GOLFI D’OMBRA

Concert in solo for one percussionist inside an installation of 55 suspended instruments.

Created: Festival Biennale di Venezia 2012

The program is built around an accurate reconstruction, done by Simone Beneventi, of Golfi d’ombra (1993) by Romitelli. Although performed twice in 1993, the score was left by the author with almost no information about the instruments to use and the dynamics. The reconstruction restores the suggestive timbre and material of a piece in which, except for the deep gongs, the choise of instruments aims to encircle an area of pitches corresponding to the vocal register, “a chorus of percussions” which produces effects of delay, distorsion, saturation, and the exploration of “masses and aggregates in continuos mutation” between harmony and timbre. Plus Oultre by Dufourt, built almost programmatically around the modernist idea of pursuing the overcoming of limits, “the spirit of inventions, the wanderings or research”: ”beyond the inventory of unusual sounds”, the author writes, “I wanted, in writing for percussion, to make the Promethean gesture for the percussionist emerge again, which depends on dance and sculpture”. The set of instruments designed to perform both of these pieces by Romitelli adn Dufourt led Beneventi to commission new works from other composers, in the perspective of creating an entire solo concert with the same set-up.