Isle of Sky: Landscapes of Memory for Cello and Guitar

Description

Angelo Gilardino (1941–2022) is widely regarded as one of the foremost composers for the guitar.
Despite a substantial output embracing solo, chamber and orchestral works, this duo for cello and guitar stands as a true unicum within his catalogue. To attribute this peculiarity to mere circumstance seems to me superficial (Gilardino can hardly have lacked contact with accomplished cellists throughout his career), just as it is misleading to explain it as a kind of reticence prompted by the intrinsic difficulty of the combination, or by some presumed distance from the cello’s poetic world. Evidence to the contrary lies in the fact that the cello appears in two other works: the Double Concerto of 2004, Star of the Morning, and the Quartet for flute, clarinet, cello and guitar (2010).
I therefore believe that the reasons for this delayed reduction of the dialogue to its most essential terms are to be sought in biographical circumstances. It is surely not accidental that the only instrument Gilardino studied systematically besides the guitar was, precisely, the cello. He thus enjoyed a privileged relationship with its idiom and timbral character; and the duo’s configuration can hardly be thematised in any other way than as a conflict within his own poetic sensibility. From this emerges a work he himself described as “two-faced”, and which bears the theme of division even in its title: Songs in Penumbra.
Here the guitar fulfils its role as an evocative, allusive, enigmatic, shadowy instrument. The cello forms its complementary pole: a voice that longs to emerge, that would like to become stentorian and dramatic, yet which, within this particular pairing, must remain—in the composer’s own terms—in penumbra.
The work’s dichotomous nature is also reflected in its musical language: we are poised between the chromaticism of the early Gilardino and the more recent predominance of modal and diatonic writing.
The first movement is built entirely on a four-note cell, stated by the guitar within an elusive, disorienting counterpoint. From this the cello repeatedly draws impetus for melodic development that is destined to remain incomplete, arriving at new regions of consonance from which the guitar strays, arpeggiating and offering fragments. These do not amount to a true second theme, but rather to an expectation of a renewed reconsideration of the initial motif.
The second movement is lyrical in character and cast in A–B–A form. The opening intensifies the guitar’s ambiguous, evocative quality by presenting a motivic fragment shaped by an ascending triplet with no point of arrival, suspended in its upbeat climax. The cello then enters with a different assertiveness, taking up this enigmatic cell and repositioning it within the bar so as to provide, each time, a stabilising point of arrival—until it progressively effaces it, allowing its own natural inclination towards song to predominate.
The B episode follows—“light and volatile”—of markedly different character. Introduced by the cello, it is constructed entirely from reiterated notes, the melodic element formed as figures that emerge like tesserae in a mosaic. The guitar quickly joins an imitative dialogue, again insistently presenting an unresolved ascending gesture at the end of the bar. Once the climax is reached, a gradual slowing leads back to the first episode, “slowly”.
The third movement has a nested construction. On the surface it again takes the form of an A–B–A, yet the B section is in turn articulated into three parts, B′–C–B′, with C representing a development of A. It is a skilful formal variation on the two nuclei that have animated the work thus far: on the one hand, the guitar’s fragmentary writing that permeates the opening section, against which the cello oscillates between pizzicato and staccato; on the other, the felicity of song, which here attains—albeit briefly—its widest expansion in the two B′ sections.
The fourth movement, in which the diatonic element predominates, may be associated with Gilardino’s abundant vein of “aquatic” music, and more specifically with a rain of Manzonian flavour that comes to heal the conflicts that have animated the discourse until now. The central lyrical element likewise offers a form of resolution, taking up the triplet proposed by the guitar in the second movement: here it is inverted into a descending contour and firmly anchored on the downbeat of the following bar. Cello and guitar take their leave of the listener with an unhurried song, unfolding across a landscape stirred by a fine, cleansing rain.

Kevin Swierkosz-Lenart (b. 1988) is an Italian composer, born, raised and trained in Rome. After graduating in guitar from the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in 2012, he continued his musical studies under the guidance of Angelo Gilardino and Dušan Bogdanović.
He made his compositional debut in 2019 with the première in Rome, given by Angelo Colone, of Jeux d’enfants for guitar, followed in the same year by the publication (Bèrben) of Variations on “El Testament d’Amèlia”. In 2020 Les Productions d’Oz issued his Suite: Homage to Giuseppe Biasi, dedicated to Cristiano Porqueddu, who gave the première in Apeldoorn (Netherlands).
A physician by training, he has lived and worked since 2014 as a psychiatrist in Lausanne, Switzerland.
