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OF BEING IN CHANGE AND THE UNCERTAIN Salvatore Sciarrino's music hypnotizes. It often seems as if it does not owe itself to laborious acts of composition, but is spellbound in the here and now as an echo of hidden mystery plays. Then again one thinks one is witnessing volcanic experiments, one witnesses menacing seethes as they resound when water and fire, solid and airy elements mingle in telluric depths. Anyone who wants to do justice to such music as an interpreter must understand something of the magician's craft. As an artist who feels synesthetics, Sciarrino is also familiar with the current discussions in the natural sciences – it is about chaos theory or phenomena of emergence, about biological processes or the interdependencies between the tiniest and the sublime. Painting since childhood, he loves the infinite in the nature of colors. Modern literature, the myths of the ancient Greeks, classical and pre-Socratic philosophy belong to the pool from whose spirit his ideas are inspired. In Sciarrino's music, rationality and the anticipation of a perceptual sensuality penetrate each other, which is still able to register the finest tremors in the niches of being and their after-trembling in the numinous, uncanny, demonic. It may be that Sciarrino is a modern brother of the prophetically inspired thinker Empedocles, who was born in Sicily at the time, like himself elements explained. Hate and love functioned in his cosmos as separating or connecting agents. And – backdrops of fate – the powers of light and »...of the lonely, blind-eyed night« worked on him. With the piano, too, which plays a comparatively small role in his extensive oeuvre, Sciarrino undertakes excursions into regions of the unknown. Using sophisticated pedal techniques or subtly staged sound shadow resonances, he succeeds in an imaginative way in compositionally undermining the deficit of the distinct individual tones. His sonatas and shorter individual pieces seem like otherworldly events. Formally compellingly designed with a beginning and an end, with balanced phases of accumulation and thinning, dynamic contrasts and subcutaneous streams of energy, they are also fed by the infinitesimal, which dwells in blurring and in silence. They are exemplifications of mental worlds of experience: full of uncertainties and latent panic, quasi continuously generating further from the conditions of hallucinated ingredients. In order to breathe life into the delicate textures that unfold in Sonata No. 1 (1976), the performer must display breathtaking virtuosity. Sotto voce, streaming restlessly from the trembling nothingness of the deep, blurred sound waves stir, the meanders of which soon grow into mollusc-like cloud formations. Chromatic runs glitter in linear mechanics, which suddenly fade away again in trills. Finally, inspired phases of two-part invention unfold. "Then the earth received" - so Empedocles - "full of joy in her beautiful furnaces parts of the splendor of water and fire; there the white bones were divinely joined together by the glue of Harmonia«. Sonata No. 5 (1994) is a different phenomenon: dryly dabbed signals from opposing sixty-fourth structures make you listen. What stirs in a lightless night sensitizes the imagination. Is it the unsteady noises of a strange species that is scenting itself? Does a motor function of the quintessentially nightmarish, distorted by spasms, unfold? Then repetitive throbbing in the lowest registers, episodes of chromatic-scalar sheet lightning. The play of energies intensifies, long pent-up tensions are discharged in zones of excessive dynamic contrasts. The recorded Notturni (both 1998) are spartan in terms of expression, but of comparable sonority. With these miniatures, Sciarrino in no way conjures up that warming consolation that is so readily associated with lunarly lit summer idylls under the evening firmament. The scenes have something claustrophobic about them. Orpheus got lost in an unknown labyrinth. He listens. we listen. Is it the broken echo of your own footsteps? Lurking menacing insects? With cluster glissandi performed silently in counter-movement to the sound tracks, Sciarrino enables chimeric resonance effects in Notturno No. 1. Exploiting the finest tonal qualities in the piano's extreme registers, morphological ambivalences and a quasi-psychedelic timing - Sciarrino also unsettles entrenched musical reception patterns with the spooky staged sound gestures in Notturno No. 3, he provokes wide-awake listening both inside and out. Perduto in una città d'acque (Lost in a City of Water, 1991) - an oceanic phantasmagoria. It's as if you're floating, out of time, somewhere between eternal night and the shimmer of spherically muted lights in aquamarine expanses. A quiet sound space, ranging in relative range from contra-C in the depths to c''''' in the brightest heights, is established, but permeable above and below. Coordinates from C resonate in changing couplings. What sounds moves gently in itself, as if in resonance with a distant swell. It is softly flooded with dematerialized third-octave sounds in the widest registers – E-G sharp or D-F sharp. But then, alarmingly, secret messages creeping into consciousness: messages as if from the registers of a long-lost civilization of wise men and fools. You can hear them for a while. Helmut Rohm |
program:
[01] Nocturne N. 1 (1998) 04:44
[02] Nocturne N. 3 (1998) 06:16
[03] V Sonata (1994) 16:35
[04] Perduto in una citta d'acque (1991) 08:45
[05] I Sonata (1976) 22:29
total time: 59:19
Florian Hoelscher piano
Press:
05/15
In the arena of sounds
The pianist Florian Hoelscher in the CD portrait
You can recognize a good virtuoso by the way he plays the simple things. For example, Mozart's slow movements. Or, as far as our time is concerned, Salvatore Sciarrino's piano piece “Perduto in una città d'aque”. It basically consists of a column of octaves above the very low C and around it a network of sparsely placed individual tones spread out over the entire keyboard. Florian Hoelscher brings the almost nine-minute piece to life in an exemplary manner.
