Andrea Corongiu - Gilardino, Porqueddu, Swierkosz Lenart, Smith Brindle: Guitar Sonatas of the 20th and 21st Centuries, Vol. II (2022)

The disc opens with Angelo Gilardino’s (1941-2022) Sonata Mediterranea, composed in 2004 as a refreshing return to the sonata form, the immediately preceding example of which was in Gilardino’s catalogue in 1986. The piece is in three movements, and was created in homage to Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. The first movement, entitled ‘Cypresses’, is in fact conceived as a homage to the Florentine composer. The composition departs slightly from the style of the gilardinian sonata, characterised by a clear change of tactus between the two themes and by the frequent introduction of triplets in a second lyrical theme, to differentiate it markedly from the rhythmic character of the first: here we have rather a dactylic continuum that opens the piece and runs through it transversally, giving way transiently to a second theme characterised by a flat flow of semiquavers, within the same time frame. With regard to the title, it seems appropriate to quote Gilardino’s own words: I cipress “The cypresses evoked in my title are not cemetery trees. In the Etruscan tradition, the cypress celebrated life, and under its shadow festivals and dances joyfully took place. Above all, I thought of a picture which Castelnuovo-Tedesco had at home. It was a work by Giovanni Colacicchi (1900-1992), a friend of Mario. It was a serene picture, suggesting a profound and meditative atmosphere, a view of Pian dei Giullari, a village on the hills surrounding Florence.” The two remaining movements are of Neapolitan inspiration, a recurring theme in Gilardino’s poetics. The second, ‘Ninna nanna’ (Lullaby), refers to a fragment by the poet Salvatore Di Giacomo (‘Ma sulitario e lento/more ‘o mutivo antico;/ se fa ‘cchiù cupo o vico/ dint’all’oscurità” “But lonely and slow/ the ancient motif dies/ the alley grows darker/ in the darkness”), the contrast between the ancient motif and the theme of darkness is rendered musically by the progressive perturbation of a simple motif of semiquavers, in the context of an “Adagio incantato”. The work concludes with a tumultuous Rondo, dedicated to the painter Giuseppe Casciaro, in which an ‘Allegro rutilante’ refrain embeds some suggestions derived from the previous two movements.

Cristiano Porqueddu (1975) is a guitarist whose activity as a performer is characterised by absolute intellectual freedom and a voracious spirit of research. To this incessant exploration of the repertoire, far from any established path, he associates the singular ability to record vast quantities of quality music in an extremely short time, so that he has to his credit more than twenty record releases that give the public new works, often in their first performance. In the context of this activity, Gilardino’s music undoubtedly constitutes a preponderant part of Porqueddu’s research, who has consecrated to the Piedmontese Maestro the effort of a complete recording still in progress. To this assiduous artistic and human acquaintance, Porqueddu’s compositional activity must also be traced without fear. Although he has undertaken an entirely personal research, he does not reject the influence of one of his most important Masters. The Sonata no. 3 “Il rito del fuoco”, from 2019, is part of a larger project dedicated to Sardinia, the composer’s homeland and source of inspiration for a series of new original works that he himself commissioned in 2019 from composers of the calibre of Brouwer, Bogdanovic and Gilardino himself, among others, contributing then himself in the dual role of performer and author. Conceived in cyclic form, the work draws its inspiration from the ritual performed in Sardinia on the night of 16 January in honour of Saint Anthony Abbot. For Porqueddu, the popular element has an inverse character to that of folklore: if the latter is synonymous with particularism, the composer is instead in search of the archaic and therefore universal roots of the procession to which it refers. Thus the opening theme of the piece, a slow melancholy, takes the form almost of a nostalgic contemplation of the elements evoked. It is a melody charged with yearning for a lost past, and the key to transforming a land as unique and special as Sardinia into a place of universals, following the same procedure implemented by Deledda in literature and Biasi in painting. In accordance with the cyclic form, this contemplative theme constitutes both the development motif of the first movement and the basis for the profound lyrical speculation of the second, finally supporting the episodes that alternate with the impetuous refrain of the final Rondo.

