{"product_id":"duo-mateaux_isle-of-sky-paysages-de-memoire-pour-violoncelle-et-guitare_2026_uvm","title":"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 the guitar. Despite a substantial body of work including pieces for solo guitar, chamber music, and orchestra, this duo for cello and guitar constitutes a true singularity in his catalog. Attributing this peculiarity to mere chance seems superficial to me (Gilardino certainly interacted with many renowned cellists throughout his career), just as it is erroneous to explain it by a form of reluctance due to the intrinsic difficulty of this combination, or by an alleged distance from the poetic universe of the cello. Proof to the contrary: the cello appears in two other works, the Double Concerto from 2004, \"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 the dialogue to its very essence are to be found in his life journey. It is certainly no coincidence that the only instrument, besides the guitar, that Gilardino systematically studied was precisely the cello. He thus maintained a privileged relationship with its language and timbre; and the configuration of the duo can hardly be interpreted otherwise than as a conflict within his own poetic sensibility. From this arises a work that he himself described as \"double-faced,\" and whose very title, Songs in Penumbra, carries the theme of division. Here, the guitar fulfills its role as an evocative, allusive, enigmatic, and shadowy instrument. The cello constitutes its 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 – according to the composer's own terms – in the shadows. The dichotomous nature of the work is also reflected in its musical language: we are suspended between the chromaticism of Gilardino's early period and the more recent predominance of modal and diatonic writing. The first movement is entirely built on a four-note cell, exposed 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 zones of consonance from which the guitar departs, 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, of a lyrical character, is structured in A-B-A form. The opening intensifies the ambiguous and evocative quality of the guitar by presenting a motivic fragment formed by an ascending triplet without a 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 measure in order to offer, each time, a stabilizing point of arrival – until gradually erasing it, allowing its own natural inclination for song to predominate. Episode B follows – \"light and volatile\" – with a distinctly different character. Introduced by the cello, it is entirely constructed from repeated notes, the melodic element being formed by figures that emerge like tesserae in a mosaic. The guitar quickly joins in an imitative dialogue, again insistently presenting an unresolved ascending gesture at the end of the measure. Once the climax is reached, a gradual slowing down leads back to the first episode, \"slowly.\" The third movement has a nested construction. On the surface, it takes the form of an A-B-A, but section B is itself articulated in three parts, B-C-B, with C representing a development of A. It is a clever formal variation on the two nuclei that have animated the work so far: on the one hand, the fragmentary writing of the guitar that permeates the opening section, over which the cello oscillates between pizzicato and staccato; on the other hand, the felicity of song, which reaches here – albeit briefly – its greatest blossoming in the two B sections. The fourth movement, where the diatonic element predominates, evokes the rich \"aquatic\" vein dear to Gilardino, and more precisely a rain of Manzonian inspiration that comes to soothe the conflicts that have animated the discourse until now. 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 measure. 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 1988) is an Italian composer, born, raised, and trained in Rome. After obtaining his guitar diploma at 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 premiere in Rome, 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). A doctor by training, he has lived and worked since 2014 as a psychiatrist in Lausanne, Switzerland. In the Roman churches, he finds, in the dialogue between the cello and the guitar, a medium conducive to expressing his nostalgia for the city of his childhood. From this nucleus, he constructs a portrait of Rome by imagining three liturgical moments in as many sacred buildings. The first movement, Santa Maria in Trastevere, entrusts the guitar with 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 homage to the splendid mosaics of Pietro Cavallini, undoubtedly the most important representative of the 13th-century Roman school. 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 which, as if fading 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 his childhood, thanks to the proximity of the Greek-Catholic church to the conservatory where he studied. Here, the cello deploys all its natural cantabile power from the opening, where a melody in Byzantine mode unfolds according to the inflections of Eastern Christianity – both austere and of a bewitching melancholy. A single musical idea sustains the movement; its transformation is entrusted to the constant dialogue between the two instruments and to the modal changes that intensify, in a progressive crescendo, up to the final climax. The work concludes 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 amidst tightly packed buildings; a privileged viewpoint is offered by the famous Caffè Sant'Eustachio, an emblem, in the composer's memory, of the sensuality of Rome. These Baroque suggestions translate into a serene and uninterrupted musical effusion that constitutes 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 houses are imagined with calm detachment, leading back without hesitation to the initial carefreeness. Oscar Bellomo (born 1980) is widely regarded as one of the most gifted guitarist-composers of his generation. After beginning his concert career upon completing his studies at the \"D. Cimarosa\" Conservatory in Avellino, he has performed as a soloist and in quartet at major festivals in Italy and abroad. Although he devoted himself to composition from his early years of study, he chose not to publish his first work until 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 new repertoire. A cultured composer with a great sensitivity to visual arts and literature, Bellomo demonstrates a natural inclination for the music of landscape. Regarding the Silencios, Gilardino observed: \"There is neither immanence nor transcendence in the soundscape of these 'moments': what reigns in them is a feeling of inexplicable beauty, in the slowing of the heartbeat of a childlike contemplation or in the breath of gusts, totally devoid of eros, that ripple the waters without dissolving the enchantment of observation without an observer.