AVAILABILITY
www.metierrecords.co.uk
It’s splendid to have
a single disc devoted to the piano music
of Castiglioni. We’ve seen that Thomas
Adès has included Come io
passo l’estate in his wide-ranging
EMI New CD 557051-2 (which also includes
Nancarrow, Kurtág, Busoni and
Grieg, amongst others) but such discs
as Sarah Nicholls has now compiled are
very much a rarity.
Cangianti is
a tightly-argued, compact eleven-minute
work written in 1959. It is composed
of sub-clauses of tremendous colour
and complexity, full of flurries in
the middle register and some fortissimo
outbursts. Decisive treble and bass
oppositional motifs join with considerable
command of dynamic variations to produce
a work of real distinction. Tre Pezzi
(1978) is curious. In his erudite sleeve-note
Michael Finnissy wonders whether they
represent a "parodistic exorcism"
citing Messiaen, Webern and the Second
Viennese School generally. The first
(marked "Sweet") certainly
has a flurry of birdsong and occupies
an insistent, staccato-laced sound-world.
And the third is kinetic and leapingly
fractious.
Come io passo l’estate
followed five years after the Three
Pieces and stands at a distinct remove
from it. Simpler and more clearly descriptive
it consists of ten "diary"
entries describing a trip in the Italian
Alps. There are just hints of Ragtime
in the first, jaunty and rhythmically
incisive, and some moments of neo-classicism
as well. La Valle del Clamin takes
us to some vertiginous heights with
rather abrupt, then more vigorous, trills.
The most amusing of the postcards, the
eighth, illustrates the slow snoring
of Antonio Ballista (the work’s first
performer) asleep in the cells of a
police station. The sleepy chords are
wickedly evocative. These pictures are
compressed into a very small canvas
and make their mark with pictorial directness,
like a Picasso cartoon in the case of
the Fantasma del Castello I Presule
– all forty seconds of it.
Dulce Refrigerium
is a six-movement suite that pays
obeisance to nineteenth century procedures
in a highly sophisticated way. There’s
a salute to Beethoven’s Les Adieux
sonata as well as a remarkable seventeen-second
sliver of a Chorale to end the brief
suite. The Sonatina fuses some of these
ideas – a kind of lineage surveyed and
transformed – with a swinging Ländler
second movement.
The recorded sound
is commendably clear yet warm and Nicholls
explores these diverse works with a
surety and finesse that are admirable
– and truly winning
Jonathan Woolf
Sarah Nicholls (piano) 