A multi-colored sound painting emerges from the bare tonal framework, through the exciting disposition of time, the depth gradation of the sounds and their different weighting, the space is expanded in all directions. The sophisticated pedaling and the resonances of individual lingering strings bring a whole world of overtones to life.
In the unreality of this underwater city, a reductionist continuation of Debussy's “Cathédrale engloutie”, you actually feel lost when listening, but in a pleasant way. The same creative power is noticeable in the other pieces on this Sciarrino CD: in the glittering cascades of sound First Sonata from 1976 as well as in the two Notturni and the related Fifth Sonata from the XNUMXs, whose ragged small figures are linked together to form a lively sound narrative. […]
Max Nyffeler
26.12.2014
Sciarrino's shadowy sceneries
Salvatore Sciarrino's music plays in the blurred zones between what is just audible and its disappearance in the depths of the sound space. In her shadowy sceneries, fleeting moments of simple clarity occur, which – immediately gone again – allow the spreading silence to shimmer mysteriously. The two Notturni, with which Florian Hoelscher opens his selection of five piano pieces by Sciarrino, lead directly into the musical universe of the Italian composer. In Nocturne No. 1, falling sound groups run counter to a silent, ascending cluster glissando, and under the sparkling movements multicolored reverberation rooms open up. Hoelscher takes the “vivo volando” of the score rather calmly – in favor of very clear articulation and careful exploration of the sound. Also in Notturno N. 3 he convinces with his will to transparency. More reduced than the first Notturno, its dynamic design provokes an intense listening, which is ready to follow what is happening to the perceptual limits. There is a nice arc between the four compositions from the 1990s and the Sonata I from 1976. Here, too, one encounters nimble sound figures that Hoelscher brilliantly unleashes in his playing. The composition soon proves to be a fast-paced virtuoso piece, which then clearly contrasts with the more recent compositions in the density of its movements.
tbh
15.12.2014
Among the Italian composers of contemporary music there is no proliferan in the tengan as they have more definitions or sustantivas parts for piano solo (with all the excepcions, as the soberbia …offer on de serene… (1974-77) by Luigi Nono). Salvatore Sciarrino (Palermo, 1947) has one of his excepciones, such as the new monographic piano piano, with two sonatas, two nights and one of his piezas with more combinations on the keyboard: Perduto in una citta d'acque (1991) ...
...Perduto in una citta d'acque has been defined by Helmut Rohm as a fantasmagoria que recuerda a una civilización de sabios extinta, evocación quizás de la Atlántida. Es una de las piezas con una sonoridad más diferenciada de las reunidas en este compacto, más roma y redondeada, como si trazara en música el dibujo que en la superficie del agua las ondas creasen al percutir las teclas contra la líquida superficie del arpa del piano . It una pieza, igualmente, más cálida que el resto, con un uso del pedal más resonante y atmosférico, trazando una masa densa, asible, sobre la que van emergiendo fraseos, sentencias que rápidamente se disuelven en esa sustancia de base hasta la última frase aguda por contraste con esa masa grave, que rubrica la partitura.
