Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

My Disc of the Year, so far

Pierluigi Billone: ME A AN / ITI KE MI. ensemble recherche. Stradivarius STR 33716.

I am not a good enough writer just to tell you how good a disc this is, so let me tell you about my weekly routine.

I live in Providence with my wife, but I am still nominally a doctoral candidate at SUNY Buffalo, so while school is in session I drive up there once a week to teach for a day. It�s a lovely drive on the Mass Pike and the New York Thruway; the scenery is pretty, the roads are great, and there�s hardly ever any significant traffic, but it is a long trip � about seven hours each way.

Of course, I always take along a pile of CDs of just about every description; Monteverdi, Brahms, Finnissy, Liars, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Randy Newman, Bruckner. I use the trip as a chance to listen to music that I would otherwise never have the time or energy to sit through.

After a long day of teaching followed immediately by a seven-hour commute, though, I�m wiped. As soon as I pull into the driveway I turn off the car, collect my bags, and head in to find my wife, cats, and warm bed. I have never, in all the fifteen or so trips I�ve made since last September, seen fit to delay the homecoming for a single second; recently, I turned off John Eliot Gardiner�s recording of Monteverdi�s Orfeo, one of my favorite recordings of anything ever, halfway through the last number after listening to it all the way through for the previous two-plus hours. No disc has ever made me even think about sitting in the cold, dark car at 12:30 AM after a 17-hour day when I could be in bed, except for this Stradivarius CD of Pierluigi Billone.

Billone is a forty-something Italian composer who has a strong interest in the prelinguistic; many of his pieces, including the two on this disc, are titled with transliterations of Sumerian cuneiform inscriptions. The jaw-dropper here, the masterpiece, is ME A AN, a 35-minute work for textless male voice, two bass clarinets, viola, cello, bass and percussion (here members of ensemble recherche). This is violent, loud, aggressive, extreme, dramatic closed-fists sort of music; but it�s also heartbreaking. The wordless vocal writing reminds me most, in isolation, of Kurtag�s Holderlin-Fragmente, but the rest of the sonic universe here could not be more different; the delicacy and fine lines of Kurtag�s instrumental writing are replaced by metallic rendings, squeakings and screams.

The other half of the record is ITI KE MI, for solo viola, restrung and beaten to within an inch of its life by new-music viola star Barbara Maurer. It�s also violent to the point of saturation, gripping in its absolute unwillingness to let up and a strong atmosphere of ill will towards the instrument. In any other context, ITI KE MI would be the standout work; here it has to be satisfied with a close second.

This disc is absolutely unforgettable. If you are at all interested in ear-splitting, painfully dramatic music of the contemporary European sort, you have no excuse not to buy it; if you�re not, buy it for a friend who is, borrow it, and then succumb to the temptation to buy a copy for yourself.

posted by Evan Johnson 2/02/2006