Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007): Kreuzspiel (1951) for oboe, bass clarinet, piano, 3 percussionists (conducted)
Elizabeth England, oboe
Gary Gorczyca, bass clarinet
David Abrahm, Michael Carp, Zachary Webb, percussions
Mariachiara Grilli, piano
Jeffrey Means, conductor
20.06.2015. Boston (USA). New England Conservatory, Brown Hall. live recording. 

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007): Kreuzspiel (1951) for oboe, bass clarinet, piano, 3 perc.

Italian Première - Rondò 2016
05/02/2016
Milano, Teatro Litta
Divertimento Ensemble
(flute, clarinet, piano, violin and cello)
Sandro Gorli, Cond.

PROGRAMME NOTES: L’Ange du morbide (2015) by Antonio Covello gathers the suggestions of the text of the same name written in 1922 by Jean Paul Sartre. In the story the main character, Louis Gaillard, a well-read provincial professor, but also a mediocre man attracted to morbidity and to the idea of illness, goes on a holiday in the Vosgi region. Here, after having imagined loving an ill woman, in reality he meets Jeanne, who suffers from tuberculosis and whom he is never able to posses, because during his advances she is stricken with a bout of cough. At this very moment, Louis abandons her. It seems he has finally become aware of the tangibility and reality of illness, from which he now understands he wants to escape due to his fear of being infected; so much so that “he forgot all about this woman’s real sweetness, her true character; it seemed to him that another being, mysterious and terrifying, had slipped into her, something like the Angel of Morbidity, that morbidity he had looked so hard for”. The man’s negativity and bad faith collide with reality, in which illness is the angel of morbidity, which is firstly latent in his thought and later clear to his eyes, and is also a threat for the reassuringly bourgeois way of life. This same reassurance appears in the clarinet’s opening melody, which is interrupted and then overcome by the impact with the shrill and jarring reality of the other high-pitched instruments, which is every bit as violent as the way Sartre “portrays” things. Indeed, the piece’s texture continually changes colour through the use of timbre and register and, although it develops over a tripartite scheme, does not allow us while listening to recognize figures that have already appeared, where and if these figures are re-proposed: we can only perceive their perpetual changing, which is similar to that of the body assaulted by an illness. In the same way, both the “blocked” sounds of the piano and the extended techniques of the flute are references to the manifestation of “something” acting in that body from the inside, such as a cough and labored breath. Roughly halfway through the piece, an attempt to recover the middle register – by re-proposing part of the opening solo’s material, using however augmented rhythms – and achieve the deep register, mainly with the bass clarinet, is again rejected by the high sound of the other instruments. Just as the body is worn out by the illness, and on a psychological level by a life-pervading nostalgia, the piece’s unity is worn out by variation, which ultimately leads it to crumble apart: like Louis, we too forget everything that could reassure us at the beginning, albeit with a melancholic acceptance. Much like the text, in which the prose itself clashes with reality by representing a rejection of anything in literature that represents a compromise with the truth – such poetic or other attitudes which merely aim at creating an effect – in this music nothing is left to rhetoric: the changing colours of the sonic texture make the piece a sort of single gesture and the writing leaves no more than an echo of the Sartre’s text, refusing to offer us the possibility of recognizing the story’s characters in the musical figures, and centering on the sound, which is presented in an extremely strong and direct way, not in the least toned down, but brought to life by the angel within, that is, variation.

L'ange du morbide (2015)

Première (08/05/2016)
ACHT BRÜCKEN Festival
Cologne Musickhochschule Orchestra
Alexander Rumpf, Conductor
Klaus-von-Bismarck-Saal 
WDR Funkhaus Wallrafplatz, Cologne

Programme notes: The term Variations has not to be intended here as a reference to the formal structure but as a description of what happens in the mind of the charachter they are inspired by: the mad prince Saurau of Thomas Bernhard’s Verstörung (1967). They’re presented without an interruption, and the generative material is in three chords: their development is not only traceable by considering these Variations as a whole, but also in each as a oneness. Saurau’s mental obsession finds its equivalent in the use of fading and timbre-morphing to shift from a chord to another (I var.); in the repetition of the same melodic sequence by starting in each occurence from a different note (II var.); in the distortion of a sound-stain (III var.) through some extended techniques (stopped strings, blown sounds); in the use of different kinds of repetition – e.g. use of a same note both natural and with quarter-tones in a single figure, oscillation and repeated notes – which represent and create six distinct situations (IV var.).

Saurau Variationen (2014/16)

performed on 4\1\16 in tel aviv
jonathan hadas- clarinet
sonia navot- cello
mariachiara grilli- piano

אנחנו שומעים ציפור לפני שנפסק הגשם- we hear a bird before the rain stops

Jonathan Hadas, clarinet
Sonia Navot, cello
Mariachiara Grilli and Amit Dolberg, piano

Das andere Tanzlied

NOTE D'AUTORE a cura di Ricciarda Belgiojoso. SALVATORE SCIARRINO MARCO ANGIUS. 4/11/17

BIO: SOON AVAILABLE
mariachiaragrilli@hotmail.it

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007): Kreuzspiel (1951) for oboe, bass clarinet, piano, 3 perc.

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