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Giacinto Scelsi: Chukrum; Quattro Pezzi; Natura Renovatur; Hymnos
Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks (Neos 10722)
3 October 2008

There has been a proliferation of releases lately of the music of Giacinto Scelsi. The Mode and Accord labels are both currently releasing their respective Scelsi Editions and there are many other labels getting in on the act too, though actual performances on these shores of the difficult music are still few and far between.

The works presented on this new release from the Neos label are mainly orchestral, performed by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. The works include the Quattro Pezzi (su una nota sola) for orchestra – probably Scelsi's most famous work and the first from his mature period to have been performed (in 1959 to general uninterest) – and go up as far as Natura Renovatur from 1967 for eleven strings. They therefore present us a vista on such elaboration as occurred in Scelsi's style over the course of the '60s –more a refinement of that style than any great change in its substance.

Scelsi's life story, if you are unaware of it, certainly makes for a good myth to accompany the music. Born in 1905 into wealthy Italian nobility – he was a Count whose wedding reception was held in Buckingham Palace – his early musical studies led to the initial development of a compositional style in the twelve-tone avant-garde idiom of his day, before he underwent a mental health crisis in the late 1940s which put paid to his activity for a few years. While recovering from this illness in a clinic he would sit at a piano for extended periods of time playing one note, over and over again. Of this he later commented: 'If you play one note for a very long time, it grows large. It grows so large that you hear many more harmonies, and it becomes larger inside. The note envelops you. In the note you discover an entire universe with overtones that you never hear otherwise. The note fills the space you are in, surrounds you, you swim in it.' Something of a recluse (few photos of him exist), he died in 1988 having largely ceased composing in the previous two decades and having only begun in his later years to have widespread recognition as a composer of import.

The method used in the pieces for which Scelsi is famous and all of which were composed after his breakdown was to improvise extensively on one note and record the results onto tape, this later being transcribed in score by an assistant. Scelsi did not think of these works as compositions with an author in the conventional sense but as snapshots of something more profound and of which the composer was something of an intermediary. His work has been quite influential in contemporary music, with Tristan Murail encountered his work while based in Rome after winning the Prix de Rome and John Cage among other American composers who specifically sought out the Italian.

The music is audibly distinctive, in its obsessive exploration of a sound that has been reduced to the process of pitch, and generally makes for an intense listen. Neither has its reception been without controversy. Scelsi is still more or less unrecognised in Italy, with one of his transcription assistants recently asserting that, although he helped in scoring it, he considers Scelsi's music to be of absolutely no value. Lyricism such as permeated previous Italian music is herein exterminated in the face of an articulation that each work spends its duration prying open.

It is hard to know what to say in response to a music that is so removed from the conventions of melody, harmony and rhythm – that indeed reduces music to a decomposed pitch, a pitch no longer operating as unitary value but as access to the sound it allows to course through it in myriad distortions, with microtonal movements and variances of articulation and dynamic acting as an engine to drive the music's incessant motion. The notion of process engaged herein influenced the spectral composers and also displays kinship with the process-based compositions of American minimalism, for example that initial version of minimalism pioneered by La Monte Young. The listening experience in the case of Scelsi is quite extreme and sometimes even harrowing; Natura Renovatur in particular on this disc seems to explore every possible detail within the range of a sixth or so in a manner that becomes more and more shrill as the piece progresses, erring towards aural violence.

The performance of such strong and unorthodox music is difficult to bring across but the performances here are matchless, executed with a refinement that does each work real justice. The recording quality also is crisp and conveys well the depth of the music in its richness of harmonic overtones, the recording coming across as something of an authoritative representation. The works are all of a piece in their adherence to Scelsi's concern with the vast universe to be explored via the threshold of single pitches, and so run into each other in the disc as a complete listening experience, offering up different glances towards the infinity of sonority into which they bound.

By Liam Cagney


MusicalCriticism.com




Scelsi: Piano Works (review)
Note that this text is rather dated and has not been revised.

Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988) wrote one of this century's largest sets of piano music. This pianistic output was concentrated into two relatively brief periods: 1930-1941 and 1952-1956. At that point, Scelsi's compositional development forced him to largely abandon keyboard instruments -- until then, the piano had been by far his most-used vehicle for self-expression. Scelsi was a virtuoso pianist, and even his most experimental compositions in this genre show a marked pianistic conception. The place which this output will hold in the repertoire remains to be seen -- Scelsi was basically 'discovered' in the 80s.

The first period of piano writing (1930-1941) occurred during Scelsi's early compositional phase in which his language was largely traditional. Here the greatest influences seem to be Scriabin, Berg & Bartok. This was also when Scelsi wrote his "rabbits" such as the extremely impressive String Quartet No. 1 (1944) and the still un-recorded cantata La Nascita del Verbo (1948). The early piano output includes four sonatas as well as the first seven suites. Some of these are lost, and the others will no doubt be recorded at some point.

After 1948, Scelsi abandoned composing for a few years only to emerge with his new style in 1952. The beginning of this period is again concerned almost exclusively with the piano, the following pieces being written at that time: Suite No. 8 (1952), Four Illustrations (1953), Five Incantations (1953), Suite No. 9 (1953), Suite No. 10 (1954), Action Music (1955), and Suite No. 11 (1956). The intended purpose of this article is as a review of Werner Bartschi's recording of Suites Nos. 8 & 9 on Accord 200802. Unfortunately, I have been largely unsuccessful at obtaining scores of these pieces, so my knowledge is not as large as I would hope.

The Suite No. 8 "Bot-Ba (Tibet)" is subtitled: "Evocation of Tibet with its monasteries on high mountain summits - Tibetan rituals - Prayers and Dances." Though it is described as less(!) violent than the Suite No. 6, the Suite No. 8 makes much use of toccata-style movements largely based on clusters. These alternate with slower meditative sections based on slow chord ostinatos, with still a hint of Schoenberg in the connecting sections. This Suite is immediately attractive for any barbarians who might like cluster toccatas and percussive devices, as it is still largely concerned with aggressive motion, despite the title. However, it is still successful at evoking Tibet -- or at least the recorded Tibetan music I have heard, which is more than a little dissonant. The suite is in six movements with the "center" in the third based on the golden section. This is followed by an extremely dissonant movement, then the slowest movement of the suite, and then the complex Bartokian finale. Bartschi's playing is admirable, particularly in the extremely virtuosic finale.

The Four Illustrations and Five Incantations are recorded by Suzanne Fournier on Accord 200742. These works are much shorter than the Suites 8 & 9, and the Four Illustrations in particular is more concentrated in form. This piece is in four movements describing four avatars of Vishnu, and might be said to correspond roughly to a sonata -- in particular the Four Illustrations occupy the same position in Scelsi's middle output with respect to the piano sonata as does the massive orchestral work Aion with respect to the symphony. Both conclude with slow, fading resolutions. The Four Illustrations is charged with a variety of ideas, and is a piece I continue to find fascinating after more than a hundred hearings -- I have little doubt that it is Scelsi's finest piano piece. For the most part it is a slow work based on murky passage-work in the middle registers and subtle interactions between the movements; the violent Varaha Avatar (as scherzo) is the exception. The Four Illustrations begins Scelsi's concentration on slow and static music. The Five Incantations are much simpler in conception -- though quite virtuosic pianistically, each is basically independent with a clearly identifiable theme. They might be described as rhapsodies, or possibly etudes.

