“PICCOLO ENCOUNTERS” is the culmination of a career-long desire to capture the essence of the wealth of experience we have been able to accumulate as musical partners and friends. As varied as their nationalities, diverse as their backgrounds and contrasting as their cultures, the artists on this album share a close bond: that which connects these seemingly disparate elements and leads to the creation of Encounters that punctuate the lives of composers and performers alike. The sharing of these experiences with you, the audience, is the special privilege of the musician. These encounters and experiences that we were able to make in the world of music had a decisive influence on the life of Pamela Stahel and led to the creation of this album. It is not only the special perspective of a piccolo player that is important, but above all the special repertoire that makes up the character of this collaboration. Both the selection of the pieces and the performers are decisive. Pamela Stahel plays a Burkart Piccolo Elite XXV. Nicola Mazzanti plays a Keefe Piccolo. On the album are Works by Alessandro Cavicchi, Meyer Kupferman, Sophie Dufeutrelle, Francesco Santucci, Jeff Scott and Giacinto Scelsi.

Giacinto Scelsi (1905–1988) is one of the most unusual composers of the twentieth century, a unique figure whose importance was only fully recognized and celebrated after his death. During his lifetime, he was often dismissed, especially in Italy, as a pretentious dilettante because he did not notate his music himself. Beginning in the mid-1950s, he recorded his improvisations at the piano and had them transcribed by others. In this way, in the course of only a few years hundreds of piano pieces appeared, many of which Scelsi then collected into suites. He began his series of suites with the number 8, since the number 8 had for him a mystic significance. The “Suite No. 8” is subtitled “Bot-ba”, which means “Tibetan”. In fact, the suite has nothing to do with actual Tibetan ritual music, but is an expression of Scelsi’s deep affinity for Eastern philosophy. His final “Suite No. 11” is a special case and was put together quite late in Scelsi’s life, at least in its final version. The interpretation by internationally acclaimed pianist Sabine Liebner is therefore the first authentic recording of the work with its original sequence of movements. Liebner’s meticulously researched 2015 recordings of Scelsi’s Suite No. 9 and Suite No. 10 (WER 67942) have been celebrated by critics.

Recorded in Finland, in Järvenpää near Helsinki, this disc is a tribute to five extraordinary figures in Italian music: Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882-1973), Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968), Luigi Dallapiccola (1904-1975), Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988), and Nino Rota (1911-1979); five composers whose poetic universes, although very different from one another, are permeated by a common, intense expressiveness: the same trait that runs through the works featured here and that, like a fil rouge, has oriented Sanna Vaarni along his itinerary from 1916, the date of publication of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Raggio verde, to 1964, the year of Nino Rota’s enchanting Preludi. An itinerary that thus begins in a particular phase of Italian music, marked by great ferment and multiple initiatives aimed mostly at promoting the activity of composers, animated in those same years by a shared intent: to renew their language and draw from tradition to coin a national style. An intent that was in line with the main European trends, sometimes devoted to linguistic research but more generally driven by a burning desire to re-express traditions, folklore or, moreover, the suggestion of the antique at a time when the relationship between the present and the past was at the center of significant intellectual tensions.