… As Fernando Pessoa wrote, “no nostalgia hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existed”. Francesco Ciurlo, in this overview of his works, frees us from this condition and invites us to another state – the state of exactness, which does not comprise only of precision. The sound objects are there, exact, reiterated, and are what is needed to give the idea of a place we live in at the precise moment in which it shows itself in all its parts. Not only a memory of a supposed listening, but a hic et nunc listening. The sound concretions always stand out precise and in forefront, without masking, with no prospective distances, and without nebulosity.

In this collection, a sort of evolution towards a clear and consolidated maturity of the composer is undoubtedly illustrated, defining and radicalizing the strong and unambiguous signs of a vision of music: a substantial coldness of the texture; a ruthless cleanliness of the images; a “narration” which is only present in watermark and therefore to some extent unnecessary and, in fact, once the subjection for it is gloriously overcome, Francesco Ciurlo focuses on ignoring it; furthermore, a disregard for decorative nuances, even within an obsessive richness of writing; an objectivity of things which is neither emotional nor of epicironic detachment; a fundamental renunciation of expressiveness; a theatre of sound within a theatre of cruelty, with a cruelty that however causes no pain but is rather cruel in the sense that it rejects everything that turns out to be extraneous or discordant. In a substantially denied narration, the complex processes appear with no resolution. This condition places us even more in front of the presence of “things” precisely at the moment of their manifestation and their repetition. Nothing more than this or rather, nothing more behind this.

The Sieben Lieder, composed in 2014, are the outcome of reflection on the poetics of Paul Celan, an author who in my experience has been a powerful catalyst for musical ideas. While in my previous compositions – Adagio a Celan for organ (1998), Celan for violin (1999), XII Preludi for cello (2000) – the poetry acted as a hypogram underlying the musical discourse and intrinsic to it, in the Lieder we have the direct setting of verses that by means of song come into synchrony, or rather, diachrony, with the scansion of the music. Since the poetic presence is a latent force in the unconscious, an unfathomed voice always ready to reveal itself, a direct maieutic action is necessary for the music to act at the appropriate time, without any other form of external need. The idea of composing the Sieben Lieder cycle came to me on reading Laura Darsié’s book Il grido e il silenzio (Mimesis Edizioni, 2013), dedicated to the irreconcilable encounter between Celan and Heidegger. The irreducible incompatibility between the thought of the German philosopher author of Sein und Zeit and Celan’s desperate sensibility becomes a challenge to the possibility of a conversation between poetry and music: an event always at risk of mutual prevarication and inadequacy, where the encounter-clash risks ending in annulment or inconclusive digression.

Augustin Braud holds a PhD in musicology from the University of Poitiers and the SACEM Claude Arrieu 2020 prize, awarded to a young composer of symphonic music. He was composer-in-residence at the Orchestre de Chambre Nouvelle Aquitaine for the 20172018 season and has since written Ceux qui Restentfor the Orchestre Philarmonique de RadioFrance, which was premiered and recorded in 2022 at the Festival Présences, as well as Lignier, a solo work dedicated to violinist Carolin Widmann. Other works include Stargazer for four trios, commissioned by the Nouvel Ensemble Européen and premiered at the Gaudeamus Festival in 2021, and the chamber music cycle Contremouvements. The search for expressiveness through physical and intellectual tension makes him think of the musician's gesture as pictorial with the imperium of evidence.

From Mark Rothko and Anselm Kiefer he draws a plasticity stretched by mutations of sound matter. Subjected to fragmented constraints and as the forms are stretched, the fragmentary approaches the swarms evoked in Survivance des lucioles by Georges Didi-Hubermann, Contrechoqué, Contrexposé and Contrecarré, articulated in the manner of Russian dolls, plunge their roots into the same soil, questioning the material and the compressed temporality. Premising the flow over the recurrence of events, they mix interval significance and expressive modes of play chiselled intovolutes of independent lines.

