Giovanni Martinelli - Kevin Swierkosz-Lenart: Luminaria [CD]

Writing the liner notes to this album necessarily compels me to begin with a preamble which fully complieswith the music andrenditions it contains: listening to a discographical work is an active act of creation, the moment when we choose to shift ourpoint of observation towards an imaginative reality that, once experienced, appears more authentic and faithful than everyday'sordinariness. This record is intimately aimed at a cultural elite, aware and solid, not necessarily to be identified in guitar confraternities, capable of seizing and elaborating the connections and the sentimental, substantial correspondences between thesound of the guitar and the cultural facts the author decided to express through it. The title «Luminaria» recalls the feeling of aVan Gogh's Night, where lights do not seem to belong to the city anymore, but rather to nature. The author himself says aboutthese works for guitar: «the landscape is nocturnal, we're moving within gilardinian poetics, the pieces are no pianistic milestones,nor are they orchestral solos; they're feeble village lights at the procession for a saint, which do not illuminate the night,and yet make it exist.»These are works complying with the poetics of «places» and of «memory», both converging in a third one represented by«distance». This music deals with an «elsewhere», referring to «here and now» rather than to a spacial acception, there's noirony, magic or enchanted realism, but a vision forged in architectures dense with a thought that fiercely invokes this very «hicet nunc», recalling the powerful verse by Montale to burn now,no other is my meaning.Kevin SwierkoszLenartentrusts these pieces to a young guitarist who has all the qualities to receive and elaborate the author'sintimate perceptions; Giovanni Martinelli, dedicatory of these oevres, has one gift distinguishing him from most of his generation'sperformers: the precocious ability to observe the many facets of things and of the world from above, whose vision herenders deeply and very clearly through the guitar. Thus, both special and rare seems the artistic alliance between author andperformer, as if they showed the way one another, and the composer's ideas are embraced by the guitarist with such naturalpredisposition.