Carlo Alessandro Landini
The two Sonatas for Cello and Piano
Carlo Alessandro Landini is an extraordinary character whom I am proud to call a friend: a person with an extremely vast culture and interests, obviously not limited to music alone, but to science, literature and figurative arts, a torrential writer and essayist albeit very pleasant to read, with a rare sense of humour and self-irony and with the compositional skills to win the first prize at the Lutosławski competition in Warsaw in 2007.
He is often unjustly identified as the «composer with a Guinness World record» due to his huge Piano Sonata No. 5, written between 2012 and 2015, whose score consists of 653 pages and a variable duration of up to 6 hours, the longest in the history of music. Nevertheless, Landini is also a Maestro of short forms, here (in my humble opinion) you can find some of the highest gems of his production: listen for example to the motet Dona nobis pacem of 2022.
The Sonatas for Cello and Piano are two monumental works that require performers able to withstand the extraordinary temporal dimensions of the movements, closer to a Symphony than to a Sonata and the extremely long expressive spans of melodic lines which are always passionate and dramatic, both in the slow and fast movements.
The two Sonatas are symmetrical both in size and in general structure, since they both consist of two movements, the first slow and the second fast. These works are written mainly using the octatonic scale, formed by the constant sequence of tone and semitone, already used by Chopin in the finale of his Sonata Op. 69 and by composers of late Romanticism, a scale which became structural thanks to Russian composers such as Stravinsky and Soviet composers such as Prokof’ev or Shostakovich.
Sonata No. 1. The First movement, («Adagio»), is an unceasing sequence of quarter notes of the Piano on which a very long cello melody unfolds based precisely on the octatonic scale. This scale is also used in the Piano part to relate the sequence of the tonal harmonies. The Piano sequence is then added to other contrasting rhythms, without however losing the endless pace that unifies the entire movement. A long glissando of the Cello towards the upper register closes the movement on a D minor chord, paralleled with the Piano rumbling in its lower register.
The Second movement («Presto») uses the same octatonic scale in a continuous game of imitations of small thematic cells equally distributed between Piano and Cello with a much faster metronome, and with accumulating and progressive tension. Towards the end, the imitative game thins out and then thickens once more until the unison with which the movement ends.
Sonata No. 2. The Second Sonata temporarily abandons the octatonic scale, in place of which we find greater freedom in the use of tonal, chromatic or sometimes modal fragments. Here, we also encounter two long movements, of which the first («Liberamente il tempo, quasi improvvisando», i.e. «Free tempo, almost improvising») is characterized by the Piano’s calm pace and the Cello’s passionate melody often used in the upper register. A C sharp minor triad opens and concludes the first movement of this Sonata.
The Second movement («Mosso, sempre scorrevole», i.e. «Animated, always flowing») resumes the quick, imitative game between Piano and Cello of the Sonata No. 1. The exclusive use of the octatonic scale also returns, with the addition of greater rhythmic complexity and consequently a greater virtuosity by the Cello, steered into the high and upper register. The Piano part also becomes increasingly dense and complex during the course of the piece up to last, assertive unison which, with its harsh, rhythmic connotation, concludes this Sonata.
Marco Decimo © 2023
Translation: Allison Turner
Between Hypnosis and Meditation
Carlo Alessandro Landini’s Sonatas for Cello and Piano indeed capture the listener – daring here a metaphor taken from cinema – in virtue of a lengthy, extenuating sequence shot. You wouldn’t want to turn your sights elsewhere, nor would you come up to the resolving event, or to the main character’s line, as quickly as you would like to. We track down the slow unfolding of the instrumental plot exactly as we would keep abreast with the smallest detail framed out by the camera. Without cuts nor keenness to know.
This way to proceed might appear somewhat outdated in relation to whatsoever contemporary musical production (not only mass production but sometimes also that of a selected, high-brow repertoire) stubbornly hunting for brevity and for an increase of auditory signals. Craft work, especially. Counterpoint and imitational procedures are the living matter of a never-ending flow, a sort of relentless process which unfolds and replicates itself by gradually introducing the listener to a dimension which is half way between hypnosis and meditation.
The solemnity with which every element of the score is articulated comes together with a palette of mystical and iridescent shades, those of the octatonic scale, embodying the ecstatic reminiscence of Olivier Messiaen’s music. Both the reasoned choice of gestures and melodic structures – devoid of all kind of frills and useless tinsels – and the almost sentient dialogue between the two instruments, a dialogue in constant evolution, ask (gently!) the performers to set aside their ego by reason of an increased attention to the sounding event itself.
One almost gets the impression that the composer himself is withdrawing, at first glance becoming a listener of his own music, then slowly turning into a herald of some message coming from afar, maybe from sidereal distances: still an objective one, yet drenched in human passions.
Landini’s music outlines what seems to be the ultimate, eschatological dimension of the musician’s task, that of questioning the Absolute to unravel its infinite response.
Luca Benatti © 2023
Translation: Lynn Marie Becker