Giacinto Scelsi: Natura Renovatur
Frances-Marie Uitti, Münchener Kammerorchester, Christoph Poppen
- 1Ohoi (for 16 strings) "I principi creativi"
08:33 - Three Latin Prayers for solo voice
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- 3Anâgâmin (for 11 strings) "Colui che scelse di ritornare o no"
07:07 - Trilogy - The three ages of Man
- 4Ygghur I (for violoncello solo)06:57
- 5Ygghur II (for violoncello solo)03:46
- 6Ygghur III (for violoncello solo)04:54
- 7Natura renovatur (for 11 strings)
12:30 - Three Latin Prayers for solo voice
- 8Alleluja (for violoncello solo)04:05
- Frances-Marie Uitti
Natura Renovatur (Nature Renewed), the first ECM New Series recording entirely devoted to the revelatory music of Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988), is a voyage into the very heart of the composer’s work. Scelsi, who spoke about a third sonic dimension, beyond pitch and duration, a dimension of sculptural depth, is a particularly apt subject for an ECM production, as both the performances and the recording itself shed light upon his fascination with the inner life of tones, with the overtone spectrum, with microtonal harmonic movement and with timbral gradations.
There is no one else who plays Scelsi with the insight and authority of Frances-Marie Uitti. The American cellist (now a Dutch citizen) was living in Rome in 1975 and rehearsing music of Anton Webern, when Scelsi first approached her. He invited Uitti to visit him in his apartment on the Via San Teodoro, where he showed her three works-in-progress for cello, pieces which were to become his “autobiography in sound”, his Trilogy. “Ygghur”, heard here, was amongst those pieces. This initial meeting with Scelsi led to thirteen years of collaboration, until Scelsi’s death in 1988. They worked intensively together on the Trilogy and transcribed for cello other works including the Three Latin Prayers (to which “Ave Maria” and “Alleluja” belong), originally written for solo voice.
Years later, Uitti archived the hundreds of tapes Scelsi left behind (many of them featuring the improvisations which had provided compositional source material) for the Isabella Scelsi Foundation. After the ECM recording session, she reflected on this work: “I now remember one particular tape I heard while transferring Scelsi’s analogue ondiola improvisations to DAT. Being a monodic instrument, several improvisations were superimposed. The quality of these acoustic tapes was at times very grainy, and it seemed that there was also a version of the same superimposed in retrograde, building a thick massive tonal centre of hoary sound. Rough, chordal, powerful. When I attended the recordings of the Munich Chamber Orchestra in the Sendling church, I re-experienced that same ‘spreading’ and transparency of sound. Giacinto often said that his music should be played in a church, and it seems he embedded that vision in the tapes.
“It was this experience with the MKO, just preceding my own recording, that inspired me to unleash ‘Ygghur’, to let it to soar through the space as a performance, uninhibited by the score, the microphones, fingers or strings- as I had done in so many rehearsals with Giacinto...”
The Munich Chamber Orchestra, under Christoph Poppen’s adventurous direction, had been giving arresting performances of Scelsi in the 2004/5 season. With Frances-Marie Uitti joining their rehearsals, they were able to go still further into the material.
“I was eager to work with Christoph,” Uitti says, “and also to impart some of that special sonoral world that was the subject of many working hours with Giacinto... The MKO is a remarkable group; they are chamber musicians with a string quartet mentality... I felt we could rehearse the most demanding details without tiring the players. On the contrary, they became more involved in the difficulties as the work progressed. Scelsi would often concentrate on high tessitura passages pushing them to almost unbearable tensile stretching, only to break in with a flood of basses; a rush of warmth and depth - his revelation of the third dimension in sound.”
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