Isle Of Sky - Paysages de mémoire pour violoncelle et guitare

Description

Angelo Gilardino (1941-2022) is widely recognized as one of the greatest composers for guitar. Despite a substantial body of work including pieces for solo guitar, chamber music, and orchestra, this duo for cello and guitar is a true singularity in his catalogue. Attributing this particularity to mere chance seems superficial to me (Gilardino certainly encountered many renowned cellists throughout his career), just as it is mistaken to explain it as a form of reluctance due to the intrinsic difficulty of this combination, or by a supposed distance from the poetic world of the cello. Proof to the contrary: the cello appears in two other works, the 2004 Double Concerto, “Star of the Morning,” and the Quartet for flute, clarinet, cello and guitar (2010). I therefore believe that the reasons for this late reduction of dialogue to its very essence must be sought in his life path. It is certainly no coincidence that the only instrument, besides the guitar, that Gilardino studied systematically was precisely the cello. He thus maintained a privileged relationship with its language and timbre; and the duo configuration can hardly be interpreted otherwise than as a conflict within his own poetic sensibility. From this arises a work he himself described as “double-faced,” and whose very title, Songs in Penumbra, bears the theme of division. Here, the guitar fulfills its role as an evocative, allusive, enigmatic, and dark instrument. The cello forms the complementary pole: a voice that aspires to express itself, that would like to become stentorian and dramatic, but which, within this particular duo, must remain — in the composer’s own words — in the shadows. The dichotomous nature of the work is also reflected in its musical language: we are suspended between Gilardino’s early chromaticism and the more recent predominance of modal and diatonic writing. The first movement is entirely built on a four-note cell, presented by the guitar within an elusive and disorienting counterpoint. The cello repeatedly draws from it the impulse for a melodic development destined to remain unfinished, reaching new areas of consonance from which the guitar withdraws, arpeggiating and offering fragments. These do not constitute a true second theme, but rather the expectation of a new reinterpretation of the initial motif. The second movement, lyrical in character, is structured in A-B-A form. The opening intensifies the guitar’s ambiguous and evocative quality by presenting a motivic fragment formed by an ascending triplet with no point of arrival, suspended in its joyful apex. The cello then enters with a different assurance, seizing this enigmatic cell and repositioning it within the bar in order to offer, each time, a stabilizing point of arrival — until gradually erasing it, allowing its own natural inclination toward song to prevail. The B episode follows — “light and volatile” — with a markedly different character. Introduced by the cello, it is entirely built from repeated notes, the melodic element formed by figures that emerge like tesserae in a mosaic. The guitar quickly joins in an imitative dialogue, once again insistently presenting an unresolved ascending gesture at the end of the bar. Once the climax is reached, a gradual slowing returns to the first episode, “slowly.” The third movement has an embedded construction. On the surface, it takes the form of an A-B-A, but the B section is itself articulated in three parts, B-C-B, with C representing a development of A. It is a skillful formal variation on the two nuclei that have animated the work so far: on the one hand, the guitar’s fragmentary writing that permeates the opening section, over which the cello oscillates between pizzicato and staccato; on the other, the bliss of song, which here reaches — albeit briefly — its fullest flowering in the two B sections. The fourth movement, where the diatonic element predominates, evokes the rich “aquatic” vein dear to Gilardino, and more specifically a Manzonian-inspired rain that comes to soothe the conflicts that have animated the discourse thus far. The central lyrical element also offers a form of resolution, taking up the triplet proposed by the guitar in the second movement: here, it is inverted into a descending curve and firmly anchored on the first beat of the following bar. The cello and guitar leave the listener with a peaceful song, unfolding over a landscape stirred by a fine purifying rain. Kevin Swierkosz-Lenart (born in 1988) is an Italian composer, born, raised, and trained in Rome. After graduating in guitar from the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in 2012, he continued his musical studies with Angelo Gilardino and Dusan Bogdanovic. He made his debut as a composer in 2019 with the Rome premiere, given by Angelo Colone, of Jeux d'enfants for guitar, followed the same year by the publication (Bèrben) of Variations on “El Testament d'Amèlia”. In 2020, Les Productions d'Oz published his Suite: Hommage à Giuseppe Biasi, dedicated to Cristiano Porqueddu, who gave its premiere in Apeldoorn (Netherlands). Trained as a doctor, he has lived and worked since 2014 as a psychiatrist in Lausanne, Switzerland. In the Roman churches, he finds, in the dialogue between cello and guitar, a medium suited to expressing his nostalgia for the city of his childhood. From this core, he builds a portrait of Rome by imagining three liturgical moments in as many sacred buildings. The first movement, Santa Maria in Trastevere, gives the guitar an opening that evokes the sound of bells. A motivic idea is then taken up by the cello and transformed into song, adorned with melismatic passages. The discourse continues until it dissolves into a dialogue between the guitar’s harmonics and the cello’s pizzicato: a fragmentary texture conceived as a tribute to the splendid mosaics of Pietro Cavallini, undoubtedly the most important representative of the Roman school of the 13th century. A second theme follows, marked by liturgical rigor and a decidedly more lyrical character, with the cello in the foreground. A livelier development — Allegretto — then reinterprets the material heard so far through the memory of the carefree spring of Roman adolescence. The movement ends with a reprise of the first theme. When the music reaches the section built on harmonics and pizzicato, the cello introduces a repeated note that, as if receding into the distance, recalls the bell motif. The second movement, Sant'Athanasius, evokes the contours of an Eastern liturgy that the composer attended several times in childhood, thanks to the proximity of the Greek Catholic church to the conservatory where he studied. The cello unfolds all its natural cantabile power from the opening, where a melody in Byzantine mode develops according to the inflections of Eastern Christianity — both austere and hauntingly melancholic. A single musical idea sustains the movement; its transformation is entrusted to the constant dialogue between the two instruments and to the modal shifts that intensify, in a gradual crescendo, up to the final climax. The work ends with a reference to Roman Baroque, with Borromini’s famous Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza. The church is inaccessible to the public for most of the week, its dome rising amid buildings packed tightly together; a privileged viewpoint is offered by the famous Caffè Sant'Eustachio, emblem, in the composer’s memory, of Rome’s sensuality. These Baroque suggestions are translated into a serene and uninterrupted musical effusion that serves as both the opening and closing episode. Between the two lies a slow interlude — “Intimate, singing” — where the interior of the church and the liturgy it shelters are imagined with calm detachment, bringing us without hesitation back to the initial carefree mood. Oscar Bellomo (born in 1980) is widely regarded as one of the most gifted guitarist-composers of his generation. After beginning his career as a concert performer upon completing his studies at the “D. Cimarosa” Conservatory in Avellino, he performed as a soloist and in quartet at major festivals in Italy and abroad. Although he devoted himself to composition from his earliest years of study, he chose to publish his first work only in 2017: the six Silencios immediately attracted the attention of guitarists. Cristiano Porqueddu recorded them in 2020, and they quickly entered the programs of performers most attentive to the new repertoire. A cultured composer with great sensitivity to the visual arts and literature, Bellomo shows a natural inclination for landscape music. Regarding the Silencios, Gilardino observed: “There is neither immanence nor transcendence in the soundscape of these ‘moments’: there reigns in them a sense of inexplicable beauty, in the slowing of the heartbeat of childlike contemplation or in the breath of gusts, utterly devoid of eros, that ripple the waters without dissolving the enchantment of observation without an observer.” This description helps grasp the deep meaning of the suite recorded on this CD: L'Île de Skye. The Scottish island, seemingly outside time and space — where landscapes of distant and austere beauty alternate with medieval castles — becomes the place where, in the dialogue between guitar and cello, an “observation without an observer” takes shape. The first movement, the Prologue, opens on a brief melodic fragment of wise and measured simplicity, entrusted to the cello and commented on by the guitar. The central section — “Allegro, like a dance” — pushes the evocation to its peak: the island’s magnificent panoramas unfold before us, as if ghosts were rehearsing the airs of old. No mimicry; everything remains suggestion, a phantasmagoria, and thus dissolves without warning into a serene reprise of the beginning. The second movement, “Lighthouse,” is a nocturne in which the