to the poetry that wishes to be her sister”.What is all this? Do two Italian authors of four centuries ago, with a clarity like Descartes, pose the problem of the “Ton- ort” relationship, commonly held to be wholly romantic, and, basically, consanguineous to German culture? Is it not perhaps German culture that possesses, exclusively, the linguistic, lexical, terminological-philosophical instruments that are fittest to define and analyse this relationship?

There is an answer. The first part is easy and immediate, Athe second bitter. In the age in which Marino theand Strozzi wrote, exercising authoritative prestige in Europe, Italy was the source of all strong ideas, of all cultural innovation, and no foreigner would have been able to exercise an activity of art or thought with any originality and personality without knowing the Italian language. If today this condition seems to have been turned upside down the responsibility lies entirely with the last four centuries of Italian culture. Most importantly, the devastating collapse of musical culture in Italy is due essentially to the type of philosophical education which produced the so-called managerial class of united Italy as of 1861: half-baked and not even half-digested neo-Hegelianism, which had assimilated a guiding idea from Hegel’s Aesthetik, the idea that music is the only one of the arts that has no logical, definite meaning (!). Starting with Francesco De Sanctis, convinced as he was that music was an “unmanning” activity, unsuitable for shaping the youth of the new Italy, and therefore, in his function as the first minister of Public Education in the unitary State, the first to demolish the immense tradition of musical knowledge acquired by Italy, then through the neo-Hegelians Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile, Antonio Gramsci (disciple of Gentile educated in the hive of his thought, not of Marxist thinking), a grandiose criminal historic process of “alienation” of music from Italian culture was brought about, and in particular (a tragic paradox, a cruel nemesis set against the words of men like Marino, Strozzi, Crescimbeni…) a sorrowful severance of music from literature and poetry.

The supremacy of opera over instrumental and non-operatic vocal music, a phenomenon that was as striking as it was unhealthy, unbalancing and deleterious (men like Benedetto Marcello, Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, and later Arrigo Boito were aware of this) was a giant standing on the sand: the crisis of opera in Italy today, due also but not only to the criminal stupidity of public powers, is further retribution.

True: it is very difficult to find in Italian twentiethcentury poetry authors with a musical training worthy of a leading role in culture (the exceptions like Michelstädter or Sbarbaro or Montale, can be counted on half the fingers of a hand), and it is even harder to find them among narrators or among essayists who, even one generation ago, were mostly influenced by Croci. Who does not remember manuals of the history of Italian literature which talked about Petrarch, Tasso, Leopardi, Berchet, Manzoni, D’Annunzio and Pascoli but which contained not a single word dedicated to the music variously connected with the writings of the above-mentioned writers? It would be like writing a monograph on Goethe or Nietzsche without ever naming Schubert or Wagner.

Good: we have performed our good deed for the day, preaching our customary “useless sermon” in the style of Einaudi and pointing out the past and present responsibilities of those who, to our immense common misfortune, hold the reins of the politics, economy, culture, judiciary and ecclesiastical institutions in our land. But for now we will abandon the limits of this reflection: it corresponds to the truth, but is partial and restricted. The difficulty in the relationship between poetry and music is one that affects all western culture today, the entire “system of the arts” as the philosopher Alain (real name Émile) Chartier conceived it in his utopian splendour. We too can make the analysis, perhaps anyone could, but we cannot overlook a book which stands among the finest in aesthetic thought in the last three centuries, and that book is the best guide, a sort of grand development of Hölderlin’s Patmos in its recapitulation of the sorrow and greatness (“Leiden und Größe”) of the West.

We are alluding to Verlust der Mitte (“Loss of the centre”, 1948) by Hans Sedlmayr. The central theand sis of this work should be known to all: a time existed in which all the arts were reunited in a single elected place (the cathedral: this, however, is not a claim staked by religion, far less by Catholicism, on the history of art “im Abendlande”, it is simply a historical circumstance, the coincidence of lines of force), and the building for worship was the highest aspiration of architects of the time, indeed it was architecture “tout court”, but it also contained painting and sculpture, poetry and music and post-ancient theatre, all the expressions of art which would not have found any other venue. Then the arts separated, acquired autonomy, transferred to art galleries, sculpture halls, noble and regal homes or the houses of the well-to-do bourgeoisie or academies, paying public theatres or universities or … editorial offices of newspapers and radio-television corporations. This too was a grandiose phenomenon, and what grandeur!