The Suite No. 9 "Ttai (Peace)" is subtitled: "A succession of episodes which alternatively express Time - or more precisely, Time in motion, and Man as symbolized by cathedrals or monasteries, with the sound of the sacred Om," along with the comment: "This Suite should be listened to and played with the greatest interior calm. Restless people should keep away." This rambling piece is in nine movement, all clearly restrained and predominately quiet and slow. Though Halbreich repeats his comparison between Scelsi and Bruckner when discussing this piece in the CD notes, it is particularly here that the limits of this comparison are seen. I find that there is always a sense of striving (an idea which is surely inseparable from the 19th century) in Bruckner's music, and this Suite of Scelsi's is nothing but arrival. Scelsi returns more extremely to ostinato-based movements, as well as simply slow repeated chords; it took me several hearings to appreciate this suite, and it continues to occupy something of a singular position -- perhaps a rock on which Scelsi's further explorations during the 50s are levered. There are many moments of evocation of various world musics, in particular the compressed southeast asian style polyphony of the fourth movement, which is something of a resolution for the first part of the suite. Another high point is the eighth movement which is then followed by a slow finale. In this eighth movement, Scelsi starts a polyphonic style which he was to use later in his string writing. I also hear something of the style of Charles Tournemire in his Don Quixote / Vanity movements; whether Scelsi knew Tournemire I do not know, though I think the comparison is apt as this suite is one of Scelsi's most vain pieces.

The Suite No. 9 has also been recorded by Marianne Schroeder on Hat Hut CD, along with the Suite No. 10 "Ka (Essence.)" Though Schroeder's performance is good, Bartschi's is better. Not only does he bring a deeper sense to the music, but he plays it 10% faster (something which doesn't hurt for this piece.) The Suite No. 10 is not very successful, in my opinion -- the bind in which Scelsi finds himself here might have had something to do with his abandonment of the piano shortly afterward. At the beginning, this suite offers something of an introduction to the earlier piano music (and this is something Scelsi was to continue for some years: an incredible new idea emerging like a boulder, followed by somewhat easier pieces which function as something of an explanation for the first; example: String Quartets Nos. 2 & 3.) The first three movements use more traditional western figurations in Scelsi's slow ostinato style, followed by a fourth movement which combines these and then three other movements which close the seven movement suite. These last three movements are largely based on quickly arpeggiated chords in the highest register over slow recitatives in the lower ones. Some of the new sound ideas here do point toward Scelsi's later output, such as the highly singular world of Pfhat (1974).

The Action Music and Suite No. 11 are not yet recorded, though I suspect Accord will be coming out with them soon. I expect that Action Music returns to the cluster toccatas of Bot Ba, and that the Suite No. 11 develops further some of the later ideas in Ka -- though I would really like to find out how Scelsi ends his piano output (not surprisingly at the same time as he was writing Triphon for solo cello.) In addition to these pieces, there is a later piano piece Aitsi (1974) which uses electronics to de-temper the decaying resonances. This is similar to Stockhausen's Mantra, though the effect is quite different. The String Quartet No. 5 is based on Aitsi, and the piano piece is arguably more effective -- the contrast between attack and decay is much more extreme. Here as in most of Scelsi's last music, the language is quite harsh and largely eschews any traditional development. Aitsi is one six-minute movement, based on a chord expanded in a style similar to Indian classical alap (though stacked vertically.)

