As a responsive musician, Giovanni Di Domenico identifies future directions after treading entirely different paths. For L’Occhio Del Vedere (“The Eye Of Seeing”) he voted against loneliness, summoning two fellow travelers of proven experience and equally refined sensitivity. Both contributed to the piece so conspicuously that they’re credited as co-composers by the Brussels-based Italian pianist, who assembled studio-born components of spontaneous correspondence.
Violinist Silvia Tarozzi, wielding an instrument tuned in sixteenths of a tone, seizes nanoscopic nuances within a single emission while tailoring her skilful spirituality to the specific musical framework. Emmanuel Holterbach – an excellent composer who we also thank for his loving care of Eliane Radigue’s archive – handled for the occasion a large frame drum that either murmurs as deeply as a secretly suffering soul, or rumbles ominously like a military aircraft perceived in the distance.
Although the instrumental timbres fit nicely in a reasonably definite triptych structure, the interplay’s core nature – mainly sparse and minimal, in a Feldman/Bryars sense – opens the mind to vast perspectives. Sound and silence are seamlessly complemented, leaving a lot of breathing room for an optimal processing of the trio’s expressive signals.
In particular, a focused listening free from any conceptual constraint carries with it a number of implications, presumably to be attributed to the extemporaneous will, or sheer insight, of the individual performers.
The sudden decision to disclose an innermost movement. The more or less deliberate choice to disrupt a hovering stillness. The suggestive gift of a harmonic spectrum that can only be glimpsed from hushed resonances. Notes held longer fade gracefully; slight repetitions in the piano figures confirm that the predicted itinerary is the right one. The overtones intersect, without really intruding on the respective existences of each of the pitches. A gentle, brittle counterpoint materializes; resistance to accepting the marriage of consonance and dissonance becomes increasingly futile as time elapses. The whole goes on by apparent tentativeness, but with a performative outline intimately depicted by the spirit of the instrumentalists, occasionally informed by sonic idioms remotely redolent of folk colors and melodies.
All in all, this music mostly conveys a quiet melancholy. The intuitions that determined the trio’s delicate interweavings are reflected in a fabric that is quite defined on a textural level, yet reminds us of a concept that is not fully detailed, possibly due to a measure of reticence. A shy smile hiding an animistic potential that, for some reason, will never be expressed materially.
MASSIMO RICCI. TOUCHING EXTREMES. 