guitar lays out a carpet of arpeggiated, watery notes, pierced by melismatic figures in the cello that seem to evoke fragments of landscape — scales caught, as if by chance, in the lighthouse’s revolving beam. No emotion, only pure contemplation. The fortuitous reappearance, within the cello line, of elements from the first movement seems to invite philosophical reflection: the island remains unchanged at nightfall; night does not alter it. In this sense, the music offers a response to the obsession Kafka notes in his diaries: “I wonder what things look like before I even see them.” The third movement, Fairy Pools, is a rondo that explicitly evokes the waterfalls of Glen Brittle, one of the island’s most famous attractions. Yet one cannot ignore that the eponymous “fairies” find fertile ground in the composer’s sensibility, imbued with the age-old Neapolitan culture that still maintains a profound fusion between the real and the magical — according to a pagan, pre-Christian feeling vividly perceived by Anna Maria Ortese in Il cardillo addolorato. All of this is translated in the score into a dreamlike dance: a break in the banality of everyday life, to which the listener is invited. In a perfect timbral fusion between guitar and cello, we witness a procession of tiny, evanescent lights that suddenly animate the untroubled flow of the waterfalls within a nocturnal landscape — an animated dance imbued with graceful fury. The slow central section, “Dreamy Larghetto,” before the reprise, represents a temporary widening and slowing of the flow of planes: the character remains unchanged, but the listener is invited to wander at leisure, for a moment, in this privileged place barely sketched — and which must immediately be left behind. The fourth movement, Portree Harbour, poetically evokes the bay from which one contemplates a picturesque row of colorful houses. Against the backdrop of this artificial image, foreign to the island’s soul, Bellomo’s music seems almost to underscore an “intrinsic truth of Skye.” Like a leitmotif, the opening of the first movement is suggested by the cello at the beginning of the “Enchanted Adagio,” while the guitar launches into a game of imitations that leads to the “Più mosso”: an implacable and essential contemplation that seems to expose the artificial element dominating a superficial gaze. The music turns into raw essentiality: detached note cells entrusted to the cello, answered by the guitar with successive sounds that stammer an arpeggio. In the finale, a brief reminder of the initial motifs seems to evoke the island’s inevitable and untroubled nature — greater than the observer, indifferent to the fate of things. The final movement, Neist Point, depicts the western tip of Skye, the viewpoint of the lighthouse whose outlines had already been glimpsed in the second movement. Conceived as a rondo, its refrain offers a sunny and “positive” counterpart to what had previously been darkened. A joyful dialogue between guitar and cello weaves a melody of vigorous vitality. At the center lies a “Dreamy Adagio,” where the song that opened the work returns, transformed — an additional reminder of the imperishable: even this immersion must not be considered definitive. For the contemplation of the island has been without an observer, and its truth can only be desired, never given. Stefano Vivaldini (born in 1997) is a multifaceted artist — guitarist, composer, and screenwriter — whose activity has been marked from the outset by cross-influences. He made his debut at the age of fifteen with the play Genesi Notturna. The natural propensity of his music to extend into texts and images is confirmed from his first publication, Dix Études Réflexives for solo guitar, whose scores are accompanied by images and captions, and which has been translated into Spanish and English. Cinema appears as a nearly inevitable destination for an artist of this caliber; this became reality in 2019 with the soundtrack for the film À Rivederci, directed by Roberto Dal Monte. In the present Suite Syracuse, his creative impulse is channeled into a direct language, supported by an essential musical architecture that serves as a frame for dreamlike harmony. The movements of the suite function, in essence, as miniature scenes: small snapshots — or postcards — of places and situations in the Syracuse landscape. The introduction, “Slow and delicate,” opens on guitar chords in which one first hears an inversion built on the notes of the open strings, subjected to a progressive transformation that alternates with the movement’s main motif: a descending sequence that returns again and again, a constant inserted into harmonic wanderings that follow sometimes a thread of fantasy and free association, sometimes the logic suggested by the inner voices. The cello enters on a sustained pianissimo note, announcing two statements of the motif in imitative dialogue with the guitar, and the music ends by fading away, vanishing into