Acousmatic mini-works.
Espace Go, October 16, 2003.
The current edition of “Rien à Voir” discovers still unknown worlds. Thursday evening, there was the Italian-style electroacoustics. …….. The guest of the day at the console, the composer Luigi Ceccarelli, presents … some of his works. Here, you fully enter the typical world of Italian opera, revised and corrected by electroacoustics.
In the first three pieces he proposes, Ceccarelli actually writes incredibly effective Opera concentrates. The librettos describe both religion, political power and a form of totalitarianism. “A propos de la chambre à coucher de Philippe II dans lÍeglise de lÍEscorial” turns out to be a powerful, frightening work. The contracted and mechanical-surrealist images of the text (we listen to a French version to understand everything) already freeze the blood. The music, she, comes to reinforce the effect.
Ceccarelli uses distortions of the voice to make Hollywood horror film directors drool with jealousy, with “special effects” to make people flee in fear from cinemas. Cinema for the ear which is sometimes called acousmatic. It is exactly that, and Orwell would have loved it!
We continue with “Tupac Amaru”, and we clash with an Inca legend of the first revolution of this people against the conquistadors in the 1780s and with the anti-Fujimori riots (Funky-Fucky-More in the booklet). The translation is projected on the screen, in the manner of subtitles in traditional opera ……. The use of diffusion in space is remarkable, the rhythm and citations of appropriate musical genres, and we are told, here is the equivalent a swashbuckling opera by Verdi.
More meaningful, “Exsultet” begins a long zone of peace, on manipulated Gregorian chant, and a meditative zone that is poisoned with horror, again, as if the shudders of disgust served as tools of condemnation. The development here is more sustained, the quality of the work is also clearly greater than the first two due to its breath and its intrinsic direction. With a more abstract purpose, music allows itself to take up more space and we admire Ceccarelli’s talent to make us remain nailed to our chair by the only inspiration brought by his convictions, which obliges us, for the time of a piece, to share . As a dramatic result, it was the great moment of the concert ……….
François Tousignant – Le Devoir (Canada) 19 October 2003