Todd M. McComb
late 1991



Scelsi: I presagi

GIACINTO SCELSI was born into an old family of Italian aristocracy on 8 January 1905 in La Spezia and died in Rome on 9 August 1988. I presagi, his only work for brass ensemble, was completed in 1958. Scelsi's ascendance from obscurity occurred in the mid-1980s, and was consummated in October 1987 at the SIMC International Festival in Cologne, where his orchestral music was featured to great acclaim. Two of his orchestral works, Aion and Konx-Om-Pax, were given their North American premieres by the San Francisco Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas, in 1997 and 2000 respectively. I presagi has been performed in Europe, under Hans Zender and others. It is scored for a smaller ensemble of tenor saxophone, two horns, two trumpets, two trombones, and two tubas, as well as two percussionists playing timpani, a horizontal bass drum, and a wind machine.
Impressions of Scelsi continue to differ, based both on his unusual approach to composing and the unconventional sound of his music. His aristocratic position and resulting means cast a dilettantish shadow over his early background, despite a thorough study of the major musical trends of the 1930s with Walter Klein in Vienna and Egon Koehler in Geneva. The latter introduced him to Scriabin's mystical approach to harmony, an orientation which clearly marks the remainder of Scelsi's career. During this period, he wrote prolifically in a fairly conventional idiom, producing a body of music he largely disclaimed later. To escape World War II, Scelsi abandoned his family's Neapolitan estate for the safety of Switzerland, and wrote two articles there on music aesthetics. These were his last public remarks on the subject. His life story becomes more mysterious after the war, a situation he maintained intentionally. He resisted any attempt to analyze his music, refused to be photographed, and generally removed himself from public view. These decisions followed quickly in the wake of a mental breakdown in the late 1940s, a crisis from which he recovered to create music in a radically new style. Scelsi's music became increasingly concerned with the sounds of single notes, and the transformations of articulation and timbre which they could endure. His working arrangements during this later period were also unusual, although not unprecedented. His music was dictated in sound, perhaps taped, and then transcribed by paid assistants who scored it according to his instructions.
Scelsi considered himself a messenger, rather than a composer, and that image fits the visionary quality of much of his music. His partially cataloged output consists of more than one hundred items, including six mature orchestral works, five string quartets, several works for larger chamber ensembles, and a substantial body of solo & duo pieces, both for voices and instruments. I presagi (1958) occupies a pivotal position in his oeuvre, as one of the last works created prior to the landmark Quattro pezzi su una nota sola (1959). There, after pioneering a restrictive style in the String Trio (1958), Scelsi returned to the orchestral medium and decisively explored the musical implications of movements based on single notes. I presagi is also one of a series of works inspired by the decline of Mayan culture. Scelsi's fascination with Central America came from his study of astrology, in which the Equatorial region is associated with his sun sign, Capricorn. He subsequently became convinced that Mayan cities were intentionally abandoned for religious reasons. This theme is expressed most elaborately in the great orchestral cantata, Uaxuctum (1966), which is also the most densely scored and dramatic large-scale piece in his output. Contrary to Scelsi's predilection for fanciful titles in exotic languages, I presagi has a straightforward meaning in Italian: The Omens. In three movements, it presents purely instrumental images of foreboding sentiments and the end of Mayan urban culture.
Much of Scelsi's work from the 1950s consists of solo music for a variety of instruments (piano, winds, strings), but he also composed for larger and more unusual forces. Among those works, until the Quattro pezzi for orchestra, I presagi employed the largest ensemble. The percussion and wind machine participate only in the last movement, but the brass writing is virtuosic throughout. As opposed to his later music, which features a highly refined sense of nuance and little conventional melody, his work from the 1950s includes octave runs and other overt musical motion, "exterior" manifestations of sonic energy in Scelsi's terms. Consequently, this portion of his output tends toward restlessness more than his "interior" expressions of the 1960s and 70s, and I presagi is no exception. The first movement, oriented around B, has a fanfare- or overture-like quality. It projects a clear sense of anticipation, a foreboding feeling which indicates that the omens of the title will not be good ones. It does so not only by Scelsi's characteristic and unsettling use of quarter-tone shifts, but by ending most phrases with long notes. The second movement, oriented around C, is less an announcement than it is a quizzical response to the first, a chance to ponder what the omens might mean. Its phrases generally begin with soft held notes, and then destabilize in trills and larger motion. The ominous feeling of the opening becomes concrete in the last movement, by far the least unified and most dramatic of the three. The wind machine and percussion enter for the first time, and help to build the music slowly into a dissonant wall of sound. A central calm highlights the wind machine, yielding a vision of desolation. As the music becomes more animated again, it seems to do so with a renewed sense of purpose, ultimately bringing an emphatic end to a frightening image.
I presagi is one of Scelsi's most approachable pieces, forming something of a climax to his work from the 1950s, much of which consists essentially of studies. While it is one of his most dramatic works, I presagi can also be viewed as a study for his orchestral masterpieces of the 1960s. The quarter tone shifts and exotic approach to sound are already evident here, but Scelsi went on to pioneer a more sophisticated approach to timbre and its harmonic implications. In his later output, music oriented around single notes regained a sense of rhetorical subtlety and refinement. I presagi, on the other hand, illustrates a scene in straightforward and aggressive fashion, something it does with great success.