La I Sonata (1976) is the most extensa del compacto, with sus 22:29 minutes de duración, y también aquélla en la que comprobamos hasta qué punto en el piano la escritura de Salvatore Sciarrino no era por aquel entonces ni mucho menos tan personal como la That's why you want to have a piece of vocals like this, in a very special form, a piece of music for instruments like the cord, like you have to go Be quartetti brevi (1967-92) o los soberbios Tre notturni brilliant (1974-75) for viola solo. Esta I Sonata anticipa, de algun modo, el modelo de Perduto in una citta d'acque, for its ondular character and the proliferation of fraseos then never (y diría que hacia la nada), si bien carece de esa base densa que se aprecia en la partitura de 1991. A pesar de su extensión y de una mayor variedad de registros y tesituras, la obra no resulta tan attractive como la pieza acuática ; en su concentration, más compacta y expresiva en su progressive desplome hacia lo más grave del piano, hacia una region oscura que sería antitética con respecto a la rúbrica de Perduto in una citta d'acque.Casi veinte años posterior, la V Sonata (1994) ahonda en los caminos previos, sintetizándolos y abriéndolos, aunque sigamos sin encontrar la rotunda personalidad del Sciarrino para voz y ensemble. Las figuraciones se multiplican ahora, fluctúan de un modo más multidirectional y proliferante. Se asoman, igualmente, escalas cromáticas que nos harán recordar a Olivier Messiaen, una de las presencias gravitantes sobre el piano de Sciarrino, como un incisivo hammered bartokiano (también Kurtág, de algún modo, se percibe en esta música). Now, you use the pedal to create massive graves in the form of proliferan fraseos, in this sonata with more contrasting sound and sound accelerandi.
At the end of the day, we had a lot more fun Nocturne N±1 (1998) and Nocturne N±3 (1998), between 4 and 6 minutes of duration, with principles of compositivos muy cercanos a la V Sonata, which has these parts in tanto cansinas por la revisitación de procedimientos en un lenguaje que nos fascina como otros Sciarrinos más sciarrinianos… Vuelve a destacar aquí el uso del pedal, la reverberación, el juego entre fondo y primer plano, la diferenciación entre Amalgamated textures and fringes, between the nebulae and the definition, the game of shapes and volumes are particularly effective in a night piety, with all the mysteries and figurative figures.
En cuanto a la discografía para piano sciarriniana, destacaba sobremanera el registro efectuado entre 1991 y 1992 por el italiano Massimiliano Damerini para el sello Dynamic (S 2015), donde se incluían, entre otras partituras (en primeras grabaciones mundiales y obras dedicadas al propio Dam erini ) tanto Perduto in una citta d'acque como las cuatro primeras sonatas para piano. La interpretación en NEOS corre a cargo de Florian Hoelscher, que se muestra más lírico y carnal frente al más ascético Damerini, que imprime al piano de Sciarrino un deje bouleziano más marcado, haciendo de sus fraseos y líneas emergentes cuerpos sonoros vinculados al puntillismo por e structure , principios y estilo. Quizás la de Damerini sea una lectura más afín a algunas de las fechas de composición de las primeras piezas para piano del compositor de Palermo, mientras que las versiones de Hoelscher resulten más actuales, desde un enfoque más personal y libre (véase, por ejemplo, su dilation de la I Sonata, que sobrepasa los 22 minutes, por los casi 13 de Damerini). Hay una calidez mayor en este album de NEOS, un sentido más mediterráneo, unas densidades caniculares; perfectamente compatibles, en todo caso, with la mayor frialdad de Damerini, en lecturas más cerebrales.
La grabación de NEOS está en plena sinergia con la interpretación de Florian Hoelscher, por cuanto amplía el registro de forma muy natural y generosa para dar cabida a unas resonancias graves, a un aliento del murmullo generado por el pedal que se agradece y penetra en los more recónditos paisajes de estas partituras. En este sentido, la toma de sonido es more agradable que la de Dynamic, more cómoda para el oído y respetuosa con el carácter del piano. La edición del compacto es la clásica de NEOS, con un interesting ensayo a cargo del productor del disco, Helmut Rohm, por momentos un tanto divagante, además de fotografías y los habituales fragmentos de partituras, muy reveladores, ya sea en los grupos cristalizados de la V Sonata o on the last page of the I Sonata, a cuyos compases finales se asoma como un eco el fantasma de la monumental Sonata en si menor (1852-53) de Liszt, incorporando así más presencias a esta fantasmagoría sciarriniana (un Sciarrino, en todo caso, minor).
This disco has been delivered for your review La Quinta de Mahler
Paco Yanez
Agora Classica, England
More than just a composer's composer, Sciarrino continues to be a unique voice, weaving beguiling, intricately detailed tapestries of sound. Hoelscher is an ideal interpreter, alive to the particular blend of hypnotic sonority, resonant silence and sly humour. Sonatas 1 and 5 are the major pieces here but, of the fill-ups, it is two of his nocturnes that most captivate mind and ear.
