Spectra Ensemble . Filip Rathé

Salvatore Sciarrino's 'Quaderno di Strada' takes us to the edge of silence, where our hearing becomes keener and every sound is new and unspoilt, and where listening becomes a special emotional experience. This music is permeated with intense atmospheres. This sung watercolour of sound and air encompasses the Mediterranean sun as well as ephemeral pastel-coloured shadows, like the intangible mysterious web of nocturnal sounds. Sciarrino collected the texts for 'Quaderno di Strada' in a notebook over the years: aphorisms, quotations and graffiti. These sometimes bizarre, even absurd, text fragments develop in this new context into an enigmatic patchwork quilt, in which delicate whispering and sighing alternates with sonorous surprises leaving us with a 'strange' feeling. The poetry of the Antwerp writer Gust Gils is highly auditory in nature. Lucien Goethals took his musical verses, which he has translated into English, as the starting point for 'Festina Lente'. Tranquillity is a key element here too. This time though it conveys the calm and introversion of a composer who after long deliberation knows how to reduce his own language to its purest essence. The delicacy and quietude of these two sets of thirteen songs touch you at the core.