Todd M. McComb
7 November 2001




Scelsi: Konx-Om-Pax

GIACINTO SCELSI was born into an old family of Italian aristocracy on 8 January 1905 in La Spezia and died in Rome on 9 August 1988. Konx-Om-Pax, perhaps the most straight-forward of his six mature orchestral works, was set to full score in 1968 & 1969. Scelsi's ascendance from obscurity occurred in the mid-1980s, and was consummated in October 1987 at the SIMC International Festival in Cologne where his symphonic music was featured to great acclaim. Like many of his works, Konx-Om-Pax was premiered in the months leading up to the Festival, on 6 February 1986 in Frankfurt by the Hessian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jürg Wyttenbach. [Note: It appears that this information is incorrect, and that Konx-Om-Pax was premiered in Venice on 10 September 1970.] This is the North American premiere, and a followup to the San Francisco Symphony's successful performance of Aion on 12 June 1997, also under Michael Tilson Thomas. That concert was the North American debut for Scelsi's orchestral music as a whole. Konx-Om-Pax is scored for chorus and large orchestra, including full strings, but without flutes and including an organ part.
His personal eccentricity and the unusual route of his rise to prominence have combined to produce wildly differing impressions of Scelsi the man and the composer. His aristocratic position and resulting means lent a dilettantish quality to his early background, in spite of a conspicuous study of the major musical trends of the time. In 1935-36, after he had already written several large-scale works, Scelsi studied the Viennese style with Walter Klein, a student of Schoenberg, and went on to declare an allegiance to Berg's version of tonal dodecaphony. He next studied Scriabin's harmonic vocabulary with Egon Koehler in Geneva, and the resulting combination of mystical & chordal thinking clearly marks the remainder of his career. He continued to compose, in a mostly conventional style which attained something of a personal character apart from these influences. For instance, although it was written prior to the "break" in his career, Scelsi's String Quartet No. 1 is a work of considerable quality, and one of the few from this period which he continued to embrace. To escape World War II, Scelsi abandoned his family's Neapolitan estate for the safety of Switzerland, and wrote two articles there on music aesthetics. These are his last public remarks on the subject. The dense French prose is sometimes insightful and sometimes contradictory, a combination which Scelsi's later poetic aphorisms take to extremes of concision.
Scelsi's life story becomes more mysterious after this period, a situation he maintained intentionally. He resisted any attempt to analyze his music, refused to be photographed, and generally removed himself from public view. All of these decisions followed quickly in the wake of his mental breakdown in the late 1940s, a crisis from which he apparently recovered only very slowly. According to later reports, the only therapy which helped him was sitting and striking a single piano key again & again, listening for the slight differences in each individual sound. This is also how he reinvented himself as a composer, finally reappearing in an old house overlooking the Roman Forum in 1951, ready to compose in a completely new idiom. Scelsi's gentility did not suffer as a result of his ordeal, or along with his retreat from public view. He entertained regular visitors, principally musicians, and was described uniformly as impeccably polite, yet with probing bright blue eyes. Scelsi's working arrangements during the period of his artistic maturity were also unusual, although not unprecedented. His music was scored in several steps, beginning with frequently improvised performances by himself onto audio tape which were transcribed by paid assistants, and then scored according to his instructions. His partially cataloged musical output consists of more than one hundred items, including the six mature orchestral works, five string quartets, several works for larger chamber ensembles, and a substantial body of solo & duo pieces. Scelsi frequently made use of the human voice, often treated instrumentally, and published four volumes of French poetry.
Although many of his works are for solo instruments, and his chamber music is often detailed enough in its demands that it places unusually high emphasis on individual musicianship, Konx-Om-Pax is perhaps Scelsi's prototypical large-scale expression and an ideal introduction to his oeuvre. It also includes one of his most discursive subtitles: "Three aspects of Sound: as the first motion of the immutable; as creative force; as the syllable Om (the Buddhists' sacred syllable)." Taken together, the title & subtitle serve to indicate most of Scelsi's principal influences, as well as the frequently muddled way he referred to them. Fascination with ancient mythology and other cultures around the world is often expressed in Scelsi's titles. In this case, the title is straight-forward: It consists of three words arguably translating to "peace" in Assyrian, Sanskrit, and Latin, respectively. It also shows a dilettantish approach to scholarship, despite what is an evident erudition, in e.g. the attribution of the Hindu syllable "Om" to the Buddhists. Perhaps even more illustratively, Konx-Om-Pax is the title of a 1907 neo-hermetic text by Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), in this case subtitled "Essays in light." Crowley is best known for the commandment "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law" and in fact the alternative religion he founded, Thelema, continues to have a loyal following. Like Crowley's, one can view Scelsi's use of muddled & tangled references to various & sundry historical ideas and cultures as allusions designed to merely indicate what are more unified underlying truths. Like Crowley, Scelsi rarely "argues" as such -- he indicates.
