booklet

 

Lucia Bova

Still Harping on Music

In this journey, Sequenza II by Luciano Berio is a true milestone. It is part of a larger project by the composer (fourteen Sequenze), who wanted to explore and investigate "the measures beyond the measures" in each instrument, in an instrumental theater where one must «renounce the ambiguous category of ‘poetics’», as well as the expectation of that «language of other old emotions that time has linked to poetry». Each Sequenza represents a sort of "witness" to historical virtuosity and at the same time a stimulus for progress towards a new form of virtuosity through extreme exploration and experimentation of the technical possibilities of the individual instruments. In Sequenza for harp, traditional sound idioms are juxtaposed with more exasperated sounds involving desecrating "gestures" that require "tearing " at the strings, using the wooden parts and tail piece for percussion, the paroxysmal use of pedals and making noises by banging the metal strings.

* World premiere recording

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