The 24 Caprices, as mentioned above, did not provoke any particular reaction in the European musical world when they were first published. At the moment, there are no known reviews in foreign press. It was only with Paganini’s European tour from 1828 to 1834 that they came back into the limelight and attracted the attention of young musicians such as Schumann and Liszt. Through the enthusiastic reception and transcriptions of these composers, they ended up exerting more influence abroad than in Italy, offering stimuli and suggestions above all to pianists, before and even more than to violinists (also because on the violin it would have been very difficult to go further, or even simply emulate what Paganini had written). Schumann transcribed and adapted as many as twelve of them for the piano, in the two collections Op. 3 (1832) and Op. 10 (1833); not content with this, in his last days he also wanted to add a piano accompaniment to the violin original.

Liszt also used five Paganini caprices for his Six Études d’exécution transcendante d’après Paganini. These piano etudes, published for the first time in 1838, were then revised by the author and reprinted in a second, drastically simplified version in 1851; the first edition was so difficult that only very few people were able to play it. Much more than the concertos for violin and orchestra - which are relatively traditional in terms of both formal arrangement and harmonic structure - it was the Caprices that received the greatest tribute from the Romantic musicians, who saw in them the sign and manifestation of a new and original will, of a force destined to upset the tranquil progress of musical things, wreaking havoc and introducing chaos into the order. In the Caprices the virtuoso and the composer go hand in hand from beginning to end; and in this inseparable unity of musical and instrumental suggestions they retain the deepest motivations for their lasting influence on the musical events of the nineteenth century.

"One of the most unexpected meteors in the history of music". With these words, while referring to the music of the Trecento, Nino Pirrotta comments on one of the most intricate enigmas of medieval musicology: how does the Ars Nova come into being in Italy? In the almost total absence of previous written records, it historically imposes itself as a sudden bloom of colours and influences; its origins appear unfathomable, and its traces, after a short while, are seemingly lost amid the innovations of a new trend from the Flanders that will revolutionize the history of European music shortly after the turn of the century. The art of Francesco, Gherardello, Piero, Jacopo, and of all the other authors that breathed life in the Trecento is preserved in few but immensely relevant manuscripts: their discovery has revealed to the world a priceless musical heritage.

“Though this album may appear to deviate from the main themes and styles of my work, in reality it complements and enriches them. A familiar statement comes to mind: “Music first!”. It may sound simplistic, but it is not: music, specifically the composition of music, involves implementing a wealth of knowledge and skills including technique, craftsmanship, mathematics, auditory analysis and representation, historical awareness, abstraction from the present and intuition about the future… and much more.” (Carlo Forlivesi)

Eugenio Della Chiara got his degree in classical guitar with full marks and honors at the Conservatoire of Pesaro. Among the Maestros he studied with three are Beppe Ficara, Andrea Dieci and Oscar Ghiglia, whose course he attended at the Accademia Chigiana of Siena. In parallel with his musical studies, he completed his education in humanities at the Università Cattolica of Milan, obtaining a degree in Modern Philology. He has performed in Japan, Austria, Germany, Hungary, Turkey, Spain, Norway, Denmark and Eire. In Italy he has performed solo recitals for some of the main musical institutions of the country. Between 2018 and 2021, he recorded three albums as a soloist for DECCA. He collaborates with violinist Piercarlo Sacco, guitarist Andrea Dieci, pianist Alberto Chines, messo-soprano Teresa Iervolino, tenors Juan Francisco Gatell and Mert Süngü. Together with Alessio Boni, he has staged ''Tutto il resto è silenzio'', a reading from Shakespeare's Hamlet accompanied seventeenth-century English music. More than twenty solo and chamber works were dedicated to him by composers like Carlo Galante, Orazio Sciortino, Roberto Tagliacollo, Davide Anzaghi and others. He has several world première recordings at his credit, among which the Sonata composed by Luciano Chailly in 1976 stand out. He has been teaching in the Italian Stte Conservatoires since 2017. He plays guitars by Domingo Esteso (Madrid 1935) and Lucio Carbone (Milano 2021)

