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SCHIZZI DI ORLANDO FURIOSO Preface D.M. Visotzky Schizzi di Orlando furiously First published in 1516 and again in extended versions in 1521 and 1532, the 46 songs about the chaotic world of knights of Count Orlando, who is losing his mind over his love for the beautiful Princess Angelica, not only had a lasting influence on European poetry and painting in the centuries that followed , but also often found musical resonance, most prominently on the opera stage in Jean-Baptiste Lully Roland (1685), in Antonio Vivaldi Orlando finto pazzo (1714) and Orlando furious (1727), in George Frideric Handel's Orlando (1733) Ariodante (1735) and Alcina (1735) or in Joseph Haydn's Orlando Paladino (1782) Orlando's constantly changing world - a scenario full of wild dreams, bitter struggles, unleashed emotions and fantastic misconceptions - in its complexity, however, has far more analogies to today's reality than it first appears; therefore, Ariosto's literary, expanded experiential space can ultimately be used as a mirror in which we can look in order, with the aid of artistic reflection, to learn to better understand the enigmatic moments of our own present. As such a look in the mirror is the conception of Schizzi di Orlando furiously to understand: Trusting in the many possibilities of musical expression, Béatrice Zawodnik (oboe and cor anglais), D. M. Visotzky (alto saxophone), Barry Guy (double bass), Brice Pauset (harpsichord) and Leonardo García Alarcón (organ) let Ariosto's verses into one encourage a varied sequence of short pieces for solo, duo, trio and quartet formation. One of its essential elements is the clash of differing idioms and styles, which results from the respective musical fields of activity of the musicians involved and emerges in a series of more or less narrowly defined auratic moments, which are repeatedly and deliberately referred to in the music making. Due to this way of acting, opposing musical spaces of discourse – namely those of new music, jazz and the sacred sphere – relate to one another or cross one another, resulting in a multi-layered, sometimes labyrinthine-looking structure. From the collision of these contrasting components, as for example in the context of the two quartets with oboe, saxophone, double bass and harpsichord (Schizzi IV and XXIV) is almost celebrated in the encounter of extroverted, action-packed chains of events, the pieces gain their attraction just as much as through the influence that the musicians often have on the performance of their counterpart, so that the different idioms begin to adapt to each other. Many of the 26 Sketches are based on musical settings of a gestural character, behind which one can literally feel the physical presence of the musicians, who drive the event forward with high-energy impulses. The fact that the elaboration of gestural qualities is in any case a prominent feature of the music-making aimed at here can be seen in particular from the three solo pieces that are based directly on verses by Ariost: in the stanzas from Canto XV and Canto XXXIV the poet's action-packed vocabulary revolves around gestural moments of fight and flight that suggest a high level of power and movement. As a result, the musicians have apparently also in Schizzi I (double bass) and XV (harpsichord) by using the poetically described network of actions as a stimulus for working out a specific musical diction based on gestural impulses, thereby simultaneously transforming the literary template into a tonal structure of high density. The same applies - albeit with a different sign - to the orientation to the verses from Canto XXIII, their fixation on death and agony in schizzo v provokes a specific musical approach: because the organ's sound production works with an interruption in the air supply, it approaches the character of halting breathing and depicts the existential borderline situation of the verses in a corporeal sonority that can be perceived as a counterpart to physical exhaustion. In contrast to this focus on individual verses, articulated as a soloist, and the energetic conditions contained therein, the sound situations suggested by Ariosto are more strongly confronted with one another in the remaining Schizzi and often enough in conflict with one another – this is also a reaction to the literary original. This in turn goes hand in hand with different networks of relationships that the listener has between the individual Sketches can link: For example, connections are created by certain instrumental combinations such as the duo saxophone and double bass (Schizzi VII, XX and XV) or the trio oboe/english horn, saxophone and harpsichord (Schizzi XVI, XIX and XXII) appear several times over the course of time and are constantly being thought through musically in new ways. Other references between different pieces, on the other hand, result as a direct consequence of tonal design measures: Here, in particular, is the staged reverberation room in the English horn, saxophone and organ Schizzi VI, X, XI and XXI to be noticed, who, through the spatially distant positioning of the wind instruments, which are often musically interwoven, not only gives the impression of greater distance, but also veils the sound of the instruments. This has a decisive influence on the characteristics of the instrumental timbres and leads to the sound generators approaching the idioms of the organ. On the basis of such and similar considerations, the sequence of the individual Sketches From one piece to the next, a complex musical discourse is spanned which, framed by two solo double bass pieces (Schizzi I and XXVI), could begin again after the last note had died away - a clear indication that the musically sampled experiential spaces of Ariost's verses could again be filled with surprising sound combinations. Stefan Drees |
program:
SCHIZZI DI ORLANDO FURIOSO
DM Visotzky alto saxophones [01] Schizzo I (Canto XV 82,83) 03:17 [02] Schizzo II 03:47 [03] Schizzo III 03:44 [04] Schizzo IV 02:56 [05] schizzo v (Canto XXIII 128) 02:00 [06] Schizzo VI 01:39 [07] Schizzo VII 02:42 [08] Schizzo VIII 03:10 [09] Schizzo IX 02:57 [10] Schizzo 01:51 [11] Schizzo XI 02:43 [12] Schizzo XII 02:25 [13] Schizzo XIII 02:24 [14] Schizzo XIV 02:06 [15] Schizzo XV (Canto XXXIV 65) 02:19 [16] Schizzo XVI 02:22 [17] Schizzo XVIII 02:32 [18] Schizzo XVIII 01:11 [19] Schizzo XIX 02:29 [20] Schizzo XX 01:48 [21] Schizzo XXI 01:51 [22] Schizzo XXII 02:22 [23] Schizzo XXII 02:17 [24] Schizzo XXIV 03:01 [25] Schizzo XXV 01:19 [26] Schizzo XXVI (Canto XV 82,83) 05:07 total time: 66:27 |