In Roman Churches he finds, in the dialogue between cello and guitar, a medium well suited to expressing his nostalgia for the city in which he grew up. From this nucleus he constructs a portrait of Rome by imagining three liturgical moments in as many sacred buildings.
The first movement, Santa Maria in Trastevere, entrusts the guitar with an opening that recalls the tolling of bells. A motivic idea is then taken up by the cello and transformed into song, embellished with melismatic passages. The discourse continues until it dissolves into a dialogue between the guitar’s harmonics and the cello’s pizzicato: a fragmentary texture intended as a homage to the splendid mosaics of Pietro Cavallini, perhaps the most significant representative of the Roman school of the thirteenth century.
A second theme follows, marked by liturgical severity and a decidedly more lyrical character, with the cello in the leading role. A livelier development—Allegretto—then reframes the material heard so far through the memory of the carefree Roman spring of adolescence. The movement closes with a reprise of the first theme. When the music reaches the section built on harmonics and pizzicato, the cello introduces a reiterated note which, as if receding into the distance, recalls the bell motif.
The second movement, Sant’Athanasius, evokes the contours of an Eastern liturgy which the composer attended several times as a boy, aided by the proximity of the Greek-Catholic church to the conservatory where he studied. The cello is given free rein to express its natural cantabile in the opening, where a melody in a Byzantine mode unfolds according to the inflections of Eastern Christianity—at once austere and melancholically alluring. A single musical idea sustains the movement; its transformation is entrusted to the continuous dialogue between the two instruments and to modal shifts that intensify, in a gradual crescendo, towards the concluding climax.
The work ends with a reference to Roman Baroque, in the celebrated Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza by Borromini. The church is inaccessible to the public for most of the week, its dome rising among tightly packed buildings; a privileged viewpoint is offered by the famous Caffè Sant’Eustachio, an emblem in the composer’s memory of Rome’s sensuousness. These Baroque suggestions are translated into a serene, uninterrupted musical outpouring that forms both the opening and closing episode. Between them lies a slow interlude—“Intimate, singing”—in which the church interior and the liturgy it hosts are imagined with calm detachment, leading without hesitation back to the initial carefreeness.

Oscar Bellomo (b. 1980) is widely regarded as one of the most gifted guitarist-composers of his generation. After launching his concert career upon graduating from the “D. Cimarosa” Conservatory in Avellino, he has performed both as a soloist and in quartet at major festivals in Italy and abroad.
Although he had been devoted to composition from the earliest years of his studies, he chose to publish his first work only in 2017: the six Silencios immediately attracted the attention of guitarists. Cristiano Porqueddu recorded them in 2020, and they soon began to appear in the programmes of performers most attentive to new repertoire.
A cultivated composer with a keen sensitivity to the visual arts and literature, Bellomo shows a natural propensity for landscape music. Writing of the Silencios, Gilardino observed: “There is neither immanence nor transcendence in the soundscape of these ‘moments’: the sense of inexplicable beauty reigns there, in the slowed heartbeat of childlike contemplation or in the breath of gusts entirely devoid of eros that ripple the waters without dissolving the enchantment of observation without observer.”
That description may be adopted to grasp the deeper meaning of the suite recorded on the present CD: Isle of Skye. The Scottish island, seemingly removed from space and time—where landscapes of aloof and forbidding beauty alternate with medieval castles—becomes the place in which “observation without observer” is shaped in the dialogue between guitar and cello.
The first movement, Prologue, opens with a brief melodic fragment of wise, measured simplicity, entrusted to the cello and commented upon by the guitar. The central section—“Allegro, like a dance”—pushes evocation to its highest degree of rarefaction: the island’s magnificent vistas appear before us, as though ghosts were reiterating the songs of ancient bagpipes. There is no concession to mimesis; everything remains within the boundaries of suggestion and phantasmagoria, and thus dissolves without warning into a calm reprise of the opening.
The second movement, Lighthouse, is a nocturne in which the guitar lays down a carpet of arpeggiated, aquatic notes, pierced by melismatic figures in the cello that seem to evoke fragments of landscape—scales caught, as if by chance, in the revolving beam of the lighthouse. There is no emotional participation, only pure contemplation. The incidental reappearance, within the cello line, of elements belonging to the first movement seems to invite a philosophical reflection: the island remains identical to itself as darkness falls; the night does not scratch it. In this sense the music offers a response to the obsession Kafka notes in his diaries: “I wonder what things are like before I lay my eyes on them.”
