VA - Paolo Marchettini: The Months Have Ends (Live) (2021)

Paolo Marchettini’s music is full of character, lyricism, and pathos. This release, his debut, features his works for orchestra that encapsulate his colorful orchestration and his dramatically expressive sensibility, grounded intuitively in the Italian musical tradition. Marchettini himself is featured as the soloist in his clarinet Concertino, while the five movement title work sets poems by Emily Dickinson with soprano Alda Caiello.

Mercy, the opening track, begins with an imploring figure, an invitation to “enter a deeper dimension,” as Marchettini describes in a written interview with composer Nils Vigeland in the liner notes. There is a subterranean foreboding in these opening two minutes, a hint of potential energy being stored up before its release. The orchestra shimmers with tactile, velvety instrumental colors and Marchettini teases the listener with small bits of emphatic material surrounded by sighing figures echoing the opening. A gently galloping figure signals the more active middle section, as the winds and brass punctuate with splashes of sound. The rhythm intensifies around figures that are passed through the orchestra, culminating in a circus-like passage evocative of the expressive complexity one finds in ensemble scenes in a Fellini film. Mercy’s third section explores more chordal movement in the strings, with a poignant violin solo floating over the top of rich harmonies. One final climactic arrival leads into a reprise of the haunting character of the opening, or as Marchettini describes it, “a reunification: it is a return to the origin, the roots.”