Salvatore Sciarrino

"Salvatore Sciarrino's Musiche per il "Paradiso" di Dante is divided in three movements:

Alfabeto Oscuro
The alphabet mentioned in the title (as if speaking, it’s written at the top of the score) refers to the language of sounds that desperately tries to transfigure into words: the orchestra seems to want to talk,” writes Sciarrino. “The nature of the instruments would not allow it, yet they obsessively act, and we hear almost without understanding. Almost. In their lack of humanity, the machines, the instruments, the talking animals sometimes become tremendously expressive. Is it possible to talk through music? Consonants also, laboriously, emerge; we recognize something, maybe. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita... The end of each journey presupposes and recalls its beginning. All the Heaven, to express itself, declares the inability to express”

L’invenzione della trasparenza
This large sonorous fresco retraces the third panel of the Poemi Concentrici in perfect symmetry of proportions, as suggested by the homologue orchestral organic, the presence of the same soloists (flute, violin and viola d’amore with the same tuning), the rotatory figures of the strings, the background sound of the metal plate and, above all, the duplication of the macroform. It is certainly no coincidence the Sciarrino’s pioneering attention to the study of the effects of transparency and iridescence inì medieval paintings (auras, halos and, above all, rainbows) that surround and envelop landscapes and supernatural figures; the cycle of Musiche per il Paradiso has, in a way, highlighted this one-to-one correspondence (and chronologically parallel) with Dante’s poetic inventions.

Postille
“We go out into a more intimate constellation, an extreme reflection on the sound-light relationship. In the absence of dark backgrounds, every sound duplicates itself, encloses its shadow: this makes it luminous. It seems like a contradiction. On the contrary, we are following the ancient mystics, investigators of perception.” The refractions the composer talks about start from the bass drum-solo violin pair in synchronous sounds: the subsonic component without extinction transients (muted bass drum) and the hyperacute melodic one (solo violin) combine itselves in an impossible synthetic timbre, that breaks down in further matter dust. The acoustic perspective, even here absolutely transparent, reveals all the stratifications and depths of the sound space: blowing bichords (flutes and clarinets with respiratory dynamics), echoing sounds of brass, glissatios and resonances that generate horizons and then disappear into trajectories curves of violas and cellos, barely audible shadow-vibrations, breaths that suspend the listener’s waiting states or speaking impulses of the solo flute (which recall the syntax of the Alfabeto Oscuro), acoustic ectoplasms with luminous trails in a game of correspondence to limits of sonic esotericism." - Marco Angius