In this separation the arts found their independence, were removed from the sphere of religion and made free, and in consequence they became stronger and more refined, each according to its own idiom and the most suitable means for communication. But, moving away from one another, creating a well-educated, civil “safety distance”, they also became melancholy, and in the long run found themselves like two old friends often do: after the initial outburst of joy when they first meet again, they then discover that they do not know what to say to each other.

Without any bitterness we return to the cultural quality of the relationships between music and poetry in Italy, and thus to the use of the voice with reference to a “strong” system of poetic-musical meanings, bound by knots of authentic vigour. If it is true that the “Ton-Wort” relationship has gone through a crisis in the last century of Western music (the golden ages were, for the Anglo- Flemish and Italian areas, the 15th and 16th centuries; for the Austro-German, French and Russian area the 19th and first two decades of the 20th century), it is no less certain that convergences between poet and musician like the ones formed in vocal music by Goethe and Schubert, Eichendorff/Heine and Schumann, Storm and Brahms, Pushkin and Tchaikovsky, Baudelaire and Debussy, Verlaine and Fauré, Mallarmé and Ravel, would have been unthinkable in Italy.

For this very reason the work done by many Italian composers of recent generations in regaining lost ground, and in the reconstruction of the cultural and emotional setting of an Italian vocal style of high tradition it has been precious. Consequently the action of collecting and witnessing in which this recording plays its part has been precious too. We should add that the seven authors represented here, carefully chosen so as to offer the opportunity to hear authors of different training, distributed over various generations, tending towards different choices of idiom and style, all work in accordance with a strong line of collaboration between text and music in the search for vocal style.

The choice of texts, or the invention of texts by the composers themselves, is in itself a path that furrows the ground and leaves its mark. There is a grand solitary figure of the West, Heinrich Heine (1797- 856) and a grand solitary figure of the East, the Indian mystic Kabir (1440-1518), persecuted by two religious groups for having sought the union of Hinduism and Islam and the abolition of the castes. A poet of our own time, a harsh and separate figure, Michael von Biberstein, acts as a counterbalance to two authors of the 18th century whose literary work stood halfway between true poetry and philosophy in verse, between the enlightenment promotion of culture and the attraction of esoteric mysteries: Johann Georg Jacobi (1740- 1814) and Johann Peter Uz (1720-1796). Mario Lavagetto has defined the opera librettos “those most modest novels”, and certainly they do stand, if not beneath than at least on the edges of genuine literature, offering themselves as “applied literature” or “service literature”.

But the alchemistic mysteries hidden in the marriage of word and music are such that, at times, a libretto text can be drawn along and made memorable by the music that gives it energy, and thus become energy itself. In Rossini’s operas, at least in those not affected by disuse even in the decades of Rossini’s eclipse, this comes about in profusion. Fragments of dialogue no longer escape the collective memory, they enter the vocabulary even of those who are insensitive to music: “Nacqui all’affanno e al pianto”, “Di tanti palpiti…”. But Il Barbiere di Siviglia, on the libretto of the skilled, intelligent, cultured polyglot Cesare Sterbini (1783-1831) – who with all these talents was (incredibly!) a senior official of the Pontifical Customs - gives us the greatest collection of “strong” textual fragments: “La calunnia è un venticello…”, “Tutti mi cercano, tutti mi vogliono…”, “…ma se mi toccano dov’è il mio debole…”. We will return shortly to the latter, but in a somewhat eccentric manner. Finally, there are the “Babel texts” and the “non texts”. Of the latter we can say that “non text” does not mean “non language”. Of the “Babel texts”, we declare that they do not demand the confusion of languages: they are only instruments for activating a sort of mental high speed.

In Culture and Anarchy (1869), Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) applied to historical analysis the distinction between organic ages and critical ages. For at least three centuries now we have been living through a phase of the second type, nor do we need any demonstration of this. One of the characteristics of the critical phases is the tendency of every art to be “other” compared to arts which follow parallel paths. The seven composers presented here intervene in the phenomenology of the voice in the most varied ways, and their artifices seem to converge upon a common aim: to liberate as far as possible music and text from their reciprocal otherness.