GUY WEATHERALL
11.08.2014
26.04.2014
03/2014
02.2014
[…] requires a highly differentiated art of touch capable of minimal dynamic nuances. The pianist Florian Hoelscher, once a student of Robert Levin, Michel Béroff and Pierre-Laurent Aimard and today a professor for piano and chamber music in Lucerne, has the necessary sensitivity […]
It is fascinating how Florian Hoelscher elicits dazzling and oscillating timbres from the grand piano in his interpretation of this work, which are able to captivate over a long period of time even without taking on a clear thematic contour. […]
Gerhard Dietel
Music:
Technique:
Booklets:
04.2014
[…] Using sophisticated pedal techniques, [Salvatore Sciarrino] also explores the volatility and fragility of sound on the piano. Spooky 64th-note figures that float over a fog of resonances dominate not only the two “Notturni” […], but also Sonata No. 5 […]. The early Sonata No. 1 (1976) is completely different: chromatic waves of sound pour over the listener with breakneck virtuosity, fleeting clouds of sound that arise and disappear - an apotheosis of impressionistic sound techniques. […]
Dirk Wieschollek
Music:
Sound:
18.02.2014
Hoelscher's Sciarrino
Densely packed, dispersed sounds, only for a short time, then only a reverberation can be heard. Pianist Florian Hoelscher repeatedly makes similar gestures that calmly and at long intervals break the silence. The listener cannot escape this music, which is captivating due to its barrenness; he is spellbound by a soundscape illuminated by an unrelenting light. This is how the 5th piano sonata by Salvatore Sciarrino, born in 1947, currently Italy's most prominent composer, begins. No matter whether Sciarrino writes operas, orchestral, ensemble or chamber music, he always creates such meditative webs that have no use for psychology or sentimentality. Often - as in this piano sonata that Maurizio Pollini premiered 20 years ago at the Salzburg Festival - they start from a nucleus that is cracked in the course of an increasingly dramatic development. This strict and hard constructing composer is familiar with the relentless and archaic, and from this he derives a magic in which threat and basic trust are mixed. Which is why Sciarrino's music both captivates and threatens. After the final excesses of the sonata, “Perduto in una citta d'acque“ reassuring until the listener realizes that he has fallen into a particularly insidious trap.
Reinhard J Brembeck
16.02.2014
From solo piano music to chamber music
www.deutschlandfunk.de
[...] With his piano works, Salvatore Sciarrino creates transparent and nebulous sound spaces that not only feed on dynamic confrontations, but also develop their power largely in moments of silence, and then create space. All of this characterizes the acoustic magic of his sounds, which so often tempt you to dream and pose secret riddles.
The two miniature-like Notturni Nos. 1 and 3 from 1998 do not, as can be seen from the poetic but very complex booklet text, conjure up the “warming consolation that one so often associates with lunarly illuminated summer idylls under the evening firmament.” . Rather, gestures of the claustrophobic are created. The relationship between sound and time takes on its own delicate dimensions here. […]
[…] “Perduto in una citta d'aqua“, i.e. “lost in a city of water” takes you into oceanic worlds and plays with delicate movements. A floating sound space stretches aimlessly in small movements and unfolds space for imagination, “as if one were floating, removed from time, somewhere between eternal night and the shimmer of spherically muted lights in aquamarine worlds”. Florian Hoelscher creates a very sensual and touching reading.
Yvonne Petitpierre
01.03.2014
Sensitive Access
The pianist Florian Hoelscher presents a convincingly arranged selection from Salvatore Sciarrino's piano works.
In recent years, the number of recordings of works by the Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino (*1947) has multiplied. The special interest that was shown in music for piano (although this instrument plays a rather subordinate role in Sciarrino's work compared to sound generators with variable tones such as the flute or the strings) is reflected in various recordings of selected piano works, including the heard this CD from NEOS. The pianist Florian Hoelscher has chosen a five-part selection of works consisting of two sonatas, two notturni and another piano piece, thus providing insights into the development of Sciarrino's music between 1976 and 1998.
The most recent pieces in the production, Notturni Nos. 1 and 3 (1998), which sound at the beginning, are full of breaks: the dynamically precisely formed tonal cascades, which slide down from the high to the middle registers in No. 1, are suddenly accentuated by tones or chords, interrupted by unforeseen pauses or by hesitating pausing in the middle of the downward movement, later also by taking over the tone movements into the bass register. In No. 3, on the other hand, Sciarrino accomplishes the break-in of the other into what is already known on the basis of ostinato gestural elements which – if the listener allows it – seem like a stylized transformation of sound impressions from nature and are superimposed over the course of the piece by a stream of other events .
The fact that the textures developed in Sonata V (1994) are similar to those of the two Notturni shows how skillfully Holescher has selected the pieces in order to establish musical correspondences between the individual works. Here and there he sensitively traces the rapid, dry tonal movements, lets the bass register sound springy and occasionally forms powerful, angular chords. However, he always puts what is heard in relation to different types of reverberation. Accordingly, in 'Perduto in una città d'acque' (1991) the pianist takes a lot of time to model the reverb components and color the resulting sounds differently. The placement of the powerful Sonata I (1976) at the end of the CD is extremely successful, as it gives the longest and oldest work in this selection of pianistic works, at over 22 minutes, the final character. The figurations, which are often extremely fast and come to nothing, are also clearly and precisely articulated here.