The third movement, Fairy Pools, is a rondo that explicitly alludes to the waterfalls of Glen Brittle, one of the island’s best-known attractions. Yet one cannot overlook the fact that the eponymous “fairies” find fertile ground in the composer’s sensibility, steeped in the millenary Neapolitan culture that still sustains a firm fusion between the real and the magical—according to a pagan, pre-Christian feeling vividly identified by Anna Maria Ortese in Il cardillo addolorato. All this is translated into the score as a dreamlike dance: a rupture in the banality of daily life, to which the listener is granted the privilege of being invited.
In a perfect timbral fusion between guitar and cello we witness a procession of small, evanescent lights that suddenly animate the imperturbable surge of the waterfalls within a nocturnal landscape—an animated dance imbued with a graceful fury. The slow central section, “Dreamy Larghetto”, before the reprise, represents a temporary widening and slowing of the flow of frames: the character remains unchanged, yet the listener is allowed to wander at leisure, for a moment, within the privileged place only just glimpsed—and which must immediately be abandoned.
The fourth movement, Portree Harbour, poetically evokes the bay from which one observes a picturesque row of coloured houses. Set against this artificial image, alien to the island’s character, Bellomo’s music seems almost to underline an intrinsic “truth of Skye”. As though as a leitmotif, the opening of the first movement is hinted at by the cello at the start of the “Enchanted Adagio”, while the guitar presses forward in an imitative play that leads to the “Più mosso”: a ruthless, essential contemplation that seems to pierce the factitious element dominating a superficial glance. The music turns towards a rugged essentiality: detached-note cells entrusted to the cello, answered by the guitar in successive sounds that stammer an arpeggio. In the finale, a brief recollection of the initial motifs seems to recall the ineluctable, imperturbable nature of the island—greater than the observer, indifferent to the becoming of things.
The concluding movement, Neist Point, portrays Skye’s western tip, the viewpoint of that lighthouse whose flickering glimpses had already appeared in the second movement. Cast as a rondo, its refrain offers a sunny, “positive” counterpart to what had been shadowed earlier. A joyful dialogue between guitar and cello builds a melody of vigorous vitality. At the centre lies a “Dreamy Adagio”, in which the song that opened the work returns once more, duly transformed—a further reminder from the imperishable not to regard even this landing as definitive. For the contemplation of the island has taken place without observer, and its truth cannot be given, only desired.

Stefano Vivaldini (b. 1997) is a multifaceted artist—guitarist, composer and screenwriter—whose activity has been marked, from the outset, by cross-pollination. He made his debut at the age of fifteen with the staged production Genesi Notturna. The natural tendency of his music to expand into texts and images is confirmed by his first publication, Ten Reflective Studies for solo guitar, whose scores are accompanied by images and captions, and which has been translated into Spanish and English. An almost inevitable destination for such a creative profile is the cinema; this took concrete form in 2019 with the soundtrack for A Rivederci, directed by Roberto Dal Monte. In the present Siracusan Suite his imaginative impulse is channelled into a direct idiom, supported by an essential musical architecture that serves as the framework for a fanciful handling of harmony.
The movements of the suite function, in essence, as miniature scenes: small snapshots—or postcards—of places and situations within the Syracusan landscape.
The introduction, “Slow and delicate”, opens with guitar chords in which we first hear an inversion built on the notes of the open strings, subjected to a gradual transformation that alternates with the movement’s leading motif: a descending sequence that returns repeatedly, a constant inserted into harmonic wanderings that sometimes follow a thread of fantasy and free association, sometimes the logic suggested by the inner voices. The cello enters on a sustained pianissimo note, foreshadowing two statements of the motif in imitative dialogue with the guitar, and the music closes by dying away, diminishing to nothing.
We are abruptly torn from this ethereal atmosphere by the second movement, Iblean Dance: a “Playful Allegretto” in 6/8 that seems to reach back to the ancestral origins of southern tarantellas. The opening section—strongly rhythmic, and founded on a balance between the two instruments as they articulate a dotted figure with incisive attacks—anticipates a gradual lightening and a tightening of rhythmic density. A moment of breathing arrives in the central section in 3/4, “spirited”, before a return to a convulsive 3-against-2 pulse, brought to a sudden, “dry” close.
