Paolo Castaldi - Piano Duos (2010)

Tracklist:
1. Innere Stimme per pianoforte a quattro mani 1974 18' 2''
2. Canoni armonici per due pianoforti (1997-1999) 8' 30''
3. Cinque ritratti dal Novecento storico per pianoforte a 4 mani (2007): Isaac Albeniz 2' 12''
4. Cinque ritratti dal Novecento storico per pianoforte a 4 mani (2007): Richard Strauss 2' 26''
5. Cinque ritratti dal Novecento storico per pianoforte a 4 mani (2007): Edgard Varese 2' 13''
6. Cinque ritratti dal Novecento storico per pianoforte a 4 mani (2007): Jean Francaix 2' 17''
7. Cinque ritratti dal Novecento storico per pianoforte a 4 mani (2007): Aaron Copland 2' 4''
8. Invenzione per due pianoforti (2007) 5' 39''
9. Anfrage per due pianoforti (1963) 26' 52''

Duo pianistico Antonella Moretti - Mauro Ravelli


In these five compositions consists my whole work for piano duo, with the exception of a lengthy Boulevard Promenade for two pianos, somehow a portrait of a great city.
I do feel fairly struck as I get aware that, without any purpose of mine, every single piece brought togethere in here involves sort of unusual or prominent characters, by different ways.
We should now try to lay out each outstanding feature of these ones.
Innere Stimme, a four-hand piece, in its very name recalls a case which happens to be a unique, in our history of music. Schumann’s Humoreske Op. 2 for piano, in its fourth section, between two ordinary staves shows an inner, or interior, third line, on which we are stunned to read an independent melody in small long-value notes. This uncanny “voice” (say, technically, Stimme), is called innere, or just “interior”, by its weird author. Moreover, it is meant neither to be played nor sung, but silently “thought of ”, possibly in a dreamy spirit, while still playing the piano part. Yet, we dared dispose that, in some tender mood infringing Robert’s prescription, the voices of two interpreters, momentarily awarded a non-professional role, may let their audience hear that line, which its author had wished to be hidden for ever.
Canoni Armonici, for two pianos, is making us meet an assortment of several tiny happenings, which deliberately will appear to be occurring just by chance. Such as vocalizations in bell-like ringing peals, knocks under the wooden piano chest as though for stirring up the absent-minded partner’s attention, a discreet reciprocal applause to cheer successful performances of a difficult passage in hand-crossing, the fall down of the score itself to the ground, and so forth. All this, is treated in strict canon forms. However, all must be represented as always has to be, in the nature of an ordinary progress of the everyday language.
It is worth observing that the canon form applies, usually, to multi-voiced imitations of melodic, single lines. Nevertheless, the thorough mechanical piano network is here being transferred from an instrument to another, with their harmonic blends tightly intertwisted into each other.
All this would proceed, therefore, to a somewhat intricate appearance…
No longer any linear formations, then, are here dealt with.
A salient peculiarity of Cinque Ritratti, for four-hand piano, stands in its movements’ being not composed in one so-called original language, but in transplanting once more, after Strawinsky’s ideal lesson, the languages of five authors, unlike one another, into the present composer’s style. This may as well be labelled a mimicry of some imaginary pieces of theirs, or a collection of, so to say, pseudo-quotations, which have been drawn – in both senses – by shadowing the miens of such beloved characters as our grand Albéniz, Strauss, Varèse, Françaix, Copland.
Fourth comes Invenzione, for two pianos. The singularity of this project settles in inlaying a lot of gusseted instalments, mostly recurring here and there, into a mosaic ground: and that as far as the second piano is concerned. The first piano, independently of the other, exposes the notes, all and only of them, of Bach’s first two-voice Invention, moving on in a constant Tempo. A boldly sham logical coherence is being attained by driving harmonic, rhythmic and other makeshifts into changes of pace, so as to get metronome equivalences properly planned to match the progress of both the instruments. This will grant an immediate way to catch the meaning of the unmistakably sophisticated and conceptual, but let’s hope always musical, operation.
Anfrage for two pianos, the fifth and last composition, was not – literally speaking – written.
Actually it is contrived as a double, integral collage, of musical and verbal fragments. The words, that everywhere surround the notes, were found out by the author: or in fact neither conceived nor imagined, but simply chosen, as carefully as possible. They have been clipped out of different lots of sources, and are intended to direct, guide and control the various ways to behave, act and react, towards all the multifarious musical matter assembled. We might say that herewith, instead of the usual “interpretation of the composition”, we are attaining a hyper-detailed – and, at some times, even exceedingly fussy – “compositon of the interpretation”.
Certainly not all of these fundamental (for the author) aspects of all that, will be clearly perceived, neither understood, nor grasped, by the listener. We should add anyway that just in here is wished to be held one remote sense of this composition.
The general form is simply sticking to the extremely elementary scheme A – A’ – A”… Which is the reiteration of the exposition. Nevertheless, we see it must be constantly affected by a countless myriad of extra accidents: sudden additional episodes, at times elaborate or inextricably complex, at times nonsensical to the grotesque, at times absurdly crazy and at others frankly so artless as to get very near the limit of idiocy. Really, the whole scenery could not be exhaustively described, at its very end, as made up with a stuff of mere sounds.



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