Sciarrino counts among my favorite contemporary composers, his brand of “minimalism” is ever suggestive, poetic, enrapturing – not the very busy repetitive minimalism of Reich-Riley-Glass, mind you, but a minimalim at the threshold of silence and nothingness (and that’s when you really listen), whose other great representatives would be Morton Feldman, Helmut Lachenmann and even John Cage in his String Quartet “The Seasons”.
Yet, so far, I’ve reviewed here only a small, peripheral and non-representative piece of his, Brazil, an arrangement NOT, as I had once thought, of some part of the soundtrack of the Terry Gillam film, but of the famous (not by me) song of Ary Barroso from 1939, Aquarela do Brazil (link will open new tab to Wikipedia). It is performed by Ensemble Musica ‘900 under Maurizio Dini Ciacci on a collection in homage to Berio, Folk Songs (with works of Betty Olivero, Andrea Mascagni, Carlo Galante, Zygmunt Krauze, Virgilio Savona, Claudio Ambrosini, Andrej Petrov, Luca Francesconi, Hubert Stuppner, Walter Zimmermann), Dischi Ricordi CRMCD 1009 (1989)