Salvatore Sciarrino - Morte di Borromini (1988) per orchestra con lettore
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ส.ค. 2024
- Morte di Borromini (1988) per orchestra con lettore [for orchestra and speaker]
Composer: Salvatore Sciarrino (b. 1947)
Performers: Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI; Tito Ceccherini, conductor; Moni Ovadia, speaker
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"The text for this orchestral work with reader is based on a dictate of the Baroque architect Francesco Borromini, whose work in Rome included St. Peter’s Cathedral and the Church of San Giovanni in Laterano. Plagued by depression, he took his own life in 1667. Shortly before his death a physician described the night in which he sought to write his testament and then fell upon a sword, killing himself. Sciarrino’s music does not seek to describe the events but rather reflect the emotions and madness of that night."
~Kornelia Bittmann
"Strictly from an economic point of view, Salvatore Sciarrino’s orchestral music would definitely be a case requiring the services of a management consultancy. It is not exceptional, for example, for the 82 musicians needed for Morte di Borromini to fill the concert stage to its utmost capacity. There are ten percussionists alone, who set up their full range of instruments in the background. The numbers are in keeping with the generous standards of a late Romantic symphony, which satisfy the higher expectations of a modern audience with regard to sheer volume. In the case of Sciarrino, however, the tonal events wafting through the hall are almost provocatively tiny; they convey little more than a faint suggestion of what might be possible. A trumpeter cautiously opens his mute; the upper limit of the crescendo is a pianissimo. A gigantic ensemble of instruments sits on hold, as it were.
Lush harmonies in the strings are just as rare in Sciarrino’s orchestral works as loud horn calls. The characteristic sound is dominated by breezy string harmonics, by the rasping of bows on wood, by the tapping of the woodwind’s keys and the players’ breathing as well as by the soft thumping of the bass drum. There is only a distant relationship between the traditional symphonic palette and these shadowy sounds and echoic worlds. But without the large number of instruments, without this apparent surplus of manpower, Sciarrino’s music could not be brought to life. 'It should not be surprising', explains the Sicilian-born composer, 'that only a genuine symphony orchestra - but one used in a different manner - should be capable of producing these new tonal spheres and giving them the necessary meaning.' Indeed, the click of a tongue in the concert hall is perceptible only when produced by more than one clarinettist. It takes the collective power of the musicians to raise such a minimal event above the
threshold of hearing.
Sciarrino’s reduced orchestral landscapes need the large ensemble to achieve a result that still lies at the lower end of acoustical perception. The frequently occurring standstills in the production process and the incessant silence gain new meaning when it is not a chamber ensemble but rather close to a hundred musicians who become motionless during the work.
Salvatore Sciarrino is an confessed 'soundologist'. Surrounded by an environment that is constantly becoming louder and an accelerated perception of time, he advocates pausing for a moment. In the silence, the emptiness, the nothingness, he explains, we encounter ourselves, our nocturnal fears as well as our lost dreams. The absence of sound, he continues, is intended to 'put pressure on the ear', just as John Cage’s famous 4‘33“ (Four Minutes and Thirty-three Seconds) of silence, brings listeners to themselves, emotionally and physically. It is a question of the largest possible external silence in which we can listen to ourselves, our breath, our heartbeat and, in extreme cases, the circulation of our blood. Large stretches of Sciarrino’s music reflect nothing but the noises of the body reduced to its elementary functions. The orchestra breathes, pants, wheezes and snores, while the rhythm of the heartbeat adjusts to the respective condition. The quiet intimacy of the human body is projected into the concert hall, an imaginary giant body: 'In contrast to that of composers, the music I write seems hyper-real because it is especially close to noise. [... ] It requires of the listener an openness and sensitivity to the noises of the world. The modern age coincides with the confirmation of a more or less obvious naturalism without which there is little in today’s art that can be justified.' "
~Martina Seeber
Translation: Joanna King, John Winbigler
Source: CD booklet
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What is he saying?
Unfortunately I don't know exactly what is being said (and am not aware of existing translations), but it is about the death of the Baroque architect Francesco Borromini. See description for more details. You can also see the full text here, p. 16 www.kairos-music.com/sites/default/files/downloads/0012802KAI.pdf
Hey, I’m Italian, I can resume it briefly for you!
We are in Rome, 2nd of August 1667. Borromini (a famous architect), is writing a letter where he explains how he got the injure that caused his death (so I assume he wrote it in the time between these two events). The amazing part is that he self-inflicted the injure with a sword, as the result of his paranoia and fear, and I think Sciarrino with this piece wanted to compose in music what was going on in his mind before he harmed himself.
The text starts saying that he has being sick in bed for few days days, so he decided to write his will. He starts working on it after dinner until 3am in the night. At his place he had a young guy, Francesco Massari, who was helping him with the house and the work. When Francesco hears that Borromini was still up writing, he advised him to turn off the light (presumably a candle or so), because it was late and the doctor said he should rest. Borromini asked how he could then turn it on again when he was up, and Francesco replied “You can turn it off, because I will turn it on back again for you ,Sir, when You will wake up”. So Borromini stops writing and go to bed.
Here starts, at 4:00, the second part, where Sciarrino puts into music the night, Borromini’s sleep and dreams (or at least this is how I see it!).
At 15:00 it continues: it's around 6am, Borromini wakes up and asks Francesco to turn on the light again, but Francesco refuses (it doesn’t explain why, maybe because it was too early?). When Borromini hears that “No Sir” he starts getting anxious, and thinking about how he could injure himself (by the way: this sentence is written in an old Italian way, that now would be incorrect, but it sounds so good, and everyone can still understand it!). He remains in bed with this harmful thought until 8:30am.
We are at 16:00 in the piece, and there is another long part with only music, that I see as all these paranoid thoughts put into music, you can really hear his obsession ramping up, fears coming and going like ghosts. All this energy builds up until it reaches the climax at 24:45.
The text continues: Borromini suddenly remembers that he has a sword next to his bed. All these thoughts and fears about not having the light made him desperate, so he takes the sword, hold it against the bed, and throws himself on it. The sword goes through his body, side to side. Borromini falls down on the floor and starts screaming, Francesco runs into the room and with some help he takes the sword out (when the speaker says that is the moment at 26:10 where the music stops).
At the end Borromini says that they put him back to bed, and this is how his injure happened.
One thing that might be interesting: in the text there are a lot of references to the time, and in the music they are usually connected with the bells, that imitate the sound of church bells. Here in Italy church bells used to mark every 15 minutes, using a lower bell for the hour and a higher one for the quarter. So, for example, at the very end of the piece, we hear 8 low bells and 3 high, and this tells us it's 8:45am; or at 16:20 we heard that it was 6:15am. What I find amazing is that the bells start as a concrete material, purely to tell us the time, and gradually they become full musical material, as part of the obsessive thoughts that were infesting Borromini’s brain (the second long section with only music).
I hope this might help (and sorry for any typo or mistake, English is not my first language!)
@@MicheleoTuTo Thank you so much for taking the time to do this!
@@unpetitabreuvoir you are welcome, thank you for the upload! I love Sciarrino's music, and the more people get to know it, the better!
Sciarrino is full of surprises!
Pezzo straordinario!
Fantastic piece, i love it! i'd love to see the 2nd violin's part score haha
Amazing subtile sounds!
Thank you for posting this fantastic work!
Thanks for posting this!!!
This sounds so similar to the piece "Stille und Umkehr" by Bernd
Alois Zimmermann, since both pieces have a long a pedal point on the note D.