Domenico Scarlatti and the harpsichord: but also, we might say, Domenico Scarlatti and the guitar. For the Neapolitan composer of the Baroque period who had made a fortune in Spain and was afforded gilded hospitality by Queen Maria Magdalena Barbara, these beautiful works for “gravicembalo”, namely for harpsichord, truly contain inspired, imagined, and thought sounds, shall we say almost unearthed from the magic sounds of the main Iberian instrument, the guitar. Velvet notes, swift and changing passages, highly refined touches witness how Scarlatti was in some way inspired by the colours and timbre of the guitar. Yet indeed now, with a contribution by Maurizio Pisati, a contemporaneous composer, the circle closes in inverse process. Transcriptions, or better still, “translations”, as the same composer would choose to make clear, are proposed with the K. 3 and K. 8 Esercizi and the K. 37 and K. 141 Sonatas: directly from harpsichord to guitar: «The translation is a passage of thought and of compositive processes taking the direction suggested by the opera. Almost a philological fantasy in the imaginary fabric of the other composer (an olden “I”), which leads me to follow a track not “in the manner of” but directly “in the mind of”. It is a parallel thought which takes on the original for its guide, exploiting the new organ exactly to think-through. The work on the Sonatas was started after being encouraged by director Francesco Leprino on the occasion of his film Un gioco ardito. The passion for the invention then took the upper hand, leading the personal project to regroup some fifteen Sonatas which little by little I am translating for the Guitar. The Guitar is a world rich of all those things you find outside and inside the music box, in which, for a fact, also this Scarlatti finds a place». In the panorama of contemporaneous music Toru Takemitsu represents to this very day a key figure in Japanese cultural life. An intellectual, genius composer and author of several film sound-tracks, he put his signature on some master pieces by Kurosawa and Teshigawara. His In The Woods, dates back to 1995 and consists in three pieces: Wainscot Pond - after a painting by Cornelia Foss, Rosedale and Muir Woods. Yet it is himself who tells us about it: «The title of each piece corresponds to the name of a place in North America where a beautiful wood is found. The forests of Rosedale are sited in Canada, where in a secluded residential area of Toronto a thick vegetation runs parallel to the road as if wanting to enfold it, and it is bathed by a beautiful light at the beginning of autumn. In the surroundings of San Francisco, Muir Woods is a grove of giant sequoias, named after the benefactor who vouched to protect it. It looks like a gloomy forest, whose trees rise sky-high to the heavens. There, everybody recalls human futility. I have never been to Wainscot Pond, and I do not know either exactly where it is located. At the depth of a beautiful landscape printed on a postcard there was written in shining letters “Wainscot Pond”. Beyond the small lake, I could see a silent wood. This piece is not simply the picture of woodland territory. I would like to express the fond memories everyone has of sentiments, thoughts and actions which all of us have passed through when we found ourselves in a forest».
The piece proposed by Steve Reich is his 1987 Electric Counterpoint, in witness to the passion of this contemporaneous author for the instrument: «... I have played the electric guitar for more than ten years and I have done this thanks to some composers. I have sensed on their part an interest for this instrument and at the same time I have noted how difficult it is to enter in contact with electric guitarists who read scores. I have so studied, read and listened and I have become aware that in certain cases the composers used them as a means to approach a language which is close to rock, at other times they have departed from starting points of an electronic or electro acoustic kind…» In Electric Counterpoint Steve Reich is searching for a pure sound, without effects, with a score with Flemish balance and clarity: «Written for solo guitar and an ensemble of ten guitars and two bass guitars, Electric Counterpoint could be performed with amplified acoustic guitars or electric guitars; the ensemble could be real or, if the soloist records the twelve parts on tape, virtual. I have recorded this virtual ensemble at Studio Agon in Milan in 2001, working with my friend Michele Tadini, a computer buff and electronic processing expert. I always live the experience of playing with a tape like a virtual duo with another musician, whether he is the composer who has realised the sound-track or, as in this case, myself and my multiplication guitars».