Search - Sciarrino, Rogliano, Damerini :: Caprices for Violin

Mists, gists, fragments, shards of violin timbre

scarecrow | Chicago, Illinois United States | 01/29/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Shame this is no longer available. The 'Caprices' for unaccompanied violin solo, there are Six was a primary work for Sciarrino and the Violin in the Seventies. The music materials here centers around incessant flourishes of string harmonics of open strings,G-D-A-E,and fingered ones of sharps so there are abundances of these tones propelled everyplace with tremoli,,trills,and scourings of the up-down motion to conpell the proceedings forward-along.The "First Caprice, has this incessant display of broken harmonics, uo and down the typical motion lumbering upwards we find in the literature. Although here Sciarrino pushes the extremities of gesture.The "Second Caprice" exploits the trill with double stops inhabiting the places,some consonant other quite dissonant,byt the overall gestural frame is always one of convolution of moving forwardThe "Third Caprice" is similar in shape although utilizing more open harmonics tones a-b-c-d-e-f-g,The "Fourth Caprice" marked "Volubile" is my favorite, for now the work seems to throw itself into the welter of its exteme premise and up-the-anti, with incessant long passages of again gorgeous harmonics swelling and enveloping into nothingness, with more "virtuosic" gestures,festering;and more cadenza-like than the others. The upper parts of the violin the "canary-sounding harmonics are quite un-tame, quite ponderous, like angry mosquitoes buzzing around a limb of a tree.Then the "Fifth Caprice" now is even faster in tempo, marked "Presto, and Sciarrino forgives the Violinist by providing open harmonics(relatively easier) to help render the speed. It has lesser density as well as it proclaims itself round the middle register, more subdued relatively, more quiet and not anxiety ridden.The "Sixth Caprice" is the longest with scales now upwardly moving to render, but again the materials seem etude-like, in fact there are repeat brackets, where the beginning "Da Capo" is repeated. This kind of activity is anathema to the vigours of modernity, You simply do not repeat mindlessly. It revealed these are indeed "etudes" pieces for study. Nothing is really violent,for there are little or no spaces, the canvas of rhythm is fairly continuous, seemless. The pieces here are like fragments,shards of timbres floating by like flotsam detritus from a clipper ship crashed into the shore, like Eco's novel. The result is very beautiful yet idly disconcerning,anxious for something, but the materials do not leave you along, and continuously engage you. This does grow thin as time weighs upon them and become uni-dimensional, and Sciarrino must know to give classic shape to his materials here and he does do this time, but it is a question after the fact. Sciarrino has a problem with durational shape,musical structure that has haunted him to the present. This is pure music for the imagination, concerned with the pre-classic,music that thinks itself of some other, some other place than situated within the darknesses of the Twentieth Century.

"Un'Immagine D'Aprocrate" invites the piano to provide not accompaniment but another gentle layer of timbre, fast filigree "fili" of timbres scourings around "misting" around."