COMPOSITIONS
I trained as a composer at King's College London with Silvina Milstein, completing my Master's in Composition in 2008. I came to composition under the spell of late romanticism: César Franck and Johannes Brahms' chamber music, a love of miniatures and short form. My music is influenced by the early atonal works by Webern especially, but blended with the lyrical strain of Italian modernists like Luigi Dallapiccola, and Luciano Berio, and pretty cluster harmonies inspired by Györgi Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen, and Luigi Nono. You can hear some selections below.
L'Augure
For piano solo, 2008.
Audibly inspired by Henry Cowell's piano piece The Banshee (1925), L'Augure is about prophecies and birds, and uses the inside of the piano to create sweeps of sound, interspersed with rhythmic, clean plucked strings. Unlike Cowell's Banshee, an augur does not announce death, and the piece accordingly has moments of brightness and forwardness into the unknown.
Listen to L'Augure here.
Animula Vagula Blandula
for a cappella SATB choir, 2007
commissioned and performed by the choir of Christ Church, Chelsea, London (UK) conducted by Gareth Wilson
Listen to Animula Vagula Blandula here.
Sei con anima
for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, 2006
I: Entro
II. Come gemma di faggio
III. Catenoide
IV: Scherzino
V: Catenoide o elicoide?
VI: Postlude
Performed by the Lontano Ensemble conducted by Odaline de la Martinez, London , UK, 2007
This piece , written for a "Pierrot" ensemble, that is, the five instruments employed by Arnold Schoenberg in his Pierrot Lunaire (1912), is also stylistically, a love letter to the early atonal works by Anton Webern and Alban Berg especially. It was conceived as a series of six short pieces inspired by processes of geometrical and natural transformation. The geometrical transformations were in turn inspired the work of mathematician and friend Maria Dedò at the University of Milan (chains morphing into helixes), and the natural transformations were suggested by friends who told me of the magical, and long awaited blooming of the buds of Beech trees. The title, Sei con anima, gifted to me by another friend, is a play on words in my home language, Italian, where "sei" means both "you are" and also "six". Therefore the title means both "you're with soul" and "six things with soul".
Listen to Sei con anima here.
