The contemporary self is many-faceted and differentiated, compelled to the lightning interpretation of data arriving from remote sources. The speed with which people, information and attitudes move compels us to be extremely flexible and “open” to the outside. Those who cannot absorb that which is different from themselves are destined to stifle in a confining dimension. In the interweaving of technological experiences that overlap in a dizzying and fascinating synchrony, the modern seeks its historic and archetypical roots.

Alessandro Solbiati has taken up the challenge. The deep core of his writing pulsates in perfect harmony with our current mode of existence. The present, with its boundless potential for fragmentation and recomposition, enables memory to reconquer imagination. And if on the one hand we recognize the linguistic hallmarks of the late twentieth century, we also note a recovery of forms personally re-experienced as ancestral.

This is why Solbiati's music is marked by the breathless cohabitation of oxymoronic tendencies whose tormented conflict seems almost frozen and photographed in the poetic wavering of an unstable balance, by nature easily corrupted in order to recover stability.

It is not only a question of capturing the meaning of the Western classical tradition as an ineluctable heritage in which to immerse oneself time and again, re-emerging with new gestures. For the spectacular bridge looking from past to present engenders a language both dense and deep, but palpitating with recent and original insights. The works of Solbiati's catalogue add inlays that in a certain sense force us to a redistribution and reinterpretation of the entire path of composition: an expressive interaction characterising the form as well as the content of each individual work.

What we have here, however, is not a conceptual game, some abstract knowledge proud of its own genius, because his style always pursue the perceptual span of the material. Material interpreted so as to “attract” halos of thought, emotion, image and words to its specific musical essence.

From the “weight” of ambiguous words, dense with historic and perceptual significance, springs the activation of associative and imaginative chains that trace the structural proportions of his works.

This is what we encounter in the 1986 oratorio Nel deserto, where the choir expresses the existential dilation of the affective and intellective dynamics of the biblical text in their connotation as concentrated symbols but also as elusive existential lability.

Without descriptive intent or madrigalistic concessions, Solbiati embraces the affective reverberation of the text in the sonic medium. The laborious consistency of the symbolic references breaks down into the range of timbral shadings of the solo voice, the boys' voices, the narrative voice, the small choir and the nine instruments.

The articulation of Sonetto a Rilke into four clearly defined situations for flute, clarinet, bassoon, horn, piano, violin, viola and cello provides continual detours from its obvious structural path. While we follow its main direction, we capture interferences, cross-references and overlapping that compel us to active listening. In the moods that follow closely one upon the other, memory pushes us backward, concretizing the sense of myth as precious jewel-case of values suspended between what has been and what will be.

Thus, while the reiterative micro-cell of four notes branches out toward broader timbral and harmonic horizons, we are drawn back to the centre of the organization material, re-invented yet again in the thematic fabric of flute, clarinet and bassoon, into which the load-bearing shadow of the horn is insinuated. On the perceptive and existential axes of ascent and descent, the transparent lightness of the winds contrasts with the obsessive restlessness of the strings. The answer lies in the vital shudder handed to us as a gift of communicative hope by the dialectic between conscious and unconscious, defined and undefined, perceived object and the motion of lack and desire.

In Canto per Ania, composed in 1992, the proud, elegant cello writing plays with the shadows and the historical reverberations of the literature for this instrument, revealing its rarest and most precious psychological overtones. Expressive directionality juxtaposed against the expanded role of the other fourteen instruments that filter, separate, and distort the cello's tremors, revealing its deep and unfathomable aspects.

Formal articulation follows the protean tendency of organism to change by exploiting active interference among different parameters. Here, as in the three pieces for orchestra Die Sterne des Leidlands (1991) or in the Quartetto con Lied for boy's voice and string quartet (1992), there is no harmony apart from timbre, no chordal conception standing over the horizontal progression of the figures.

In the three pieces Die Quelle der Freude for vocal quintet and orchestra (1993) set to poems by Rilke, the trace of meaning that memory pursue like a broken but living song - from the gesture of firm structural resolve to the exhausted crumbling of the rhythmic pattern - draws a spiral suspended between high/low, near/far, even/uneven. And pockets of nostalgic evanescence arise from the meeting/clash of these multiple tensions.

In the imitative and relaxed character of the voices - a sort of chorale dense with internal resonance and proliferating contrapuntal threads - in the slow flowing of rarefied material that sometimes freezes in hypnotically fascinating timbral tableaux, we recognize that which Heidegger saw as the transcendental meaning of Man and things. Every object, gesture, emotion or thought is “ulteriorized”, stretching out beyond itself.

In the forms of myth and archetype, in the liquid flow of water and the unconscious, Solbiati hands up the power of light and ascent, the tormented effort to accept and conquer - in the indecipherable multiplicity of creation - the pain of the world.

                                                                                                            Lidia Bramani

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