Raffaele BELLAFRONTE (b. 1961)
Guitar Works 2021
Acrobatic Stomp (2020) [5:41]
Flexis (2020) [4:24]
Cristalli di Sale (2002/2020) [7:00]
Filum (2020) [3:43]
Sherwood Forest (2018) [6:17]
Bolè (2020) [3:42)
Running after the Dream (2008) [4:51]
Suite n.1 (1994/2016) [17:32]
Davide Di Ienno (guitar)
Filippo Latanzi (marimba), Luca Marziali (violin), Tiziano Palladino (mandolin), Mario Stefano Pietrodarchi (bandoneon1).
rec. 2021, P.I.M.S. Studio, Vasto, Italy
All works are World Premiere Recordings
TACTUS TC960204 [54:37]
An earlier CD of music by Raffaele Bellafronte was issued by Tactus (TC 96023) in 2015 under the title Guitar Works – it contained a similar mix of works for solo guitar and small chamber ensembles including guitar. It, too, featured the guitarist Davide Di Ienno and, indeed, the marimba of Filippo Latanzi. But there is no music in common between that disc and this new one, so if you bought (and liked) that 2015 disc, you can safely buy this new release.
Of the pieces on Guitar Works 2021 it was Cristalli di Sale which most forcefully captured my interest on initial hearings of the disc. It is scored for guitar and marimba (played here by Di Ione and Filippo Latanzi). As is often the case, the combination of a plucked instrument with a percussive instrument produces some captivating textures; for me, there were passages which (given the composer’s title) made me think of, say, iodized salt crystals and their glittering facets. Cristalli is, as the booklet notes by Ennio Speranza tell us, a “transcription of a piece composed in 2001 for guitar and harp”. I haven’t heard that piece, but I wonder if one of Bellafronte’s motives in making this transcription of it might have been to hear the music interpreted by a duo which mixes the sounds of plucking and beating, rather than by two plucked instruments? Cristalli is rather episodic in its construction, more a matter of juxtaposition than sustained development – though most of the ‘episodes’ seem to have common origins. Working as it does in this way, Cristalli di Sale, more than any other work on the disc, seems to make especially apt the choice to reproduce Juan Gris’ 1925 painting Guitar and Newspaper on the front of the CD booklet. Though never a ‘pure’ cubist Gris was much influenced by the example of Braque and Picasso, and like them often took music or musical instruments as his subject as, for example, in The Violin (1913) and Still Life with Violin and Guitar (1913). The great art-dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (in his book Der Weg zum Kubismus, Munich, 1920) used the word ‘polyphony’ in discussing the work of Gris, tacitly recognizing its analogies with the way music often works and declaring that “anyone who looks at [the paintings of Gris] can easily recognize independent voices” (quoted thus in Brenda Leach, Looking and Listening: Conversations between Modern Art and Music, Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).
The cubist artists frequently collaborated, and socialized, with poets and musicians (see, for examples, The Cubist Poets: An Anthology, ed. L.C. Breunig, University of Nebraska Press, 1995, passim). Though quite unlike Stravinsky stylistically, Bellafronte’s Cristalli di Sale does what Stravinsky did in his Piano Rag Music of 1919 – when he reclaimed for music some of the methods which cubist painters had, in part, learned from music – methods belonging to synthetic cubism (such as structure by collage or the appearance of collage, the work being created by synthesis and accumulation rather than by a kind of fragmentation) rather than analytic cubism. I can’t, of course, know that Raffaele Bellafronte had this parallel in mind when he wrote Cristalli di Sale. I simply suggest that it offers a fruitful way of thinking about and responding to this composition.
Elsewhere Bellafronte, as on other recordings of his music which I have heard, is often at his best when his work makes use of dance rhythms of one kind or another. A good example of this is Acrobatic Stomp, which opens the CD. This is, according to Ennio Speranza, a transcription for guitar and bandoneon, of the third movement of Bellafronte’s Sonata for guitar and mandolin (2018). Its new title echoes that of another composition by Bellafronte, his piece for piccolo and piano – The Crazy Acrobat of 2005, premiered at the World Flute Convention of that year in San Diego. The phrasing of Acrobatic Stomp is insistent and repetitive, though the rhythmic emphases keep shifting, so that although the opening phase of the piece is mostly in 7/8, those who choose to dance to it may risk a broken ankle or a degree of confusion. It isn’t, I think, only the presence of a bandoneon that makes one think of Astor Piazzolla and nuevo tango. The central, slightly more lyrical, section of Acrobatic Stomp is well described by Speranza as “resembling a weird waltz, interrupted by changes of rhythm”; after this a version of the earlier material returns. This is, indeed, a ‘stomp’ best suited to ‘acrobatic’ dancers.
There are further witty and inventive treatments of dance rhythms in other works on the disc. There is a vivid example in one of the works for solo guitar; Flexis starts simply and quietly, before increasing in complexity, rhythmic urgency and volume, in a manner which suggests a kind of lopsided waltz (while one might not need to be an acrobat to dance to this passage, a clear head and strong sense of balance would certainly help!). Bolè is not a word I know, but in this context it surely indicates some connection with the bolero, since Raffaele Bellafronte’s Bolè closes with what is quite clearly a ‘take’ on that dance in 3/4, rather knowing and ludic. The same two adjectives might be applied the ‘Tango’ which closes the Suite n.1 for violin and guitar. Ennio Speranza more than once uses words like ironia (ironic) in referring to such pieces. Though I think I can see what he means, I think the word isn’t really useful in the discussion of music, not least because it denotes such a “ubiquitous and multifarious … phenomenon” (D.J. Enright, The Alluring Problem: An Essay on Irony (O.U.P., 1986); the term is hard enough to use consistently even when discussing less ‘abstract’ kinds of art than music.
Relatedly, one might, I suppose, think of some of Bellafronte’s music as postmodernist (though that is another catch-all word about which I feel rather uneasy). More than once deploys (in self-aware fashion) the resources provided by the earlier history of music. So, for example, Sherwood Forest incorporates a rather lovely berceuse and the last work on the disc (Suite N.1) finds new life in the duo of violin and guitar, so popular in the guitar’s romantic heyday, when composers such as Nicolo Paganini, Mauro Giuliani and Ferdinando Carulli wrote popular music for it, as did such lesser-known figures as Pietro Pettoletti, Matteo Bevilacqua and Francisco Molino. The third movement of Bellafronte’s Suite, headed ‘Romantico’, delightfully evokes (without simply imitating) the many meditatively romantic slow movements written for violin and guitar (and, of course, for many other instruments) in that earlier era.
All in all, Bellafronte’s music is engaging and well-made, essentially tonal (at times almost neo-romantic),
often allusive and frequently imbued with a sophisticated, gentle wit. If you haven’t encountered Bellafronte’s work, I urge you to seek it out. While it won’t do anything to make you redraw your maps of contemporary music, it will certainly give you real pleasure. This disc, or the earlier Guitar Works (Tactus TC96023) would be good places to begin; but so too would any of the following (the extent of my own familiarity with the composer’s music): Ritratto di un compositore (Bongiovanni, 5049-2), Arakthalama (Stradivarius, STR33904), Chamber Music (Bongiovanni, 5081) and Concerti (Tactus, TC 960202). The reader will, I am sure, notice that the labels mentioned in connection with Bellafronte’s music are all based in Italy. His work, however, deserves to be better known beyond the country of his birth.
Glyn Pursglove
