12 Works of Christmas - 7. Ferruccio Busoni's Nuit de Noël

Ferruccio Busoni is one of a handful of composers one might call "cult" composers, ones whose music has the power to perplex and even repel the mainstream classical audience but have passionate followers for just that power.  A singular figure in Italian music, Busoni's style morphed from fine late Romanticism to a strange but assured stretching of the definition of tonality, omnivorous in its influences and demanding a great deal from performers and listeners alike.  Despite being largely enamored of Bach, a noted genius of absolute music, Busoni's works were frequently colorful and exotic, such as his Indian Diary in piano and orchestral versions, and among his more programmatic music the Nuit de Noël (1908) is one of his most effective and memorable.

Despite Busoni never being aligned with the likes of Debussy and Ravel, Nuit de Noël is an Impressionist piece throughout, employing tricks like planing fifths right off the bat.  The use of these techniques is Debussyian in several aspects, such as an enigmatic countermelody in the bass, slow trills right out of one of Debussy's water pieces, horn-like chord bursts in the tenor register, and turns so subtle one can only know them to be Debussyian while never putting them into words.  Heck, it even shares Debussy's main publisher, Durand & Bros.  Of course, Debussy would never break his own rules as much as Busoni does, relying on striking shifts in harmony, such as blurring the cascading fifths into a warbly off-minor key with a resounding bass pedal, to imbue the piece with a distant wonder very apt for Christmas night.  It's one of his most immediately beautiful pieces, needing no explanation but containing sumptuously unanswerable questions.  In lieu of Marc-André Hamelin's perfect recording, unavailable on YouTube, here's Roland Pöntinen's nearly perfect one instead - and what better playing could you ask for at this time of year or any other?

~PNK

Autumnal Classics - Preludi Autunnali by Gian Francesco Malipiero

Popular culture has an unfortunate pattern of trying to filter whole artistic scenes into single, attractive figures, such as how Jackson Pollack is the only abstract expressionist and Ang Lee is the only Chinese filmmaker.  In that vein you can count on the bulk the Classical audience to assume that Ottorino Respighi was the only Italian composer of his time to write instrumental music, but that couldn't be less true if they also claimed he composed underwater.  It's certainly true that opera was the dominant medium in Italian Classical music during the whole of the 19th century, the era in which many people believe the whole Classical tradition parked its trailer and cracked a brew, but once the 20th century rolled into view there was a thriving scene of Italian composers trying to revive instrumental music to the prominence it held in their homeland in the days of Vivaldi and Pergolesi.  Once again we can thank the "Everything Old Is New Again" attitudes of performers and record producers in the 80's onward for renewing the public's interest in figures such as Alfredo Casella, Ildebrando Pizzetti, Giuseppe Martucci, Franco Alfano, Leone Sinigalia, Amilcare Zanella, Marinetti and all his wacky Futurist buddies, and today's composer, Gian Francesco Malipiero. Highly regarded in the first half of the century and possessing such creativity and work ethic to extend his career from the mid-1900's to the early '70's, not to mention his invaluable work in editing the works of Renaissance and Baroque Italian composers, Malipiero was an unmatched creative figure that would have left much more of an impression had his works seen the light of concert halls outside of his native country and had tastes not shifted away from his style near the end of his life.  Malipiero is both refreshing and vexing to musicologists, as his music didn't conform to one voice that lasted the bulk of his career, rather mutating and sharpening as he grew older and wiser; trying to categorize his work reveals how tricky it can be to embrace a "change is good" outlook on art, especially when you've got theses to finish.  That isn't to say that his style is untrackable, though, as its easy to see the impression that the introduction of the music of Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky left on his work in the 1910's and '20's.  Case in point: Preludi Autunnali (1914), one of his most wholly successful piano works.