Kevin Swierkosz-Lenart (1988) is an Italian psychiatrist who combined his medical studies with a diploma in classical guitar, obtained in 2012 in Rome at the Conservatorio ‘S.Cecilia’. His meeting with Gilardino dates back to the first period of his musical studies: a regular correspondence was born from this, which developed over the years and centred on an ongoing confrontation concerning, above all, literature and the figurative arts. Starting in 2017, he took formal composition lessons from Angelo Gilardino and Dusan Bogdanovic for about four years, an experience that was quickly reflected in a corpus that now numbers several works for guitar, eight concertos for solo instrument and orhcestra, chamber music and a few examples of extra-guitar work. ‘Marina a Viareggio’, the piece presented here, is his first sonata for guitar, dating from 2019. Heavily influenced by the gilardinian styleme, the first movement is characterised by a decidedly rhythmic first theme, alternating with a decidedly different motif both in its slowed-down tactus and in the adoption of quite different rhythmic formulas. The development explores the possibilities implicit in the two themes within a lyrical context, and then leads to a reprise in which a modal alignment of the two ideas underpinning the piece is implemented: a contrivance taken from the classical tradition that is implemented here in a more recent language. In the second movement we find an idea based on the singing of semiquavers over chordal masses and a chant of quavers entrusted to the lower register, with a lulling and undulating character, in which the undertow is evoked. In the conclusion we find a movement still based on the sonata form in which the development closes in a play of infinite mirrors: in fact, at the opening we find an “Agitato” that represents a diminution of the first theme of the first movement, which immediately reappears, after a short lyrical section, as a rhythmic pattern for developing an idea taken from the second movement. The piece is inspired by the splendid painting by Telemaco Signorini entitled ‘Marina a Viareggio’, exhibited at the Ricci Oddi Gallery in Piacenza. The oneiric and nostalgic character of the painting makes it almost a photographic find from a mediumistic séance, an imaginative quality that finds a simply perfect correspondence in the guitar timbre.

To conclude the recital, Corongiu offers Sonata no. 2, “El Verbo” by Reginald Smith-Brindle (1917-2003), an English composer who has long been fascinated by Mediterranean, whether due to the fact that he established his ideal home in Florence, where he trained with masters of the calibre of Dallapiccola and Pizzetti, or due to his repeated frequentation of Garcìa Lorca, a true constant in his poetic world. The work presented here dates from 1976, the late phase of the composer who is now far removed from the serial explorations of the 1950s and adopts a language marked by great freedom. Il Verbo (The Word) is an evocative title, the bearer of centuries of Western tradition in which this word took on, in its primitive Greek formulation as logos, the meaning of reason, sense of reality, world, and ultimately identified in the Christian sphere with Christ himself. I like to follow a game of suggestions that, taking Florence and the Mediterranean as its starting point, leads us to the extraordinary figure of Montale: active in Florence between 1927 and 1948, a participant in a fertile intellectual coterie gathered around the Giubbe Rosse café where he met Dallapiccola. In the poem entitled Mediterraneo, we read: ‘As then today your presence I turn myself to stone,/ sea, but no longer/ I believe myself worthy/ of the solemn admonition/ of your breath. You told me first/ that the tiny ferment/ of my heart was but a moment/ of yours; that it was at the bottom/ your risky law: to be vast and different/ and at the same time fixed”. Here is condensed the inheritance of a way of seeing the world that finds within nature the place of the Word, an epiphany that Smith-Brindle describes in music through sound iterations articulated in quatrains of rebates, in which an oracular message seems to be hidden. With superb mastery, the composer condenses the construction of the three movements with singular coherence around these small cells, which truly seem like the Montalian ‘breath’ of the Mediterranean. Just as surprising is the coherence that Corongiu succeeds in restoring to the margins of such a heterogeneous itinerary.
Kevin Swierkosz-Lenart © 2022