\" This description allows us to grasp the profound meaning of the suite recorded on this CD: L'Île de Skye. The Scottish island, as if 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 with 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 magnificent panoramas of the island unfold before us, as if ghosts were repeating the tunes of yesteryear. No mimicry; everything remains a suggestion, a phantasmagoria, and thus dissolves without warning into a serene reprise of the beginning. The second movement, \"Lighthouse,\" is a nocturne where the guitar lays out a carpet of arpeggiated and aquatic notes, pierced by melismatic figures on the cello that seem to evoke fragments of landscape – scales caught, as if by chance, in the rotating beam of the lighthouse. 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; the night does not alter it. In this sense, the music offers a response to the obsession that 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, steeped in the millenary Neapolitan culture that still maintains a profound fusion between the real and the magical – according to a pagan, pre-Christian feeling, keenly perceived by Anna Maria Ortese in Il cardillo addolorato. All this translates 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 small evanescent lights that suddenly animate the imperturbable flow of the waterfalls within a nocturnal landscape – a lively dance imbued with a 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 be immediately left. 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 soul of the island, Bellomo's music almost seems 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 play of imitations leading to the \"Più mosso\": a relentless and essential contemplation that seems to see through the artificial element dominating a superficial gaze. The music turns into raw essentiality: cells of detached notes entrusted to the cello, to which the guitar responds with successive sounds that stammer an arpeggio. In the finale, a brief recall of the initial motifs seems to evoke the ineluctable and imperturbable nature of the island – greater than the observer, indifferent to the becoming of things. The final movement, Neist Point, depicts the western tip of Skye, the viewpoint of that lighthouse glimpses of which were already seen in the second movement. Conceived as a rondo, its refrain offers a sunny and \"positive\" counterpart to what had been darkened before. 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 – a further reminder of the imperishable: even this immersion should not be considered definitive. For the contemplation of the island took place without an observer, and its truth cannot be given, only desired. Stefano Vivaldini (born 1997) is a multifaceted artist – guitarist, composer, and screenwriter – whose activity has been marked, from its beginnings, 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 to 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 an almost inevitable destination for an artist of this caliber; this materialized in 2019 with the soundtrack for the film À Rivederci, directed by Roberto Dal Monte. In the present Suite Syracuse, his creative drive channels into a direct language, supported by an essential musical architecture that serves as a setting for a dreamlike harmony. The movements of the suite function, in essence, like miniature scenes: small snapshots – or postcards – of places and situations from the Syracusan landscape. The introduction, \"Slow and delicate,\" opens with guitar chords where one first hears an inversion built on the notes of the open strings, subjected to a gradual transformation that alternates with the main motif of the movement: a descending sequence that returns incessantly, a constant inserted into harmonic wanderings that follow sometimes a thread of fantasy and free association, sometimes the logic suggested by inner voices. The cello enters on a held 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 from 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, heralds a gradual lightening and tightening of rhythmic density. A moment of respite occurs in the central section in 3\/4, \"fiery,\" before a return to a convulsive pulse in 3 against 2, concluded abruptly and \"dryly.\" \"Vuci di Sciarriata,\" the third movement, is where the composer's theatrical instincts manifest most clearly. It opens with 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 monody and chord masses that also condense rhythmically. This \"disordered\" music stops abruptly, leaving a pianissimo chord on the guitar 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: the 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, describing the small island that constitutes the oldest part of Syracuse. Entitled \"Very sweet and slow, almost timeless,\" it opens with a cello melody where the descending motif of the introduction resonates, supported by the guitar's chord accompaniment. Vivaldini adopts a form that skillfully avoids any simplistic repetition and builds itself as a climax of progressive rhythmic accumulation: from quarter notes to eighth notes, then to triplets, and finally to sextuplets of sixteenth notes – within a process where the free harmonic wandering is constantly brought back to the center by the piece's descending motif. At the end of the movement, a brief cadenza for solo guitar appears: a suspended moment that seems to split the suite in two, functioning as a silent threshold between two expressive universes. The fifth movement, \"A cathedral in the temple,\" naturally extends this suspension, referring 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 Gelon. The music, of a hieratic character marked \"Majestic,\" rests on an 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 Song of Seikilos, woven into the counterpoint in a way that evokes the coexistence of pagan and Christian layers in the building's architectural history. A section in 6\/8 follows, where a cello ostinato supports the guitar's repetitions of previously exposed 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 on the guitar, leading to a return, subtly recalibrated in its rhythmic profile and guided towards a progressive rarefaction by held cello notes and fragmentary reprises on the guitar. The final movement surrenders 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 the omnipresent symbolism of the sea on the horizon. Its title, \"The sea has the color of my hope,\" is inspired by a tradition 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 – whereas we know full well that natural elements possess countless nuances and that the sea, under certain conditions, can become wine, blood, fire, vibrating to the rhythm of the moods of the one who contemplates it. The last heir of this mill","brand":"Duo Mateaux","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57489929371992,"sku":null,"price":23872853.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/vinyles.com\/en-us\/products\/duo-mateaux_isle-of-sky-paysages-de-memoire-pour-violoncelle-et-guitare_2026_uvm","provider":"Vinyles.com","version":"1.0","type":"link"}