Impressionist composers had a real knack for depicting autumn as they delighted in its metamorphosis, complex moods and lack of bombast.  They also loved to depict wind, as broadened compositional technique and improved musicianship among performers opened the door for great wind pieces like Debussy's Preludes "...Le vent dans la plaine." and "...Ce qua vu le vent d'ouest." as well as Ibert's Le vent dans le ruins.  Luckily for them Autumn is just lousy with winds that poetically whip fallen leaves around and cause traffic accidents, and Malipiero's first Prelude finds a novel way to depict continuous rustling as well as nature's shifting state of decay:

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Impressionist trickery allows for cells of music to be placed as is on top of conflicting harmonic material to create unity within dissonance, and in this case Malipiero was able to use the old "pedal bass" trick and switch the unchanging element from the bottom to the middle.  It's a low boil uneasiness, quiet enough to attempt to ignore but still able to insinuate itself into everything you hear, like a cello imitating a mosquito.  The "B" section features one of his loveliest melodic turns (as well as some good ol' planing):

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The second Prelude is more impish and nostalgic, highly reminiscent of Debussy's "Le fille aux cheveux de lin" and offers much room for yearning, rubato phrasing:

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It's the most simply pretty one in the set, though there's still dramatic interruptions:

The third Prelude is much more profound, both in its register and mood, kneading a lydian chord with added 7 and 9 notes deep into the listener's psyche.  Its melody is concerned and elliptical, as if failing to untie a metaphorical knot.  It also gets plenty of mileage out of letting the listener settle into one block chord and then sliding into an ingenious contrast:

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Not to mention a much-earned fortissimo:

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The final Prelude is even more impish than the second and twice as sarcastic, taking a xylophonic glance at the changing seasons, as if the leaf part of the leaves fell off leaving the veins by themselves:

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It's an oddly caustic way to end the set, though most audiences will be relieved that there's at least one up-tempo piece.  The Preludi has suffered a similar fate to the rest of Malipiero's piano works - recorded every ten years or so and then seeing its own record go out of print.  This article was an exception for me in that I was able to pick my favorite performance from multiple candidates, though I'd be hard pressed as to where to find cheap CD's of any of them, though I guess this is a better fate than the bulk of Malipiero's other works.  Pretty much all of his symphonies have been recorded if you're in an orchestrally adventurous mood and have a few hours to kill - and in the deep freeze coming at the end of every year killing time might be the only thing we've got.

~PNK

Fulvio Caldini's Memories of the Flood

I'll freely admit that I'm no expert on contemporary Italian classical music.  Sure, I know and love post-WWII guys like Luigi Dallapiccola, Luciano Berio and Giacinto Scelsi, and featured a piece by Niccolò Castiglioni on Forgotten Leaves, but that's hardly a comprehensive knowledge and would make me look like a poser if I ever attended university over there.  That doesn't mean that I won't promote lesser-known Italians like I own the place, which brings us to Fulvio Caldini, a composer I discovered via Keith Johnson's sheet music shop in Seattle, the stock of which can be viewed here.

Caldini is best known for his pieces for the recorder as a soloist and ensemblist, an instrument I've long held disdain for due to its deceptive difficulty and tendency to create grating wolf tones (at least whenever I try playing it).  Caldini is a spiritual disciple of Steve Reich, and as such most of his more current music, including the many recorder works of his to get recorded, are dyed-in-the-wool minimalism that reflect a heavy Reichian influence.  They also show how excellent it can be when people can actually play the recorder, such as in the Amsterdam Loeki Stardust Quartet in their recording of his Clockwork Game, op. 72/a:

That slap-tongue effect is really something, adding a rich percussive texture that immediately sets the piece apart.  There's also a slight flanging, possibly unintentional but totally welcome.  In the spirit of the genre he allows harmonies to unfold naturally, and the rhythms gently transition from duple to triple meters and back again.  The texture becomes more pointillistic as the piece reaches the middle but the true center sees longer notes than ever before, accompanied by seething dissonances.  Once the 8-minute mark rolls we get both high slap notes and moments of actual silence, and the low strings of repeated notes eventually return, though in a different key.  It's a fine act of hypnotism at the very least and the performance here is excellent.

