Montalti / Divertimento Ensemble / Gorli - Sotterraneo [CD]

The title of the fifth of the pieces by Vittorio Montalti (Rome 1984) featured on this release refers, as we will see, to a book by Georges Perec; it is dated 2013 and is therefore from the same year as his first theatrical work, performed at the Biennale Musica di Venezia, L'arte e la maniera di af-frontare il proprio capo per chiedergli un aumento. The long title corresponds literally to the French title of a book by Perec from 1968, which was published posthumously. The titles of the four instrumental works recorded on this album all contain an extramusical reference, whose connotations are nevertheless always expressed in abstract terms, not descriptive. At the centre of the release we find a piece for solo voice, Bestiaire Remix from 2014, which is a re-elaboration of two previous works, Bestiaire and Bestiaire II in which some texts from a collection of poems by Apollinaire, illustrated by Raoul Dufy (1910), have been fragmented by "breaking up the words and syllables" (one of the procedures typical of Montalti's anti-naturalist research on vocality). "In Bestiaire Remix - the composer comments - I cut out some passages from the pre-existing texts and reassembled them almost like a movie director might do. My idea is to be able to rebuild a unity starting from the fragment and linking elements that are totally heterogeneous"