Those familiar with Coluccino's recent CD of 'string quartets' - see
review
- will be well prepared for this collection of chamber pieces. These
short pieces for eight different kinds of duo are not destined for
the ears of those requiring their music to have tunes in it, nor indeed
for those unwilling or unable to apply considerable concentration
to their listening.
The works, all dating from the last decade, are each cut from similar
cloth: they are concise, ethereal, viscous and virtuosic. Their meditative,
generally fragmentary nature renders them also more or less inscrutable.
Notes and a biography of Coluccino are included with the glossy digipak,
printed straight onto the card, but only those who read Italian will
make anything of the texts. Even then, as far as the notes are concerned,
intelligibility is far from guaranteed, as Coluccino writes in a rather
arcane academic language. Some background information on the composer
can be had in English
here,
on the website of Another Timbre, who recently issued a disc of acoustically
experimental works by him. The fact remains though that there is no
obvious way to uncover any contextualisation or what the composer's
intentions were for 'Gemina' - Coluccino is of that dying breed without
a personal website. For all that, these pieces are not totally inaccessible,
certainly not to anyone with a penchant for Webern, who may recognise
in Coluccino a distant but kindred cousin.
Audio quality is very good, though recording levels are not entirely
ideal - all tracks seem to have used the same settings, meaning that,
to accommodate the bursts of
forte sound in one or two pieces,
those tracks with a steady low volume tend towards the inaudible at
the same level -
Talea, most notably. A twist of the volume
button will temporarily right these wrongs, however.
A running time of 36 minutes at more or less full price does not cry
out "Bargain!", and in these economically straitened times
Gemina
may not easily find a willing market. Factor in the complex nature
of Coluccino's writing and it might be ventured that this disc would
have fared much better fifty years ago. Nonetheless, there remains,
thankfully, a small number of music-lovers who can and will appreciate
this provocative kind of modernism/post-modernism, and some of them
will be able to afford this disc - assuming they can find a stockist:
Soundohm.com, for one. With the bonus of a full complement of impressively
virtuosic performances included, they should buy it.
Byzantion
Collected reviews and contact at artmusicreviews.co.uk
Track Listing & performance details
Gemina, for violin and piano (2002) [3:24]
Cenere, for flute and piano (2005) [5:23]
Giano (2009), for violin and viola (2009) [2:12]
Stati, for contralto flute and guitar (2006) [5:45]
Talea, for violin and cello (2008) [4:51]
Appulso, for B flat clarinet and tenor saxophone (2008) [6:22]
Specchio, for cello and piano (2008) [3:52]
Stigma, for trombone and electronics (2008) [3:52]
Gianluca Turconi (violin), Marco Sala (piano)
Giampaolo Pretto (flute), Marino Nicolini (piano)
Gianluca Turconi (violin), Andrea Repetto (viola)
Daniela Cima (contralto flute), Leopoldo Saracino (guitar)
Umberto Fantini (violin), Manuel Zigante (cello)
Enrico Maria Baroni (B flat clarinet), Mario Marzi (tenor saxophone)
Manuel Zigante (cello), Marino Nicolini (piano)
Fabio Sampò (trombone), Osvaldo Coluccino (electronics)
