Search - Claude Debussy, Jacques Ibert, Bruno Maderna :: Flute XX

Great compendium of flute avant-garde history

04/13/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Fabbriciani is a premiere Italian, well European flutist. He has single-handily inherited Severino Gazzelloni revered place. The flute in the early Fifties for the serial avant-garde proved to be a fertile ground. Everyone wrote an unaccompanied solo and the repertoire skyrocketed practically overnight. Here Fabbriciani picks significant works beginning with Debussy's classic "Syrinx".This piece kicked-things off for the genre its pure colour and evocative plain-chant like innocent melody is eternal. Also Berio's "Sequenza" his first is the most widely played of all his 14 odd "Sequenzas" for various unaccompanied instruments. The flute "Sequenza" is a wistfull affair with high virtuosity, fluttertonguing all in the right places,the middle to low registers, leaping between registers to create the effect of two voices. Maderna didn't quite get past Webern-like simplicity the earlier part of his creativity and then went to aleatoric means. This is representative of Fifities thinking, and not strong Maderna. Sciarrino is an imaginative Sicilian. His music full of filigree,mystery,other-wordly nuances and can be incredibly evocative. Here he mines the inner sonoric world of the flute,asking the flutist to simply blow air through the flute's column without a full-throated sound. This is done via a gentle torrent of upward-moving scales. Fabbriciani has been a devoted follower of the late Luigi Nono, and has collaborated with Nono in major works,like this one. Nono's late music is a significant end-point where he began again,or so it seems. But he had developed a high sense of new sonorities, new silences and form.The flute is not Ferneyhough's terrain,despite the fact that he plays flute. I enjoy his string meta-complexities. This piece to me seems measured and timid simply an exercise onto another dimension."