Giacinto Scelsi

CD version. Three orchestral works recorded in Vienna in 2005 by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra with Concentus Vocalis and the Wiener Kammerchor, conducted by Peter Rundel and Johannes Kalitzke. They come from three different decades and they do not sound like the same composer.

Quattro Pezzi (su una nota sola), 1959, for twenty-five musicians. The title says exactly what happens: each of the four pieces holds a single pitch and never leaves it. What moves are the micro-fluctuations around the centre, vibrato, slurs, tremolo, shifts in the spectrum, and the changing density of the instruments carrying the note. With harmonic motion almost entirely abandoned, what the ear is left to follow is the timbre of the orchestra as one body.

The date is worth holding onto. In 1958 La Monte Young had written the Trio for Strings, an hour made almost entirely of held tones, commonly cited as the first minimalist work. A year later Giacinto Scelsi reached the same place in Rome, by a completely different route and knowing nothing of what was happening in New York. There is no influence in either direction and no shared school: the same intuition came to two people in the same moment, six thousand kilometres apart.

Uaxuctum, 1966, carries the subtitle “the legend of the Mayan city, destroyed by themselves for religious reasons”. Scelsi scored it for mixed choir, ondes Martenot, heavy brass, six double basses, timpani and seven percussionists, and asked the singers for breath noises, nasal tone and swallowed gutturals in place of words. For nineteen years nobody would touch it. The premiere came in Cologne in 1985, three years before Scelsi died.

La Nascita del Verbo, 1946 to 1948, is here in its first recording: thirty-two minutes for chorus and large orchestra, chromatic, closer to Scriabin than to anything Scelsi wrote afterwards, with a sea of percussion, a vast double fugue and a canon in forty-seven voices across twelve keys. Scelsi said it was written in blood and that it left him in a deplorable state. He stopped composing for several years.

Hi-resolution 48 kHz/24-bit recording.