Oslo Sinfonietta - Chambered Music - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Dutilleux / Seattle Symphony / Morlot / Hadelich - Metaboles - Violin Concerto L'arbre Des Songes [COMPACT DISCS] date 08/14/2015

The music on this CD confirms the special position of the composer Jorgen Jersild (1913-2004) in Danish music. It is captivating chamber music written over a half-century during which the composer underwent great musical development, but at the same time persisted in his own personal style - from the early works from the 1930s and 1940s to the later string quartet showing US a courageous, mature composer seeking out new musical areas.

Born in 1947, Salvatore Sciarrino has been delighting and perplexing his audiences, often at the same time, ever since the mid-60s, though his reputation has long since spread beyond European avant-garde circles, particularly with the opera Luci miei tradici and it's stagings in Brussels, New York, Salzburg and Berlin. The basic premises of Sciarrino's language explore the limits of perception, the borderline between sound and silence, and the abstraction of gestures and forms from the tonal contexts that supply them. 'I don't write music, I write a psychological experience,' Sciarrino he declared, and his output certainly resists description or classification except insofar as it takes it's place in a grand tradition of Italian postwar experimentalists in the laboratory of sound, headed by figures as diverse as Luciano Berio and Luigi Nono. Even at the level of his works for orchestra and the stage, Sciarrino writes with an immediacy and intimacy of expression which finds it's natural home in the kind of chamber ensemble works recorded here. Scored for flute, guitar, bass clarinet and violin, the album's title work dates from 1986 and lives up to it's title by discovering how many shades of sound can be found near the border with silence, a sonic analogue to a Rothko painting or an Agnes Martin drawing. Vagabonde blu makes full use of the accordion's potential to set weightless and ceaseless waves of sound in motion. By contrast, the scoring of alto flute, cor anglais and bass flute makes Muro d'orizzonte a study in furtive attacks and explosions. The most recent work is Alba meònia from 2020, receiving it's first recording on this album, and scattering it's timbres across a still wider soundscape through the diverse scoring for flute, violin and guitar.