The Sonatina in Quartetto, op. 65f, features a long solo on the sopranino recorder or garklein (I think; I don't have the album liner notes) that dances across a disjointed chaconne in the first movement.  This instrument is one of the more treacherous I know and the performer here is pretty stunning; I'd think those li'l beasts require insane breath control.  The second movement is more flowing and pastoral, akin to a late Medieval partsong and exploiting the recorder's Earthy resonance.  The third brings back the sopranino for another off-kilter dance, but this time there's less staccato chirps and more melismatic lines supported by quasi-organ chord bursts.  In all three movements Caldini's harmonic palette is ebullient and bubbly, making for a sonatina both condensed and somewhat light in tone, especially in the last movement.  Did you know that you can get both these tracks as well as many other recorder ensemble pieces by Caldini on this excellent-looking CD?  Lovely stuff.

On a less Reichian note, Caldini created this piece of musique concrète only a few years ago, Sulle scogliere di marmo, op. 132.  The title translates to "On the Marble Cliffs", and I have a feeling it's in reference to Ernst Junger's novel of the same name.  Published in 1939, the novel is mostly remembered for having predicted the outbreak of WWII with its depiction of a Utopian rural society infiltrated and corrupted by an insidious, pseudo-fascist regime.  I read that book some years ago, and while I didn't think it was all that great and largely read like bad fan fiction of the War, it did have some very striking imagery and I can see other people liking it far more than myself.  I can't be sure that Caldini had that book in mind when writing this, the first movement of which begins as a study of bells and gongs smeared across a wide, processed canvas.  By minute two crashing waves and screeching wails have entered the scene, as well as low thunder-tube notes akin to the music that accompanies the scene in Star Trek: the Motion Picture where the Klingon ships get destroyed by V-GER's energy field.  Caldini's own energy field soon takes over and is wholly terrifying, layered break drums emerging from a hundred writhing snakes.  The waves subside and single pitches needle into our foreheads.  Movement two aims to illustrate the sensation of dropping a 70's moog into a river.  The high pitches insinuate themselves into our frontal lobes and the break drums/gamelan bells return.  Then Caldini tosses a rock in and we flash back to 'Nam.  Movement three slows down to allow for an apparent alien invasion as many of the electronic layers are classic sci-fi stuff, but as before water and helicopters take precedence.  It's here that I realize what Marmo is - a psychological tale of the arrival of war and an atmosphere piece that works best as a stream-of-consciousness narrative of someone hiding from war machines in the wild, and the Junger reference makes much more sense after a full listen.  In purely musical terms, the best reference I can muster for this piece is Xenakis's concrète masterpiece Hibiki Hana Ma, but Marmo's sound tapestry is wild and mysterious enough to evoke whatever you feel like.  Any way you look at it the piece is a striking and expertly crafted addition to the musique concrète rep and shows Caldini as a master of atmospherics.


All of these pieces allude to wide spaces and internal worlds, and this fascination is much older than his Reichian work - it has been present since his career was in its infancy, which brings us to the works I wanted to talk about the most.  At Keith Johnson's shop I found two sonatas, which we won't be discussing, as well as three large-format one-sheets written back when his opus numbers were single digits and immediately grabbed my attention for their elusive beauty and elegant engraving.  I recorded all three of them for my Soundcloud (making my performances the recording premiere of these pieces) and scanned them as to make them as easy as possible to enjoy and perform by others.  And first on the docket is a micro-suite inspired by Old Scratch himself, just in time to miss Halloween by a little while.