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Sound quality:
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Booklets:
dr Stefan Drees
03/2014
The Sciarrino piano: extraneza and fascination
Dentro del ya enormous catálogo de obras del maestro de Palermo el corpus pianístico propiamente dicho ocupa un espacio comparativamente reducido. Florian Hoelscher (1970), professor de piano y música de cámara en la Hochschule Luzern, que desarrolla a su vez una intensa actividad artística en Europa y Estados Unidos, it el responsable de estas brilliantes lecturas, como en su momento también lo hizo con obras de Jonathan Harvey para este mismo sello.
La Música Salvatore Sciarrino Tiene La Virtud de Saber Conectar Sutilment Diperentes Planos de Percepción, de Enlazar el micro y el macrocosmos Creando Sonoridades Tan Interiores, Tan Bajo La Piel, Que Nos Hablan de Misterio, A Veces de Alucinado Temblor Que SE Proyectan Hacia Una dramaturgia de lo incierto, lo vago o quizá lo soñador. Entre el interior y el exterior, entre el blanco brillante y el negro profundo hay un amplio espectro de colores sugeridos nunca plenamente visibles ni audibles que el compositor nos revela sotto voce como queriendo atender sigilosamente a su nacimiento desde el silencio original. Sin embargo, su obra pianística adolce un tanto en ocasiones de algunas de estas virtudes de su personal y exquisito modo de expresarse para adoptar un lenguaje ajeno a cualquier lugar común, de mayor densidad y contundencia sonora amén de poco complaciente en la concepción y articulación de read piezas. No obstante, ello le otorga como artista un valor añadido.
His first Sonata fue escrita en 1976 como obra de lucimiento tanto por su extension como por su high grado de exigencia técnica para el interprete. An acentuado contraste de texturas fluctúa between polos de trémolos y densos graves y agudos trinos nos invita a la simbólica percepción de un tensado diálogo entre el fuego y el agua. Brilliant escalas de color se van abriendo en flexible e ingrávida filigrana esparciéndose por el espacio con gesto libre y luminoso en una suerte de jeux d'eau que regresa hacia su final a las tesituras graves del comienzo apagándose poco a poco.
Sin embargo, la muy posterior V Sonata (1994) differ enormousmente de lo anteriormente dicho y la escritura se torna more ruda adquiriendo tintes de mayor radicalidad. Ahora el severo contraste dinámico, la pulsación obsesiva y martilleante se nos revela como incómoda e inquietante presencia. Los fraseos y los acordes se entrecortan, quedan flotando y palpitan en el espacio vacío, la atmósfera cae en lo claustrofóbico y el desarrollo se hace con paso espasmódico como si a tientas se avanzara en la tiniebla.
Los más breves Nocturne N.1 and Nocturne N.3, ambos fechados en 1998, presentan bastantes similitudes en su escritura y modo expresivo. Al margin de cualquier connotación romantica y de su casi rotunda sencillez estructural, la atmósfera del primero vuelve a lo desconcertante en su atmósfera obsesiva construida con clusters y glissandi, mientras que el tercero, de refinada escritura en registros extremos, parece revivir the extrañeza de intranquilas presencias y sombras en una ensoñación nocturna.
Perduto in una citta d'acque (1991) Invita a detener el tiempo en un pausado goteo de notas que nos permite imaginar una mítica ciudad perdida en la se perciben lejanamente luces en una noche infinita de transparencias, sombras y silencio. Esta fascinante y meditativa pieza la conocíamos en la extraordinaria lectura que de ella hizo para el sello Col-legno Marino Formenti en la que la resonancia interna del piano cobra un protagonismo esencial. Sea cual fuere la version, no dejen de escucharla.
Manuel Luca de Tena
12 / 2013, Semele Number 3
La musica de Salvatore Sciarrino tiene algo de hipnótico. A menudo parece que no sea resultado de unos complejos procesos compositivos, sino que haya sido conjurada aquí y ahora como eco de ciertos misterios ocultos. El piano es el instrumento elegido para sus exploraciones por los territorios de lo incierto. Mediante sofisticadas técnicas de pedal o el sutil empleo de resonancias consigue, with enormous imagination, socavar compositivamente el peso de unas sonoridades aisladas y different, evocando espacios de acontecimientos sustraídos al mundo.