Colombo Taccani’s works often take their basic starting point from a brief fragment of very varied origin: Schumann, Ravel, chorale melodies, short portions of Gregorian chant have alternated with Duke Ellington or fragments of rock. The list could go on for much longer. Small elements of DNA that will shape all aspects of the works, from the harmonic substance to the general proportions and the alternation of the sections; occasionally – very seldom –there may be some allusion to the musical setting of the original, whereas elsewhere –more often, if not nearly always – the process of composition has proceeded in a totally independent and autonomous manner. From this perspective, Watcher (2012/13), Crawler (2014) and Winkler (2016), written for Sentieri Selvaggi, together make up a trilogy united by the fact that their primary elements belong to a world very dear to the composer, that of the progressive rock of the Seventies. The three fragments of well known songs by Genesis, the unforgettable British band, can be very rarely recognized but are never the source of any stylistically direct references. Nevertheless, there is inevitably, at a personal level, a sort of affective tribute to the listening experiences never denied by Colombo Taccani and still unashamedly cohabiting today with other musical domains; the link that the composer has attempted to create is therefore of an emotional nature, aiming to retrieve from this repertoire certainly not a literal interpretation but rather its communicative energy and expressive power, associating all this with a substantial compositional elaboration.

The compositions featured in this recording portray a pivotal step in the technical and constructive development of the flute: the moment in which the instrument – with production and manufacturing processes evolving and including a shift from wood to metal, and changes in structure, dimensions and shape of the barrel, number of keys, extension and sound power - begins to take on the appearance and to conquer the boundless elasticity in the melodic movements and in the emission, that it still possesses today. The person principally responsible for this evolution was Theobald Boehm, a Bavarian concert player, composer, teacher, inventor, entrepreneur and builder who for decades, devoted himself to the development of the flute: from around 1800, when he was still a teenager, until his death in 1881.

Two factors contributed to the creation of this new instrument, which although was not always well received by Bohem’s contemporaries, was soon recognized as essential. The first was the skill in applying himself to the fine and minute details of the artifacts, which he had learned in his goldsmith father’s workshop: as a child, he had particularly developed this skill, repairing a new model of flute conceived by his teacher, Johann Nepomuk Kapeller, and he went on to perfect the skill in adulthood, combining his interest in acoustic studies along with his interest in chemistry and physics of materials.

“Today we have turned the page. A brutal youth proposes a new ideal and employs every means to affirm it. A fierce struggle is taking place around Akela at the Council Rock”. In a markedly polemical tone, the biting critic Émile Vuillermoz used images from The Jungle Book to describe, in February 1921, the emergence of new breakaway voices on the French musical scene. The body of Akela, the authoritative leader preyed upon by jackals in Kipling’s tales, was none other than that of Claude Debussy, who had died just three years earlier. The void created by the disappearance of this master of symbolism was added to the broader crisis emanating from the Great War. For younger composers, particularly those belonging to the Group of Six, the war seemed to have rid older composers’ musical legacy of meaning, for example the likes of Debussy, Gabriel Fauré, and Maurice Ravel. The faces that give this disc its title are some of the protagonists of this explosive, chaotic moment in the early postwar period that so impacted the trajectories of these composers. The works presented here, which range from first recordings of relatively unknown pieces to staples of the concert canon, focus on the viola, an instrument long neglected but rediscovered during the 20th century. On the one hand, composers favored the viola for the intimate atmosphere it evokes. On the other hand, they took advantage of the possibilities offered by an instrument that didn’t bear the heavy legacy of repertoire and virtuosity that weighs down the viola’s better known string family sibling, the violin.” (Alberto Napoli)

Not all the composers have such a deep and daily relationship with the piano like Rossano Pinelli, as this intense 2-hand and 4-hand collection shows. It is the same instrument which suggests the acoustic material the composition takes shape from. Also for the music not for piano Pinelli expresses his ideas starting from the piano and from acoustic images. The connection between the complexity of music and the complexity of life is at the base of Pinelli’s aesthetic/ethical idea, which – just like in daily life – moves on an inclusive thought, starting with Stravinskij, proceeding with ethnic Balkan and African music, jazz, medieval music, progressive rock, and more, in a vital synthesis. Also the dialectics between consonance and dissonance draws on the fluctuating moments of living, which are often perceived unintentionally.