In his Vocalizzo sopra “Ma se mi toccano dov’è il mio debole” from Barbiere di Siviglia, Marcello Abbado (born Milan, Thursday 7th October 1926), whose predilection for periphrastic operations on the matter-form of music already rooted in memory and consciousness, especially on those fragments that are so deeply deposited and so historical as to act almost automatically, subjects the melody defined by the title (the second semi-phrase of the cabaletta “Io son docile”, in turn the second section of the cavatina “Una voce poco fa” in Act I of Il Barbiere) to a treatment of radical de-structuring. According to the composer’s indications, “the singer sings leaning into the piano so that her voice resounds in its sound box”, and meanwhile “the pianist plays standing; the lid of the piano will be raised as high as possible, the music stand removed, there will be a music stand to the side”. The text as such disappears in the fluid substance of the vocalisation, which alternates singing with humming, which means that the composer distances himself by three steps from the text: from the memory of words which are no longer there, to a melody sung without words, to intonation without singing. Thus the voice is reduced to a ghost of itself. Of the text there remains the rhythm, but unboundedly expanded, as happens to the Geneva Psalter in Bach’s Cantata BWV 130. The only feature of the vocalisation that seems, for a fleeting moment, to be the germ of a verbality, is found in the sighs of the singing voice, articulated in various vowels: “Ah”, Eh”, “Ih”, “Oh”. The pianist imposes a similar de-structuring of sound on his instrument: he strikes the strings with his knuckles, with his fist, flicking fingers, or, alternately, pinches them with his fingernails. How far can this type of de-structu ring go before the amused and mischievous experimentation becomes the tragedy of destruction that threatens the music even in its most flourishing, vital expressions?

With her legendary micro-composition, Stripsody (1966), Cathy Berberian (Attleboro, Massachussetts,Wednesday 4th July 1928 – Rome, Sunday 6th March 1983) is certainly far removed from elaborate material: no longer the shadow of a text, a shadow which however much it be extended and “de-textualised” is still recognisable when viewed from a distance, but interjections, onomatopoeias, expressions imitating noises, or rather analogical transcriptions of noises following the conventions used in America cartoon strips (“strips”, whence the title of the composition, where the suffix “-ody” in English has the universal meaning of “configuration in music”). Indeed, technically far removed from Abbado’s Vocalizzo, but “on the same side” in its intention to de-structure and rethink what is possible in the sphere of sounds.

The cultural theme with which we began, the alliance between the arts and in particular their liberation from a sense of reciprocal otherness, finds a very attentive witness in Gilberto Bosco (born Turin, Wednesday 6th February 1946). This composer is one of those interviewed by Renzo Cresti in the book that tackles the heart of that theme, I linguaggi delle arti e della musica [The idioms of the arts and music] (Il Molo, Viareggio 2007). Bosco declares: “Painting has influenced me greatly. First of all because I have friends who are painters, and have often spoken to them (more than with fellow musicians) about problems concerned with composition; receiving stimuli and suggestions that have generally seemed more acute than the ones my musical friends managed to give me. From painters I have, I believe, learnt an “openness” to the event, to the manifestation of a work, faced with its physicality, which I have never found in musical experiences: again, is this only my problem? […]

Though I tend to live a long time with poetical texts, the beginning of composition is often partly irrational, following the sound qualities and purely musical suggestions of some words […]. The work often later finds substance in a complicated strategy in which tonic accent positions, open and closed vowels, various madrigalisms enter a sort of mental polyphony, making various moments of the composition denser or more rarefied. What the voice or chorus does then provokes different levels of echoes, according to the instrumental formation of the piece, often almost provocations, or false madrigalisms, or games (quite probably wholly private, valid for me alone) of false and real quotations and allusions.”

