Sound & Silence: Four Pioneering Modernist Italian [CD] (ONLINE ORDER ONLY)

3CD collection featuring four pioneering modernist Italian composers. Although he was a superb melodist, it was in his deployment of a whole landscape of non-musical sounds, dissonant harmonies and silence, that Ennio Morricone revolutionised film music. His audacity, and his diverse musical palette (manifest in the spaghetti westerns he scored for Sergio Leone) came less from cinema than from the pioneering post-war generation of 'New Music' composers. In 1958 Morricone attended a summer courses in New Music in Darmstadt, Germany; where he immersed himself in the works of the leading figures of contemporary music; Stockhausen, Varèse, Berio, Ligeti, Cage, Messiaen, Boulez, Maderna, Nono. The mood was one of excitement and adventure where the outer limits of music's artistic and conceptual universe were questioned and fearlessly explored. Morricone described Darmstadt as a turning point in his life. He felt compelled to react to what he learned there, feeling that the experience helped define his personal voice, his musical identity. Certainly Morricone's signature styles are are easily detected in the three delightful early soundtracks featured in this edition; including among the selections from il Federale, the maestro's very first film as primary composer. Morricone respected his Italian contemporaries, Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono. He was deeply impressed by two of Nono's works; Il canto sospeso for solo soprano, alto and tenor, mixed chorus and orchestra, and Cori di Didone for mixed chorus end orchestra, which he claimed, "hit me down in my core". Both compositions are included here along with Berio's Sinfonia, for orchestra and eight amplified voices, a rich collage of words and voices and sounds which has been compared to a live 1960s Happening. One of the principal modernist works of the era. In 1954, Berio and Maderna founded Italy's first studio of electronic music, in Milan. The first work to emerge, the radio study, Ritratto di Città (Portrait of a City) is presented here in it's entirety along with other significant works by Berio and Maderna including the first Sequenza for flute, and Gesti for recorder, virtuoso pieces that the player to the limits of his or her technical ability. Bruno Maderna's genius as both composer and conductor is showcased by his magical Serenata no. 2 and by his elegant account of Valses Nobles Et Sentimentales.