This is an orchestral version for concert hall of music which Sciarrino wrote for a television version of Dante’s Divina Commedia. In total he wrote 15 hours of music for the production – this work is a portion of that composition.

“To write music for Dante’s entire Commedia... It was not without trepidation that I accepted the proposal for a television production. Especially to accompany a reading of the text, meaning to follow it step by step, but also to support it with solid architecture. It is the opposite of a background created fragmentarily with the situations to which it relates. [Rather] a complete structure that expresses itself within the poem, a unified plan. I thought of a single arch of music, of gigantic and yet perfect proportions. It is the unity of the incomparable voyage that forbids one from approaching the great individual flashes of inspiration. It would be senseless – the idea of a crazy dilettante – to set the entire Divina Commedia to music, phrase by phrase, in a kind of opera, to pile up a mountain of music. Such an undertaking would deserve admiration only because of its sheer size, though perhaps also because of the dedication it would require. But that idea quickly revealed itself to be fragile and hardly meaningful.” (Salvatore Sciarrino)

Includes booklet with text by Rainer Pöllmann and Salvatore Sciarrino