#Brass darkening full#

Something similar happens in Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis,” but Marino’s version is notable for its scandalous detail: when the boar, aroused by the sight of Adonis’s upper thigh, leans in for a kiss, he inadvertently gores the boy with his tusk. Marino’s treatment of the story gives unusual prominence to the boar, who, in this telling, is as smitten with Adonis’s beauty as Venus is. The primary source for the “Venere e Adone” libretto, which Sciarrino wrote in collaboration with the novelist Fabio Casadei Turroni, is Giambattista Marino’s “L’Adone,” a vast, voluptuous Baroque poem that was first published in 1623. Even that tale, though, has the timelessness of a modern Dante scene. Contemporary settings are not lacking: in the opera “Superflumina” (2010), a woman is marooned at a train station. He has also treated medieval and Renaissance themes, from Dante’s Paradise to the real-life crimes of the Neapolitan composer-murderer Carlo Gesualdo. Sciarrino, however, has long been drawn to ancient milieus: his first opera, from 1973, was “Amore e Psiche,” based on Apuleius. The story of his latest opera-that of Venus’s love for the beautiful Adonis, of the boy’s death at the hands of a boar, of his rebirth as a flower-is the kind of mythological melodrama that thrived in the Renaissance and Baroque periods and then passed from fashion in the Romantic era. They resemble meditative exercises that have been infiltrated by anarchist elements.įor an ostensible avant-gardist, Sciarrino has a deep fondness for the musical and literary past. It’s this combination of fragility and chaos that gives Sciarrino’s works a singular profile. In the orchestral score “I fuochi oltre la ragione” (“The Fires Beyond Reason”), from 1997, a pistol goes off nineteen minutes in in the Banquo scene in his 2002 adaptation of “Macbeth,” grinding orchestral paroxysms alternate with quotations from Mozart and Verdi.

#Brass darkening full#

At the end of the Prologue of “Venere,” the full orchestra bursts in with a brief, raw instrumental frenzy, as if a breeze had gathered into a destructive gust. As much as Sciarrino is associated with quietude-he is, in some ways, the Italian counterpart to Morton Feldman, the godfather of modernist pianissimo-he routinely administers sonic shocks, which are all the more unsettling for occurring amid a general hush. Your ears have to adjust to the acoustical reduction: you are groping around a darkened room.Īfter a time, you are likely to be startled, even frightened. You often find yourself in a sparsely but exotically populated natural environment, full of rustlings, rumblings, twitterings, quick cries. Sciarrino loves sounds that emerge and fade like breaths or breezes. The clarinet note is marked, in characteristic fashion, with a diminuendo to nothing. The initial dynamics are pianissimo or pianississimo-as quiet as possible or quieter than that. A ghostly note gleams and fades on the clarinet violin strings are plucked woodenly at the bridge a bass drum thrums and the violas play an ethereal squiggle of a melody. “Venere e Adone,” or “Venus and Adonis,” begins, like many Sciarrino works, at the edge of silence.

Five decades on, he remains a musical loner, tending his own strange garden. In keeping with the hectic spirit of the nineteen-sixties, Sciarrino dissolved conventional classical forms into atomized activity, but his exquisite touch, his lepidopterist’s regard for the slightest fluttering sound, set him apart from his thunderous avant-garde colleagues. One of his earliest published scores, the Sonata for Two Pianos, from 1966, begins with softly sweeping gestures across the white keys, like the rapid strokes of a superfine brush. Born in Palermo, Sicily, in 1947, he is largely self-taught as a composer and at the age of fifteen was already winning notice at Italian new-music festivals. The Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino, whose austerely sensuous opera “Venere e Adone” had its première on May 28th, at Staatsoper Hamburg, has long possessed his own inviolable sonic world.