“Behavioural and mental unconscious processes are an unlimited source of inspiration” – says Pinelli – “The composer has to have their antennas always well tuned in to what is around them; but, above all, they don’t have to be afraid to constantly rummage through their own subconscious” and all the pieces presented in the cd follow this existential direction.

From its inception with landmark works like Edgard Varèse’s Ionization (1929-31), Amadeo Roldán’s Ritmicas (1930), or John Cage’s First Construction (In Metal) (1939), the percussion ensemble has been associated with innovations in rhythm—with driving, pulsating, and complex explorations of the domain of time. The titles of these works suggest this aesthetic, calling conspicuous attention to their own modernity and hinting at a type of abstraction and scientific outlook towards the investigation of new materials. Alongside these rhythmic explorations, however, there has always been another aspect of percussion music: an intense preoccupation with the nature of sound. From instruments fashioned out of everyday objects to those with long and distinguished histories, the sheer variety available to the percussionist is staggering, as is the range of different sounds each instrument can produce.

The sounds of the percussion ensemble run the full spectrum from dense noises to clear chimes and bells, and navigating this variety presents both challenges and opportunities. The performances of the Lugano Percussion Ensemble, recorded on this disc, meet these challenges admirably with interpretations that are sensitive to the nuanced shaping of individual sounds, technically precise, and authoritative in bringing to life new works, many of which were composed specifically for this Ensemble. The pieces presented on this album represent a new generation of music for percussion ensemble, building on the innovations of Varèse and Cage, but also bringing the vast array of abstract material to new expressive forms—shaping sounds, both familiar and novel, into evocative images and associations, even narrative journeys through the world of sonic possibilities.

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.

The Fantasias for solo violin composed by Georg Philipp Telemann (Magdeburg, 14th March 1681 – Hamburg, 25th June 1767) were published in 1735, approximately fifteen years after the Sonatas and partitas for solo violin by Johann Sebastian Bach. We do not know if Telemann knew Bach’s masterpieces, but surely he did not have the same speculative concerns as Bach; indeed Bach tended to reconstruct the polyphonic texture on a monodical instrument thanks to a game of real sounds and underlying notes. On the contrary, in Telemann the pleasure of exploring the possibilities of the instrument prevails, as well as identifying original technical and expressive solutions, to enhance the performer’s capabilities, with the aim of fascinating, surprising and involving the audience.

Since its beginning, organ writing has been characterized by its imitation and contrapuntal style the severity of the melodic lines managing to catch the distinctive element of the instrument, sound emission preventing perspective differentiation of different sound pianos. The organ was the instrument which helped an exceptionally artistic compositional style to thrive in music chapels in Italy, being the only musical instrument allowed in religious places. It was used both in accompaniment and in transposition to the instrument of motets and vocal masses, sometimes even to replace chants, habit which led to alternatim, alternation of instrument and voice, with a music balance where ‘now the words are clear and now are lost’ (Dante Alighieri, Purgatory, IX, 145). Although the organ repertoire was a slave to the sacred chanting, it very soon departed from it, producing music forms solely dedicated to the instrument performance Ricercare, Tiento, Toccata, Intonazione, Praeludium, Praeambulum. The list of titles is so rich and it can translate equivalent writing forms, some closer to the imitation contrapuntal style, some others closer to free invention, according to a style that is more similar to improvisation. The term stylus phantasticus refers to the latter, a music gesture of extreme elasticity and freedom in performance.