“Vuci di Sciarriata”, the third movement, is where the composer’s theatrical instincts emerge most clearly. It opens with a recitative in free rhythmic declamation, entrusted to the cello and marked “Slow, spoken”. The guitar enters with a syncopated chordal gesture whose function is to add pathos and heighten expectation; then the piece takes shape as a taut dialogue between the two instruments, favouring incisive attacks. The cello declaims melodic cells that rapidly contract into agitated groups of semiquavers, while the guitar alternates monody with chordal masses that likewise condense rhythmically. This “messy” music breaks off abruptly, leaving a pianissimo dyad on the guitar’s bridge. Vivaldini’s craft lies in having sketched a small theatrical scene: a calm exchange that escalates into a brief dispute—a sciarriata—and finally resolves into nothingness, restoring serenity. There is no tragedy here: the forms of disagreement are merely “temperament”, a fiery nature presented as an authentic, spontaneous trait.
The fourth movement, Ortigia, has a strongly landscape character, describing the small island that constitutes the oldest part of Syracuse. Marked “Very sweet and slow, almost timeless”, it begins with a cello melody in which the introduction’s descending motif resonates, supported by the guitar’s chordal accompaniment. Vivaldini adopts a form that deftly avoids any simple pattern of repetition and is shaped as a climax of progressive rhythmic accumulation: from crotchets to quavers, then triplets, and finally sextuplet semiquavers—within a process in which free harmonic wandering is repeatedly drawn back into focus by the song’s descending motif. At the close of the movement a brief cadenza for solo guitar appears: a suspended moment that almost divides the suite in two, functioning as a quiet threshold between two expressive worlds.
A natural continuation of this suspension is the fifth movement, “A cathedral in the temple”, referring to the Cathedral of the Nativity of the Most Holy Mary in Ortigia. The building rises by incorporating an ancient Doric temple dedicated to Athena, built by the tyrant Gelon. The music assumes a hieratic character, marked “Majestic”, and rests on a severe three-voice imitative counterpoint in which the subject is entrusted to the cello’s pizzicato and taken up by the guitar. The principal theme here explicitly draws on the ancient Song of Seikilos, woven into the counterpoint in a manner that recalls the coexistence of pagan and Christian strata in the building’s architectural history. A 6/8 section follows, where a cello ostinato supports the guitar’s repetitions of previously exposed cells, as though in a phantasmagoria in which ancient sacred hymns return to memory—an evident play on the dialogue between Greek-era walls and Christian ones. The music reaches a brief melismatic passage for the guitar, which leads to a return, subtly recalibrated in its rhythmic profile and guided towards progressive rarefaction by sustained cello notes and fragmentary reprises in the guitar.
The final movement abandons itself to the joy of song, in a flowing invention marked “Serene andante”. Unlike the other movements, it is not tied to a specific place, but rather functions as an ode to the land itself and to the ever-present symbolism of the sea on the horizon. Its title, “The Sea Has the Colour of My Hope”, draws upon a tradition extending from Homer to Sciascia, with the sea described as οiνοψ (oinops)—“wine-coloured”. It is intriguing to reflect that the advent of industrial culture introduced into our chromatic vocabulary the notion of “solid colour”, unthinkable in a world dependent on natural pigments and dyes. In much the same way, cultural, economic, theological, and ultimately advertising imperatives have conditioned us to think in stereotypes: a sky that is always blue, a sea that is always blue—whereas we know well that natural elements possess infinite nuances, and that the sea, under certain conditions, can become wine, blood, fire, breathing in unison with the moods of the one who contemplates it. The last heir to this millenary tradition was perhaps the Sicilian painter Piero Guccione, with his seascapes of innumerable shades.
This is what Vivaldini seems to remind us of in a piece that calls for the closest bond between descriptive poetics and inward poetics—one that seeks to speak of itself by speaking of the sea. The melody, stated first by the cello, begins with a stammering impulse that soon unfolds into a joyful, rhythmically buoyant song, open to swift melismatic digressions. The process of accumulation, typical of the suite as a whole, is here enriched by a moment of stillness: the cello settles on a sustained harmonic, as though suspending the discourse, while the guitar insists on semiquaver ostinati. We reach the point at which descriptive poetics has succeeded in abstracting from what it has observed and portrayed, isolating instead a movement of the soul that recognises itself in the landscape. The previously set-aside melody returns, now condensed, and driven in the climactic passage to its utmost limits: the guitar’s demisemiquavers release the energy accumulated thus far and lead—according to procedures already established—to a conclusion on a sustained cello note and a rapid recapitulation in the guitar, without requiring the performers this time to let the sound die away. We are confronted with a “solar” poetics, one that finally gives the listener in full what until now had only been hinted at or evoked.