"Iblis" is the name for the Devil in the Qu'ran, and Caldini totally avoids filling his portrait of the Lord of Lies with lots of fire and brimstone.  Each of the movements of the suite are played attaca and are not immediately perceptible as distinct pieces, relying on the prowess of the performer to make them notable.  Starting out only with three intervals - minor second, minor third, major third - each movement expands the sound palette to create mounting foreboding, all within the context of static-yet-expansive drama.  Caldini ladles on fermati and dynamic quaking, his harmonies caught in a limbo between tonality and atonality but can't help but be dark.  A particularly curious detail are he quasi campanella fourths and fifths in the Liberissimo statico movement, marked with both staccato markings and fermati; as there's no standard approach for this on the piano I used half-pedalling to make the notes decay unpredictably.  The piece reaches a climax in the middle of page 2 at Libero, where rolled tenth chords sound subterranean gongs and a minor ninth roll marks a grand fall to a low E, leading into a soft variation on the opening figure and a final abyssal D-flat.  There's been a lot of great classical music written about the Devil but the Iblis Suite, op. 3a is one of the most subconsciously compelling and makes for a singularly entrancing performing experience.  Let's hope I didn't botch it too much.

Translating into "Memory of the Flood", Memoria del Diluvio, op. 5 is a bigger step towards minimalism but avoids the modal noodling that is post-minimalism's hallmark sound.  In fact, in all these early pieces Caldini's harmonies are unlike anything else being written at the time, neither tonal or dodecaphonic, maintaining strong lyric sensibility without appearing old-fashioned or sentimental.  Once again using limited intervallic variety as stepping stones, Memoria pulls the dragshoot on drama and sits on the sustaining pedal, allowing single notes to shimmer in the deep.  The left hand ambles along broad triads to create enormous resonance, allowing familiar harmonies to emerge organically and clash with one another.  When the pedal is finally changed nearly a minute has elapsed and the effect is like a huge heartbeat.  Caldini maintains this reduced writing for many minutes, all the way until the middle of the third staff of page 2 where two perfect fifths offset by a minor second and a few octaves sounds like an Earthy bell.  Some people will think of John Cage's In a Landscape as a possible inspiration, and while I'd buy Caldini being a fan of the work what this piece really reminds me of is the piano suites Charles Koechlin wrote in 1910's, such as his famous hour-long cycle Les heures persanes, op. 65 and more appropriately Paysages et marines, op. 63:

Those resounding open intervals are key to Koechlin's unique brand of Impressionism and Paysages was my biggest reference point for performing this work, and even if my work here only succeeds in making Paysages et marines more popular than that's okay, too.  Memoria del Diluvio doesn't need help from Koechlin, though, and hopefully it'll come in to its own with repeated performances.

The Etruscan civilization became distinct around 800 BC and fell around 500 BC, and has sustained a fascination in the Italian soul due to its unique language and deep roots in the land; the region of Tuscany is named after the culture.  I've seen at least two Italian horror movies that use Etruscan mystery to spice up mundane zombie stories, and that's got to count for something.  In Caldini's case Etrusci (is that what you'd say?) is used much like Satie used ancient Greek gymnopedes, backdrops for delicate evocations of an unknown past.  The action is marked by contrasting beat divisions, simultaneously more sustained and faster moving than the textures of Memoria and alluding to a recalled restlessness.  Melodies snake eliptically and the hands dovetail each other's phrases.  The second "incantation" features a rarity in contemporary music, a repeated section, and he gives the number of repeats over to the choice of the performer; I've only repeated it once as to not overstay my welcome.  As in Memoria Caldini uses larger note values at slow tempi to give the illusion of flying over large space, and in the third incantation those values are nearly doubled, resulting in the one string of quarter notes moving by very quickly.  This practice might not be so much new as a throwback to Medieval and Renaissance music that used whole and half notes how we tend to use quarter and eighth notes today.  Not as obviously euphonious as Memoria, the Incantesimi occupy a harmonic world of their own and might be the most elusive of these works, and as always performance takes serious concentration and restraint, things which might not excite the Transcendental Etude crowd but is well-served by this haunting music.  Much like the Gymnopedies, In a Landscape and Paysages et marines, these three dark-eyed beauties by Fulvio Caldini need special advocation and a mature touch/ in order to survive, and thankfully they can all be acquired very cheaply at Sheet Music Plus, but I've tried to make it as easy as possible for you to take a crack at them yourselves.  Caldini aims to ripple deep waters in the psyche and casts a richly layered stone to do so, and the waves will keep going long into my future.

~PNK