Scelsi adopted the non-rationalist position enthusiastically, describing himself not as a composer, but as a messenger. The conspicuous examples of correlative & lateral thinking which abound in Scelsi's allusions are characteristic of creativity at many levels, and consequently no indication that his actual artistic production suffers from a similar pastiche. Indeed, Scelsi's mature music is highly unified in gesture, direct & coherent in approach, making for perhaps its greatest contradiction. While reasonably straight-forward on its own terms, it does demand from listeners the suspension of many pre-conceived ideas on music, constructed as it is in a radically different manner. Although long considered baffling & unprecedented, in retrospect, Scelsi's fundamental concerns were actually fairly typical of the 1960s. His interest in world music, and especially Eastern mysticism, was very much in the air and was reflected in both the classical & popular spheres. More technically, his approach to sound and timbre are realistic answers to the questions posed by the avant-garde of that era, specifically in such poles as Stockhausen's "timbre-music" and Cage's abdication of compositional control. In Scelsi's case, the former is especially prominent, as timbre shifts frequently serve as the primary dynamic around which individual movements are constructed. Inspired by the repeated striking of the piano from his clinical recovery, Scelsi erected entire forms around single notes, articulated in various octaves by various instruments. The timbre of the note-complex is varied by shifts in orchestration, as well as by microtonal slurs which serve to inject a dynamism into what might otherwise be a static sound. Scelsi's human concerns are also evident, as he rarely used any electronic devices to break down timbre in this way, instead giving it a formal role through a kind of organic motion which Stockhausen's superformulæ never seem to fully realize. Likewise, although Scelsi's work leaves little to chance and contains little silence, his concerns regarding our connection to a universal consciousness expressed through the always-changing sound of a single note mirror Cage's in some ways. Scelsi's resolution of these issues appeared on the public scene only in the 1980s, lending his musical ideas an exoticism they may not have had otherwise.
A discussion of Scelsi's artistic concerns and the demands he makes on listeners overstates the actual difficulty of his music. Although there is frequently a mental "leap" required, advanced musical training or erudition are not prerequisites. Indeed, experience suggests that Scelsi's music may be easier to grasp initially for someone with only modest experience in contemporary music and few pre-conceived notions. It is not elitist music at all. Scelsi is sometimes described as a minimalist, and in that he could be seen as a forefather of the minimalist movement, yet his music is packed with activity. Although it may involve only one note for extended periods, that note will be restated in parallel intervals, slurred, or varied in orchestration in a continuous way throughout the piece. Indeed, there is a classical balance of activity in Scelsi's music which serves to give it a density of ideas very comparable to Mozart's. What Scelsi does, however, is place that activity into directions orthogonal to the usual course of musical argument. The fundamental motion in Scelsi's music is interior, as one note mutates into another note through a process beginning with shifts in timbre. Within that idiom, once grasped, the ideas are expressed succinctly and cogently.
In the case of Konx-Om-Pax, the subtitle provides a clear orientation for the music. In the first movement, an opening C becomes larger & larger, until it is slowly destabilized by what begin as timbral and then quarter-tone variations, only to reassert itself. Although unified in gesture, the movement has an unsettling quality arising from the motion driven by microtones. It is a fine example of Scelsi's ability to let a small inflection drive a larger form. The overall sonority and articulation style, reminiscent of a bell, are also vintage Scelsi. The brief second movement starts slowly on a main pitch of F, only to become increasingly animated and even violent. It is a sudden explosion of dissonance which ends just as one grasps what has happened. As in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the chorus enters only in the last movement. In Scelsi's case, it brings a quintessential evocation of peace by repeatedly chanting the syllable "Om" on a main pitch of A. The chorus is surrounded by various destabilizing musical gestures which it nonetheless succeeds in unifying. Both of the larger outer movements have a relatively simple bipartite form, building to an initial climax which is followed by a central calm and then a reassertion of the original musical dynamic. Despite a relatively simple general description, the range of harmonic material swirling around the central "Om" of the last movement resists a naïve interpretation, as does the overarching tonal sequence (C-F-A) of the symphony as a whole. Whereas Crowley used light as the central metaphor of his text, Scelsi's cosmology-in-sound yields a very real, haunting sound. When it ends, the return to silence is palpable.
To discussion of Konx-Om-Pax, part 2.

