Sciarrino is an important,
and distinctive, figure in the Italian
avant-garde. The present work is a setting
of thirteen brief texts (its subtitle
is ’12 canti e un proverbio’, twelve
songs and a proverb) for baritone and
14 instrumentalists – the booklet notes
say fifteen, but only fourteen are named.
It puts before its hearer fragmentary,
skittering sounds, sudden changes of
dynamics, as sounds loom out of silence
and disappear just as quickly. There
are fluttery, fugitive sounds, repetitive
patterns and unexpected blasts. There
are elementally simple tunes and abrupt
eruptions of percussion. There are breath
noises and the clatter of instrumental
keys. Instruments are played in unorthodox
fashions, to the extent that sometimes
– without a score or sight of the performers
– one is unsure how particular sounds
are produced. The effect is not relaxing
listening, but I, at least, find it
involving and intriguing.
The thirteen brief
texts range from the letters of Rilke
to Italian graffiti, from Brecht to
Cavafy, from the modern Italian poet
Giovanni Testori to words attributed
to an anonymous hunchback. All the texts
are in Italian and are provided; most
of them are translated - or at least
paraphrased - in the booklet essay by
Lothnar Knessl.
Some of the texts pose
questions: "If not now, when? If
not here, where? If not you, who?";
"Where did the builders go each
evening when the great wall was finished?".
Elsewhere there is talk of the rose’s
self-destruction and of the woodworm
we are urged to love, since we too shall
be gnawed in our turn. The dominant
tone, indeed, is of the unsettled, the
anxious. But there are also occasional
images of beauty, even splendour: ‘the
flame vibrates from the string of the
violin". All these moods are mirrored
in Sciarrino’s glissandi and instrumental
squeaks, in the troubled vocal line,
well handled by Katzameier. Katzameier
is something of a specialist in Sciarrino’s
music, having taken the role of Macbeth
in Sciarrino’s Macbeth: Three
Nameless Acts.
I cannot honestly say
that this is music to which I would
want to listen every day of the week.
It challenges, disturbs in a way that
is akin – though not of course stylistically
– to, say, Pierrot Lunaire. It
has power, it has a strange beauty –
as in the wonderful moment when in one
piece, ‘Fior di kencùr’, the
voice emerges from a background of animal
and bird noises (or so it seems). Much
of Quaderno di strada has the
attractiveness - and the power to irritate
- of the unpredictable. There are moments
when its flurries of sound come close
to a kind of self-parody of certain
aspects of the contemporary avant-garde.
The sceptical should perhaps begin with
‘Fior di kencùr’, the longest
track and perhaps the most ‘conventional’.
I like to think that most unprejudiced
listeners would recognise the imagination
and compositional skill evident here
and be willing to explore – with ‘Fior
di kencùr’ as their guarantee,
as it were – the rest of this CD. Recommended
to the adventurous, or to those who
have already discovered the highly individual
sound world of Sciarrino.
Glyn Pursglove
Klangforum Wien/Sylvain Cambreling. 
