An important musical event: the world premiere of a new guitar concerto by one of the foremost guitar composers of our time.
Fascinating music in which the combiantion of the guitar and the orchestra fuses into unheard-of sonorities and colours.
Played by the champion of Gilardino’s guitar music: Cristiano Porqueddu, who knows the secrets of this music inside-out.
Porqueddu already recorded the much-praised Transcendental Studies of Gilardino for Brilliant Classics.
The Concert of Oliena, the third for guitar and orchestra written by the composer from Vercelli and dedicated to Cristiano Porqueddu, unfolds in three movements: Andante lento, Adagio, and Allegro Scherzoso.
The orchestra includes woodwinds (the piccolo flutes and the English horn as well), with a single music stand for each instrument, a kettle of tympani and arches without divides, to allow for a chamber execution with only one arch per section. The celesta adds on to the latter, already used by the author in the “Liederkonzert” for two guitars and orchestra.The organic composition is a forenote and integral component of the aesthetics of the orchestral writing, which prefers the unraveling of concurrent reticulars instead of compactness and rich bands of sound.
The eight studies chosen from among the 60 “of virtuosity and transcendence” seem to constitute preambles that more useful to comprehend the most recent aesthetics of Gilardino represented by the Concert of Oliena. In fact, the most suspended and ghastly musical images, just as much as the dynamic ones which purport the most genuine sensory-motor pleasure, in which energy is equivalent with imagination and pure corporeity, blend well together, distilled from the dismissals that the urgency to invent entails, in the mature work of the composer from Vercelli.
