lunedì 27 luglio 2015

Review of La voce contemporanea in Italia, Stradivarius 2011


Fifth volume devoted by the Stradivarius to composers and musics related with the use of the voice in the Italian contemporary music, always within "times future". What to say? I have been very surprised. The well interpreted passages by the Duo Alterno (Tiziana Scandaletti soprano and Riccardo Piacentini piano) have decidedly left me to the first listening surprised. Until now (but I admit a personal scarce interest for the voice against my prefernce for the guitar and the instrumental music) to the word "contemporary" I always had met voices like Cathy Berberian or Joan La Barbara or however an idea of voice used against with the opera tradition. Instead this record goes to an other direction, here the voice becomes a pretext to activate a link with the opera and the melodrama traditions and for an abandonment of noise and atonal forms for the game of melody.
Sacrilege? Abandonment of the "sacred" verb of Darmstadt? A nostalgic recovery? Or perhaps … it can be that after the excesses of the romanticism (in a sense) and the European avantgard (in the other) are those people that compose new music returning or better mediating toward "melody?" What can be better then do it through the sweetness and the tradition of the opera and the tradition of the Italian melodrama? How to explain otherwise the seven “Canzoni d’amore”by Lorenzo Ferrero and “Canson piemontèisa” and “Quattro canzone napulitane” by Riccardo Piacentini? To talk and tosing about love don't seem to ever have been the goals of the cold underlying logic to the dodecafonic and the atonal music.
The Duo is not alone in this cd that we could quietly rename of "songs of love for contemporary music", they accompany them the flute of Carla Savoldi, the l’Orchestra I Pomeriggi Musicali directed by Roberto Giannola and the electric guitar of Virginia Arancio.
It will be for my explicit preference for the electric six strings but I really enjoyed the passage by Victor Andrini "Marcello's Divertissement" where the guitar of Virginia Arancio plays with and against the piano and the voice of the Duo, bringing a sonic distorted substratum in the languid melody of the passage, an element of disturb (guitar sometime follows the piano sometimes the voice) and at the same time bringing some depth in the music. A sonorous depth not so perfect anyway, the recording is perhaps more careful to the qualities and the dynamics of the voice and the plan and it doesn't put well in prominence the "dirt" expressed by the electric guitar clipping the wings of her dynamics but patience.. the risult is an interesting piece that can be object of study for those people who I want to widen their own repertoire.

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