Salvatore Sciarrino's music has been a regular fixture on Britain's festival calendar this year. He was a featured composer at Aldeburgh, and the highlight of the final day at the Huddersfield contemporary music festival. This exposure is more than coincidental: Sciarrino is a composer who manages to be definitively modern at the same time as compellingly timeless.
His chamber music, represented in a revelatory recital for strings, flute and piano, creates a world of breathtaking virtuosity and innocence. The Six Caprices for solo violin, brilliantly performed by Mieko Kanno, consist entirely of disembodied, whistle-like harmonics. It was as if the instrument had become a ghost of its normal self. Yet Kanno found a kaleidoscopic range of expression in these mysterious pieces.
An even more extreme example of this instrumental transformation came in D'un Faune, for alto flute and piano. Mario Caroli began by making his flute produce a series of bestial growls, the most unlikely sounds from this melancholy, refined instrument. But then the flute became a panpipe, as a high-register melody tamed the grunts and groans of the wild animal. What is remarkable is that the esoteric artificiality of Sciarrino's composition creates an unmistakable immediacy.
This almost naive imitation of nature was further developed in his 1984 opera, Lohengrin, which received its first staged performance in the UK with the Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin, conducted by Beat Furrer. The piece is loosely based on a story by 19th-century French poet Jules Laforgue, itself a transformation of Wagner's Lohengrin libretto. Sciarrino's own adaptation produces a non-linear narrative, a dramatic monologue for solo female performer and ensemble. But there was no sense of abstract discontinuity in the music, or in Ingrid von Wantoch Rekowski's effective, minimalist production.
Dramatically, the staging was held together by Viviane de Muynck's performance as Elsa. Through an amazing series of gulps, coughs, laughs, whispers and words, she relived her relationship with Lohengrin and revealed the psychological derangement it caused her. The music was then a projection of Elsa's mind. The musicians shared her onomatopoeic soundworld, and became Lohengrin's swan through whooping clarinets and hissing bassoons and flutes. Just as the events of the story were rearranged in Elsa's text, the instrumental music juggled a collection of bird calls and refrains in ever-changing combinations.
The symbiosis between De Muynck and the players was echoed theatrically at the very opening of the piece, when the musicians slowly surrounded her on an enormous bench. All of their costumes sported voluptuous wings for lapels. The extraordinary intimacy of this production made Lohengrin by turns funny, tragic and poignant. The very end of the piece was especially moving, as Elsa finally found the remnants of a simple, folk-like melody.
