Pier Luca Pierini

For a long time, Ennio Morricone (1928-2020) kept the two main fields of his compositional activity neatly separated. First, there was film music: this was undoubtedly the best known and also the most abundant of the two. His artistic partnerships with directors such as Sergio Leone, Giuseppe Tornatore, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Giuliano Montaldo, Elio Petri, and Gillo Pontecorvo marked the history of film music. However, the directors with whom he cooperated, also on the international stage, are very numerous, including Brian De Palma and Quentin Tarantino. His film music comprises nearly 500 scores: a record quantity, reached over the course of more than five decades, and crowned by three Academy Awards, three Golden Globes, five BAFTAs, a Grammy and countless other awards.

The present release synthesizes some stages characterizing the composition path of Pier Paolo Scattolin: from a cappella vocality to instrumentalism with stylistic dynamics sometimes distant but all having in common the research on sound, from the linguistic phoneme to the eclectic and sometimes experimental use of instrumental emission. The path winds through almost forty years of continuous investigation and dissection of both choral and instrumental sound, the latter of a chamber/soloistic character and in some cases concerted and intersected with the voice. In the a cappella choral repertoire a varied anthology collects poetic and literary texts by Dante Alighieri, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Alda Merini, Umberto Saba, Emily Dickinson, Alessandro Striggio, Agnolo Poliziano, Alceo, Saffo, Ipponatte, Enzo Iacchetti, Agnese Troilo and the composer himself.

The present Reflections juxtapose four composers of the so-called First and Second Viennese Schools, who became world-famous through many things – except compositions for organ. Pier Damiano Peretti, organist and composer as well as professor of organ at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, conceives an organ program framed by the two Fantasies in F minor K. 594 and K. 608 “for a mechanical clockwork organ” by W. A. Mozart. In addition, there are arrangements for organ by Franz Schubert of the Fugue in E minor op. 152 (D 952), the Fantasia in F minor for piano four hands op. 103 (D 940) and the Adagio in G major, D 178. The Six Little Piano Pieces op. 19 by Arnold Schönberg as well as the Variations for Piano op. 27 by Anton Webern are portraying the Second Viennese School. All arrangements were created by Peretti, who is performing on the Lenter organ of the Lutherische Stadtkirche Vienna.