Composer Franco Donatoni was something of an enigmatic figure among post-war Italian modernists, and his work has remained somewhat marginalized as a result. In an interview with Andrew Ford (published in the book Composer to Composer), Donatoni maintained that he had experienced ‘several crises’ during his career. These challenges were heightened by major bouts with mental illness. Several curtailments and cessations altogether of musical activity occurred at various points in his lifetime. These were demoralizing to be sure, but his steadfast determination to conquer each successive experience of creative block resulted in re-emergence full of vitality, with compositions that explored new directions. Ford later remarked (in his other seminal work, Illegal Harmonies) that in the twentieth century, Donatoni and Stockhausen were the two composers who most frequently changed direction in their work. Indeed, Donatoni frequently identified with Stockhausen's concept of ‘moment form’, crafting music full of wit and surprises.
It is precisely these traits – inscrutability, creative vitality, mercurial changeability and indomitability – that that have attracted Ensemble Adapter, a Berlin-based new music group, to adopt the further promulgation of Donatoni's music as a long term project: they plan to record several compact discs of the composer's music. The first recording was released this past September on the Kairos imprint. It contains two sets of pieces that, while created separately, ultimately accumulated into cycles of work.
Donatoni often remarked that he didn't imagine his pieces in advance, but instead worked through them to come up with each successive composition's material. Essentials were preferred to a wide swath of reference points, with winnowing down to the bare minimum necessary to create a work being a preferred technique. For instance, in several of the pieces on the Kairos CD, Donatoni begins with a cell of just three pitches, very gradually expanding the harmonic field through the use of permutation (transposition, inversion, etc.) of the original cell and the interpolation of intuitively derived additional material. Another approach frequently found in Donatoni's music is his reworking of pieces into new contexts. Thus, a pair each of solos for harp (Marches, 1979), piccolo (Nidi, 1979), and clarinet (Clair, 1980), are chopped up and reframed as the trio Small (1981).
The composer had a penchant for piccolo, and both movements of Nidi are impressive displays of virtuosity on the instrument. Donatoni suggested birdsong as the inspiration for the piece, saying, ‘It sounds like a little bird making her nest’. The nest, built out of strands of those three-note pitch cells, is followed by sounds that much more resemble a bird aloft in flight than carefully building a domicile. Kristjana Helgadóttir, bearing in mind Donatoni's extramusical inspiration, moulds phrases carefully, allows runs to flow ebulliently, and keeps the stridency of the piccolo's upper register to a minimum. Harpist Gunnhildur Einarsdóttir is given a difficult task, making fast arpeggiated music ‘march’. However, the incisive attacks she employs manage to give heft and metric stress that supplies the requisite martial illusion. To provide a third layer of gestural types, Clair includes klezmer-style riffs, dynamic shifts, and widened vibrato, performed with characterful zest by clarinettist Ingólfur Vilhjálmsson. The three musicians together interpret Small, a recombination of solo elements into an ensemble piece. Somewhat surprisingly, the disparate characters of each instrumental part often collide and commingle in unexpectedly organic fashion. This is no cut-and-paste piece, but instead a very effective recomposition of preexisting material into an altogether convincing new incarnation. The piece's climax, a pile-up of the trio's most emphatic gestures into a dense polyphony, is particularly stirring. What's more, one would be hard-pressed to describe is as sounding like nearly anyone else: this is Donatoni at his most original.
A similar process is undertaken in Donatoni's earlier Estratto triptych. Estratto (1969), a brief work based on a motoric ostinato of dissonant lines in equal note values, is played with scrupulous rhythmic integrity by pianist Elmar Schrammel. Secondo Estratto (1970) explores the same percussive texture, but here Schrammel is joined by harpsichordist Peterri Pitko and mandolinist Seth Josel. This version is significantly extended to ten-and-a-half minutes in duration. The trio overlaps the material culled from the original Estratto in an elaborate game of musical tag.
In Quarto Estratto (1974) Donatoni makes two interesting moves, increasing the ensemble size to a septet, including piccolo and violin, and once again distilling the material to its essence, bringing the duration back down to a little less than three minutes. This is the first recording of the piece, and the ensemble mentions in the liner notes that they had a difficult choice to make. The parts have no bar lines or metric symbols; the only indication is ‘play as fast as possible’. Donatoni didn't indicate whether that meant strict coordination of the parts, playing fast as possible throughout, or instead to allow for a certain measure of independence, of quasi-aleatory. Adapter, mindful that their rendition will be a benchmark of sorts, considered both approaches, but ended up opting for more independence between parts. Observing the snippet of score that is included in the liner notes, this appears to be both a pragmatic and logical decision based on the information that is shared. The resulting music is a dizzying shimmer. Even amid the hurly burly of the instruments’ individual sprints, the limited pitch material in each part allows for a sense of harmonic coordination. Each of Quattro’s iterations takes on a different character. It is to Donatoni's credit that it is hard to pick a favourite among them.
