Luca Francesconi, born in 1956, has emerged as one of the leading
Italian composers of the generation after Berio and Nono. A pupil of
Berio and Stockhausen, Francesconi is less well known in the UK than,
for instance, Salvatore Sciarrino, who is nine years older, but as this
collection of ensemble pieces shows, he has a genuinely distinctive
musical personality, and the knack of creating sonorities of real
immediacy and dramatic power. With the exception of Da Capo, for nine
instruments, from 1986, the pieces here date from the mid-1990s. The
biggest, most ambitious and most memorable of those is Etymo, which
takes a collection of fragments from Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, sets
and atomises them for a soprano soloist and enmeshes the voice in
teeming, febrile textures spun from an instrumental ensemble with
real-time digital processing.
Animus is an electronics-based piece too,
with a solo trombone caught in a sound web of its reflections, while A
Fuoco pits a solo guitar against an ensemble in a study of musical
memory. The sounds are haunting, seductive, intensely vivid; it's a
shame that the accompanying notes don't match the clarity of the music.
(The Guardian)