Nicola Guazzaloca – Avant Music News

The two newest releases from Amirani Records offer a dramatic contrast in moods and sonorities.

Cadenza del Crepuscolo is, as its title suggests, a recording that has a twilight feeling—it is the audio analogue of an abstract painting of predominantly dark colors. The ensemble that recorded it is a quartet of John Hughes on double bass; Gianni Mimmo on soprano saxophone; Peer Schelechta on pipe organ; and Ove Volquartz on bass clarinet and contrabass clarinet. Already, the instrumentation betrays a bias toward the lower end of the sound spectrum, with the single high-register instrument paradoxically emphasizing the tonal heaviness of the other three. And the pipe organ, double bass, and bass clarinets do often play in a bloc of low-pitched, densely dissonant harmonies laid out in long sustained notes. These thick washes of sound are punctuated by single lines alternating between the languid and the knotty; at those moments when individual voices break out into an animated polyphony, the music takes a dramatic and rather unexpected turn.

Herbstreise, a duet recording featuring Mimmo once again on soprano saxophone as well as Nicola Guazzaloca on piano, is tonally and in terms of pacing a much brighter affair. The seventeen short tracks present an improvised abstract impressionism that tends toward the nimble and astringent, with extended technique from both players adding a well-honed edge to a number of the performances.

Daniel Barbiero

Although considerably more rare than the violin-piano duo, the viola-piano duo traces at least as far back as Mendelssohn’s 1824 sonata for viola and piano. Max Reger and Paul Hindemith—the latter a violist himself—added substantially to the repertoire in the last century, as did Darius Milhaud, Hans Werner Henze, George Rochberg and others. Now, Serbian-Hungarian violist Szilárd Mezei and Bolognese pianist Nicola Guazzaloca bring the viola-piano duo into the twenty-first century, albeit in a manner that departs substantially from the conventional chamber sonata.

Unlike classical sonatas, these eight improvisations, four each from concerts in Lucca and Bologna, develop through variations of timbre, dynamics and density rather than through melodic themes and harmonic modulation. But although much of the playing negates the formal vocabulary and syntax of the classical viola-piano duo, something of the latter’s ability to capture an emotional arc remains. The music can be tempestuous, placid, abstract or even plainly melodic, as when Mezei delivers a modal soliloquy during the third improvisation from Lucca. Both improvisers draw on an expanded palette of instrumental colors, setting conventional and unconventional techniques in a mutually illuminating dialogue with each other. Guazzaloca moves agilely from the keyboard to playing directly on the strings inside the piano; his use of objects in association with the piano emphasizes the instrument’s often-obscured status as a percussion instrument. Mezei, too, plays percussively, using a full-bodied attack with the bow as well as a forceful pizzicato; his engagement with hypermodern performance techniques doesn’t eclipse an expressive immediacy consonant with his involvement with Hungarian folk traditions.

http://www.amiranirecords.com

Daniel Barbiero

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