nothingness. We are abruptly torn from this ethereal atmosphere by the second movement, Danse d'Ibléa: a “cheerful Allegretto” in 6/8 that seems to draw on the ancestral origins of southern tarantellas. The opening section, strongly rhythmic and based on a balance between the two instruments articulating a dotted figure with incisive attacks, announces a gradual lightening and tightening of rhythmic density. A moment of breathing occurs in the central 3/4 section, “impetuous,” before a return to a convulsive 3-against-2 pulse, concluded abruptly and “dryly.” “Vuci di Sciarriata,” the third movement, is where the composer’s theatrical instincts are most clearly revealed. It opens on a recitative in free rhythmic declamation, entrusted to the cello and marked “Slow, spoken.” The guitar enters with a syncopated gesture on a chord whose function is to add pathos and intensify expectation. The piece then takes shape as a tense dialogue between the two instruments, favoring incisive attacks. The cello declaims melodic cells that quickly contract into agitated groups of sixteenth notes, while the guitar alternates between monody and masses of chords that likewise become rhythmically condensed. This “disordered” music suddenly stops, leaving a pianissimo chord on the guitar’s bridge. Vivaldini’s genius lies in sketching a small theatrical scene: a calm exchange that degenerates into a brief quarrel — a sciarriata — and finally resolves into nothingness, restoring serenity. No tragedy here: forms of disagreement are only “temperament,” a fiery nature presented as an authentic and spontaneous trait. The fourth movement, Ortigia, has a marked landscape character, depicting the small island that forms the oldest part of Syracuse. Titled “Very soft and slow, almost timeless,” it opens on a cello melody in which the descending motif from the introduction resonates, supported by the guitar’s chordal accompaniment. Vivaldini adopts a form that cleverly avoids any simplistic repetition and is built as a climax of progressive rhythmic accumulation: from quarter notes to eighth notes, then triplets, and finally sextuplets of sixteenth notes — within a process in which free harmonic wandering is constantly brought back to center by the piece’s descending motif. At the end of the movement appears a brief cadenza for solo guitar: a suspended moment that seems to split the suite in two, functioning as a silent threshold between two expressive worlds. The fifth movement, “A cathedral in the temple,” naturally extends this suspension, in reference to the Cathedral of the Nativity of the Most Holy Mary in Ortigia. The building rises by incorporating an ancient Doric temple dedicated to Athena, built by the tyrant Gelo. The music, with a hieratic character marked “Majestic,” rests on austere three-voice imitative counterpoint, where the subject is entrusted to the cello’s pizzicato and taken up by the guitar. The main theme is explicitly inspired by the Seikilos Epitaph, woven into the counterpoint in a way that evokes the coexistence of pagan and Christian layers in the building’s architectural history. This is followed by a 6/8 section, where a cello ostinato supports the guitar’s repetitions of previously stated motifs, as in a phantasmagoria where ancient sacred hymns resurface — an obvious play on the dialogue between the walls of the Greek era and those of the Christian era. The music reaches a brief melismatic passage in the guitar, which leads to a return, subtly recalibrated in its rhythmic profile and guided toward progressive thinning by sustained cello notes and fragmentary reprises in the guitar. The final movement abandons itself to the joy of song, in a fluid invention marked “Serene Andante.” Unlike the other movements, it is not tied to a specific place, but rather functions as an ode to the land itself and to the omnipresent symbolism of the sea on the horizon. Its title, “The sea has the color of my hope,” is inspired by a tradition ranging from Homer to Sciascia, where the sea is described as i (oinops), “wine-colored.” It is fascinating to note that the advent of industrial culture introduced into our chromatic vocabulary the notion of “solid color,” unthinkable in a world dependent on natural pigments and dyes. In the same way, cultural, economic, theological, and ultimately advertising imperatives have conditioned us to think in stereotypes: a sky always blue, a sea always blue — when we know full well that natural elements possess countless shades and that the sea, under certain conditions, can become wine, blood, fire, vibrating to the rhythm of the moods of whoever contemplates it. The last heir to this millennia-old tradition may have been the Sicilian painter Piero Guccione, with his seascapes of a thousand nuances. This is what Vivaldini seems to remind us of in a work that calls for a profound union between descriptive poetics and inner poetics — a poetics that seeks to reveal itself through the sea.