Storie di altre storie

Album review

Salvatore Sciarrino's 1981 work for voice and orchestra, Efebo con radio (Boy with radio), uses "ephebe," the archaic term for a youth in ancient Greece, to highlight the huge distance, in terms of technology, from the composer's childhood in the 1950s, when a boy could keep himself entertained with the sounds created by switching stations on a radio. The piece re-creates that experience, the bulk of it made up of the interference that separated the stations, sporadically interrupted by snatches of speaking, popular music, and commercials, many of them barely discernible through the static. It's a witty, engaging, and surprisingly accessible work that successfully conveys the wonder of a child making his own dreamlike music with the simplest of technologies: a radio knob. The composer intends his Il giornale della necropolis to be a reflection on the ephemerality of life, and of human culture in particular. It largely consists of the kinds of small, indistinct, fragmented, diaphanous sounds that characterized the interference in Efebo con radio, but its stasis and lack of incident or direction make this a piece that's best experienced as a sonic landscape rather than with the expectation of any kind of traditional development. Much the same can be said for Autoritratto nella notte, although its title suggests a program of night sounds that gives it a context and makes it easier to follow. In Storie di altri storie (Story of other stories), Sciarrino takes the music of composers of earlier periods -- Mozart, Guillaume de Machaut, and Domenico Scarlatti -- and serves it up reorchestrated, but little altered otherwise, floating in a modernist haze (in the first two movements) that gives the simplest phrases an air of mystery and distance. The final movement, though, sounds far more like Rodrigo's Fantasía para un gentilhombre in its straightforwardness (but with an accordion rather than a guitar as soloist) than like the work of a dedicated modernist. Sonia Turchetta is the versatile vocal soloist in Efebo con radio, and accordionist Teodoro Anzellotti is featured in two of the other works. WDR Sinfonie Orchester Köln, conducted by Kazushi Ono and Lucas Vis, plays with discipline and sensitivity to the music's atmospheric delicacy. The CD should be of special interest to fans of trends in the world of the European avant-garde.

© TiVo

Details of original recording : 68:07 - DDD - Enregistré du 16 au 18 février 2005 et du 20 au 22 février 2006 (Il giornale della necropoli) à la Philharmonie de Cologne - Notes en anglais