concert review: two weird Italians
Oct. 19th, 2009 08:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacAfter my recent encounter with a piece of crappy late modernism (it'll be on the internet radio Tuesday evening; you can listen to it then), I thought it would be redeeming to attend a convenient concert of better-quality late modernism. It still isn't my sort of music, but at least I could hear it done well.
A few dozen people actually made it out to Stanford's small recital hall, Campbell, last night to hear the Quartetto Prometeo emit works of their profoundly weird compatriots, Giacinto Scelsi and Salvatore Sciarrino. Sciarrino's Eighth Quartet, here receiving its US premiere, is a single movement of chirping phrases hovering in space, beginning up at the dog-whistle level of the instruments and slowly descending to the upper middle register. Though pontillistic and airy, it had more coherence and flow than otherwise similar works of Anton Webern. Webern might not have liked it, but I'd say this was better than his.
Scelsi was represented by two works. His Fifth Quartet, only six minutes long, is a series of slowly shifting breaths. For some reason I didn't feel this worked all that well; I prefer this kind of music at a Feldmanesque pace and scale. But the much longer Third transformed its bee-buzzing drones, especially in the fourth movement where Scelsi discovers harmony, into a kind of transcendent ethereal beauty. For a few moments there, I was actually moved by what I was hearing.
The concert was framed by Sciarrino's Esercizi di tre stili, his arrangements of the Baroque composer Domenico Scarlatti. Rather than feeling incongruous, they functioned as worthy appetizer and dessert.
A few dozen people actually made it out to Stanford's small recital hall, Campbell, last night to hear the Quartetto Prometeo emit works of their profoundly weird compatriots, Giacinto Scelsi and Salvatore Sciarrino. Sciarrino's Eighth Quartet, here receiving its US premiere, is a single movement of chirping phrases hovering in space, beginning up at the dog-whistle level of the instruments and slowly descending to the upper middle register. Though pontillistic and airy, it had more coherence and flow than otherwise similar works of Anton Webern. Webern might not have liked it, but I'd say this was better than his.
Scelsi was represented by two works. His Fifth Quartet, only six minutes long, is a series of slowly shifting breaths. For some reason I didn't feel this worked all that well; I prefer this kind of music at a Feldmanesque pace and scale. But the much longer Third transformed its bee-buzzing drones, especially in the fourth movement where Scelsi discovers harmony, into a kind of transcendent ethereal beauty. For a few moments there, I was actually moved by what I was hearing.
The concert was framed by Sciarrino's Esercizi di tre stili, his arrangements of the Baroque composer Domenico Scarlatti. Rather than feeling incongruous, they functioned as worthy appetizer and dessert.