The work by Bosco that we present here, … im Traume (“… in a dream”, 2007) visits a holy place for European musical Romanticism, the Lied number 7 in the cycle Dichterliebe op. 40 by Robert Schumann, on texts drawn from one of the collections of poems most steeped in the weariness of life, Lyrisches Intermezzo by Heinrich Heine. Here the composer applies directly, onto the “right” material, one of the ideas that guide him in his work and that he feels particularly keenly, the memory as more than a trace of an experience (of an “Erlebnis”): precisely, as a sign that is in us but already is us. In taking up again the famous sequence of repeated chords which accompanies the entire Lied “Ich grolle nicht”, and immediately deforming their harmonic and melodic configuration, today’s musician can glimpse the Maestro of yesterday, master also of the “mal de vivre”, as though in a dream, reconstructing the fundamental poetic situation of the romantic Lied, its dreamlike connotation that is to say. The alienation, according to a Heine text that is already terribly antiphrastic which says “I feel no hatred” and at the same time shudders with inextinguishable hatred and a sense of death, comes from the very beginning, for from the first repeated chords the Lied informs us that it is not what it should be. In this desolate, sorrowfully living announcement, word and sound reciprocally recognise their consanguinity.

Mauro Bortolotti (Narni, province of Terni, Friday 26th November 1926 – Rome, Thursday 15th November 2007), who among his many artistic merits was also a founding member of “Nuova Consonanza”, is present with two works from 1995 in this recording, Schatten (“Shadows”, taking the German word as a plural) and Ein Spiel (“A Game”, but also “A Play”), on texts by Michael von Biberstein. As we enter into the music of Bortolotti, an artist who always sought a relationship with poets who were sorrowful and harsh (Alfredo Giuliani, Elio Pecora…) but affirmative, we stand very far apart from projects of testing through destructuring: the musical scoring is of high, complex tradition, and the “Ton-Wort” relationship is an intricate labyrinth, in which the text invites us to stop and look at the world following an arch from the stars to the deepest caves, and the music fills that space multiplying itself infinitely. In Lachrimae (1978) with the subtile: … per ogni voce; un balletto ideale [for every voice; an ideal ballet],

Sylvano Bussotti (born Florence, Thursday 1st October 1931) works on texts in four different languages: early French, English, German, Italian. They appear in the score, set in the “right” place with scrupulous precision, but in reality can be shuffled like playing cards, lending themselves to a high number of possible combinations. Yet as always what is most illuminating is what Bussotti himself points out to us. “No indication of movement, however. Dynamics, rather. Thus the abstract liberty of confused appearances: a coded writing, reiterating the private, which shuffles the cards of a more intimate game, yielding to feelings. […] In becoming a ballet, Lachrimae takes as its subject that dose of the unreal that the stage and dance can realise perfectly in themselves. […] The texts must be consulted carefully (observing the preponderance of early French), drawing precise elements from the reading, both for the choreography and for the setting or possible dramatic progression.”

Franco Donatoni (Verona, Thursday 9th June 1927 – Milan, Thursday 17th August 2000) is present with a work from 1978. Ed insieme bussarono [and together they knocked], on the above-mentioned text by the Indian poet Kabir. An exquisite, shadowy text again, as its final verse reads, comparable to seed that seeks the strength to sprout: a music of supreme lightness, of irresistible charm, enclosed in the dynamic framework of a series of “nuances” all held in the idea of pianissimo.

Riccardo Piacentini (Moncalieri, Thursday 3rd July 1958), who, among other things, intervenes with his own reciting voice and with the discreet intromission of a piano in Bussotti’s Lachrimae, closes the set presented in this recording with a very recent work, An Mozart (2008), on texts by Johann Georg Jacobi and Johann Peter Uz, whom we have already mentioned. The texts belong to two Mozart Lieder, An Chloe (“To Chloe”) K. 524 (1787) and An die Freude (“To joy”) K. 53 (1768), and are subjected to multiple re-readings “in code”. In the subtitle, the composer defines An Mozart as a Modular piece for string quartet with or without photosounds with or without voice and piano. Everyone who knows Piacentini’s music knows how important the concept of “photo-sounds” (i.e.: soundlight, sound- llumination, sound-flashing) is in it. Piacentini sees it as an “acoustic report”, in which the trace of an organised ambience is left. A reality that is both for the ear and the eye. The musical writing of An Mozart is free of any element of chance, and this is probably the most “structuring” composition of all presented in this series dedicated to the contemporary voice in Italy.

 

(Translations by Timothy Alan Shaw)

Some reviews on CD Duo Alterno - The Italian Contemporary Voice in Italy 4