Todd M. McComb
21 January 2000



Giacinto Scelsi
Piano Music 1952/1953
Quattro illustrazioni "Four Illustrations on the Metamorphosis of Vishnu"

Suite No.8 Bot - Ba (Tibet)

Cinque Incantesimi
Markus Hinterhauser (piano)
col legno WWE 20068 [54 mins]

 

Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988) is one of the most individual and elusive of composers; he was given to secrecy and mischievous misinformation. I had been bowled over by hearing a piano Suite and the Third String Quartet of Scelsi on BBC Radio 3, bought all the music I could find, and went on to write one of the first articles about his piano music for Piano Journal. Over the next years I studied all Scelsi's piano music at the keyboard, and visited him in Rome, where I found him friendly but disconcertingly unwilling to discuss details of the music and its notation. That remains open to question and a minefield for music writers; col legno's commentator writes about the 'great rhythmic precision' of the notation, but it is probably the case that some of that is apparent, resulting from attempts to notate taped recordings of the composer's improvisations.
Here is a well chosen selection of Scelsi's later piano music, which belongs to the early 1950s, and listeners will be surprised at its originality for that time. The performances are scrupulous and the recording quality superb; Scelsi is a composer who has come into his own with digital recording. The major work Bot - Ba is a half-hour ritualistic sequence of major statements inspired by monasteries and mountains of Tibet, depicted with spacious solemnity, several of the movements culminating in dizzying dances which demand transcendental pianistic virtuosity, well served by Markus Hinterhauser.
I offer readers a copy of my 1986 article, and also some extracts from Todd M. McComb's website, a valuable listings source, with a page about this favourite composer of mine and his. Lastly, an extract from an important lecture at Goldsmiths College in which the violinist/violist Mieko Kanno tackled the vexed question of uncertainties in Scelsi's published scores.
I hope readers will be encouraged to purchase this newly released CD.

Peter Grahame Woolf
DISCOVERING SCELSI (Piano Journal 7/21: 1986)